2021 was supposed to be a good year.

MUSKOGEE, Okla. – A gunman killed five children, ages 1 to 9, and his 24-year-old brother in a mass shooting early Tuesday at a home in Muskogee, Oklahoma, where they all lived together, along with the mother of the children. 

The violent mob that stormed the national Capitol Wednesday repulsed many voters who supported President Trump’s reelection but the insurrection did not demoralize his zealots in America’s heartland.

First-time Illinois Congresswoman Mary Miller could have drawn from the collective wisdom of countless thoughtful Americans as she addressed the group "Moms for America" at President Trump’s rally in Washington on Tuesday.

Molly Ivins, the feisty Texas columnist and author, described herself thusly before succumbing to breast cancer 13 years ago:  “I spent most of my life feeling like I’ve been shot out of a cannon.”

My grandfather, Harry S. Truman, initiated the protocols for the peaceful transfer of presidential power as we know them today. He invited President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower to send over his Cabinet and staff so they could kick the tires, as it were -- be briefed by their predecessors, attend meetings, try out the office chairs.

Following the announcement Saturday that Joe Biden will become the 46th president of the United States, President Donald Trump ought to concede and leave office with more dignity than he has shown as commander-in-chief.

In Washington, flip-flopping never gets in the way of political want. Nor does holding to principle or telling the truth.

Last week many people noticed a strange, smokey sky over much of the country, not realizing why it was there. The haze was smoke carried across the U.S. by the jet stream from the giant wildfires in California, Oregon and Washington.

NORMAN -- Oklahoma University’s football team canceled practice Friday to march lockstep from the stadium to the campus Unity Garden to protest racial injustice and the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

If you oppose mail-in voting because President Donald Trump calls it a fraud, prepare to stand in long lines to cast your ballot on Nov. 3 Election Day.

President Trump’s weekend with reporters at his private golf club in New Jersey can be explained as a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

Earl D. Lawson's death by COVID-19 was doubly cruel.

LOCKPORT, N. Y. -- The great debate over voting by mail has begun.

INDIANAPOLIS – Federal health officials report a disproportionate number of coronavirus deaths occur in the nation’s nursing homes, but the agency tracking their morbidity rates maintains a database riddled with incomplete information and errors.

GROVELAND, Mass. – This unpretentious Massachusetts town joined the national concern over racism this week when a white man resident told a young Black woman resident she made him feel unsafe driving through his neighborhood.

STILLWATER, Okla. – The governing board of Oklahoma State University Friday ordered the removal of the name of the state’s 9th governor from campus halls because of his racist reputation.

Some events have the power of a match set to a mountain of dry wood. The video from Minneapolis, showing a police officer killing George Floyd in broad daylight, his knee pressed hard onto a handcuffed man’s neck as he pleads to live, all 8 1/2 minutes of it — this has been such an event.

Let’s not sugarcoat it. Your last semester in high school has gotten demolished by a global pandemic and it is wickedly unfair. Your graduation is now a drive-thru, your prom is imaginary, and instead of spending your last semester of senior year hanging out with your friends and taking a victory lap, you spent it in your bedroom doing classwork over Zoom and making Tik Tok videos.

MOODY, Ala. – A veteran Alabama police officer was shot and killed Tuesday night in a standoff between police and two suspects at the Super 8 motel in this suburban community 22 miles east of Birmingham.

George Floyd's death at the hands – or rather the knee – of Minneapolis police office Derek Chauvin has sparked protests nationwide, including some looting and destruction of property in my hometown of Dallas. I do not condone senseless violence, but I understand some of the rage and frustration that fuels it.

It has been eight weeks now since the Great Shutdown began. Humanity has not been forced to sit this immobile for this long since the 1951 movie classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and that time it was just science fiction.

Jeffrey Gerritt, editor of the Palestine, Texas, Herald-Press, Monday won journalism’s most prestigious award, the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing.

COLUMBIA, MO  -- Palestine, Texas, Herald-Press Editor Jeffery Gerritt has won the 2020 Burl Osborne Award for Editorial Leadership, the national News Leaders Association announced Monday.

There’s a three-story museum in downtown Wynnewood, Oklahoma, that depicts life in the city of 2,300 people a century ago. Rooms display a general store, post office, funeral parlor and other period artifacts.

“I am an old woman, named after my mother… Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery… To believe in this living is just a hard way to go.”

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. – Jeffrey Gerritt, editor of the Palestine, Texas, Herald-Press, has won this year’s National Headliner Award for editorial writing, one of the most prestigious honors in American journalism.

ALBANY, N.Y. -- Chris Cuomo, CNN news show host and younger brother of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, revealed Tuesday he has been diagnosed as positive for the coronavirus.

General Motors announced Friday it is bringing back 1,000 workers at two plants in Indiana to begin making ventilators for critical-care COVID-19 patients struggling to breathe and stay alive.

GREENTOWN, Ind. -- With their vows read and rings exchanged, Henry and Emily Riffles sealed their first moments of married life with a kiss Saturday, the wedding party and family looking on from proper social distance.

ALBANY, N.Y. -- Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood producer sentenced to 23 years in prison for rape and sexual assault, has tested positive for the novel coronavirus, officials connected with the state prison system said Sunday.

GLASGOW, Ky. – Ronnie Ellis, an accomplished Kentucky political reporter, died Monday at a hospital in his hometown, two weeks before his scheduled induction into the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame. He was 68.

Did the U.S. Supreme Court go too far in its rationale for free speech and press when ruling for the New York Times in a landmark libel case brought by a public official 56 years ago?

The coronavirus or Covid-19 is spreading and we are anxious, more so every day.

ROCHESTER, N.Y. – A western New York man who admitted phoning a death threat to Minnesota Congresswoman Ihan Omar has been sentenced to one year and one day in prison by a federal judge.

FRANKFORT – A backdoor addition to a revenue bill that changes the way legal notices for local government audits and bids are brought to the public’s attention has caught Kentucky newspapers off guard.

On learning Russia had staged a massive disinformation campaign in the 2016 presidential election, schools across the country began adding digital literacy classes to their course offerings.

LOCKPORT, N.Y. -- It happened again this morning. Just after dawn my youngest daughter was whisked away in a yellow bus to spend the day at one of the most socialist institutions on our city: Lockport High School.