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1 week ago | 
fltimes.com | Joel Freedman
After retiring from the U.S. Marine Corps in 2008, Staff Sgt. Aaron Grant attended Finger Lakes Community College, where he began a career as a historian (and where he was a student in an American government course I taught). He later earned a bachelor’s degree in U.S. history at Empire State and a master’s degree in U.S. history from Norwich University. Prior to his move to South Dakota with his wife and children, Grant taught U.S. history at John 15 Leah Homeschooling Group in Middlesex.
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3 weeks ago | 
fltimes.com | Joel Freedman
In my essay “Eliminate wasteful government spending” (Times, March 22), I stipulated that while wasteful government spending needs to be eliminated, it would be wrong to consider programs such as federal oversight of nursing homes and policing federally inspected animal breeding facilities — including the many deplorable “puppy mills” in America — as non-essential.
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3 weeks ago | 
fltimes.com | Joel Freedman
Shortly after Barack Obama’s inauguration, Andry Dys, a journalist with the Rock Hill Herald of South Carolina, wrote a story about local people who fought against racial segregation during the 1960s, and about the satisfaction they felt by the inauguration of America’s first Black president.
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1 month ago | 
fltimes.com | Joel Freedman
In July 2023, I watched a congressional hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP, aka unidentified flying objects, UFO) via C-SPAN. There was bipartisan consensus linking UAP with extraterrestrial beings and technology. Until recently, Congress and federal government officials were usually dismissive of UAP and quick to find excuses to sweep the significance of UAP under the proverbial rug. Luis Elizondo has played a major role in bringing about such change.
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1 month ago | 
fltimes.com | Joel Freedman
In the early 1990s, when I initially became involved in animal protection issues, I learned about the horrors of commercial greyhound racing, which had expanded to nearly 70 operational dog tracks in 19 states, making it the sixth-largest spectator sport in the United States.
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1 month ago | 
fltimes.com | Joel Freedman
I agree with Finger Lakes Times reporter Louise Hoffman Broach that jail and prison inmates should receive adequate healthcare and protection from dangerous inmates and from any correction personnel who may be sadistic or otherwise abusive in the way they treat inmates. (“Inmates are entitled to health care,” Finger Lakes Times, March 25)Some inmates are dangerous for both correction officers and other inmates.
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2 months ago | 
fltimes.com | Joel Freedman |Andres McConnon
Shortly after the Nazi occupation of Italy in September 1943, Italian Maj. Mario Carita and his men ingratiated themselves with the Nazis by zealously pursuing Jews and anti-Fascists and by turning the torture of suspected enemies of the Nazis and Italian Fascists into a grim science. Carita’s headquarters in Florence was known as Villa Triste (House of Sorrow), so named because of the screams of tortured victims emanating from it.
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2 months ago | 
fltimes.com | Joel Freedman
Among many other wasteful and unnecessary U.S. government expenditures, the newly created Department of Government Efficiency — or DOGE — has called attention to government funding for steroid-enhanced hamster fights ($3 million), cocaine experiments on beagle puppies ($2.3 million), research administering feminizing hormone therapy to male monkeys in a transgender monkey hormone study ($257,000), studying nicotine consumption in fish ($300,000), studying the sexual preferences of quails...
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2 months ago | 
fltimes.com | Joel Freedman |Tiya Miles
Harriet Tubman was born about 1820, one of many children of Harriet Greene and Benjamin Ross, a slave couple owned by Edward Brodas of Dorchester County, Maryland. At age 13 or 14, Tubman, while trying to protect another slave from the brutality of a cruel overseer, was struck with a 2-pound weight that fractured her skull and would result in Tubman having frequent sleeping spells, headaches, and seizures for the remainder of her life.
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Mar 4, 2025 | 
fltimes.com | Joel Freedman |Loren Grush
In his praise for journalist Loren Grush’s book “The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts,” Andrew Chaikin, author of “A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts,” said this: “Today there is nothing unusual about a woman flying in space, walking in space, or living in space, which makes it difficult to imagine what it was like forty-five years ago for the six women who broke the highest of all glass ceilings to become astronauts.
