commentary

Talk about improvements. The SPCA needs them, and downtown Olean is awash in them. Olean has a gorgeous new entrance to downtown from the north. A per...

THUMBS UP: While the fervent hope is that such training will never be needed, the Cattaraugus County Sheriff’s Office’s Special Response Team, as well...

I’m guilty of using a cliche response to a commonly asked question. What are you going to miss the most? This is a question I pose, for example, when ...

What is State and Union? We hope it becomes a conversation — a daily conversation involving members of the community, the Olean Times Herald and its r...

Two events last month made for a strange juxtaposition: a celebration of a Southern president, Jimmy Carter, after he disclosed his battle with cancer...

(TNS) Funny how what counts as a good idea depends on who stands to benefit. In two important economic debates, supposedly no-nonsense analysts handle...

(TNS) Patriotism is an abstraction, but its level of strength — in ourselves and others — is usually expressed and understood in practical ways, by th...

At times, I want to toss my GPS, or at least its base, out the window. And, after a recent incident during a trip to an assignment, I almost did just ...

Standing among the group of about 75 people congregated at Wayne and North Union streets Monday evening, it was hard not to get caught up in some of t...

"He's accessible." Lizanne Pando and I are talking about the World Meeting of Families soon to be held in Philadelphia — Pope Francis' reason for comi...

(TNS) Uzeyer Novruzov is a talented practitioner of the circus arts. His specialty is the free ladder, and his stock in trade is balance. He can sprin...

(TNS) The Chinese Communist Party’s power has long rested on four pillars: economic growth, nationalism, repression and communist ideology. The last o...

THUMBS UP: The Rev. LaMont Higginbottom, the first African-American pastor to lead the 150-year-old Trinity United Methodist Church in Olean, overcame...

It’s the morning of 9/11, 14 years removed from the one we all remember. I have just returned from a walk up the road, where I stopped to look across ...

Stepping out the back door Wednesday, I could feel a cooler wind. A few raindrops spattered down, but I just stood there, letting the drops hit me for...

(TNS) It’s no longer shocking to hear that young men and women raised in the West have left the comforts of home for the turmoil of Iraq and Syria, ea...

(TNS) Donald Trump’s eruption into the Republican presidential race has been held up as evidence of a new phenomenon in American politics. But it’s no...

WASHINGTON (AP) — It took three interviews and five days for Hillary Rodham Clinton to say "I'm sorry." After resisting apologizing for using a person...