Imperial Valley Press reporter Karina Lopez knows what it’s like to live with twins.

Some of us in the newsroom get a good giggle in when she regales us with stories of her not-so-little brothers, Mickey and Alex Lopez, calling in to ask her important life questions, like how to properly microwave a burrito.

As tuned in as she might be with her own personal Double-Mint Duo, I think even Karina was stupefied and exasperated to find out Mickey and Alex were among five sets of twins graduating from Imperial High tonight, and that they were one in 20 sets of twins who attended Imperial this past school year.

It’s an amazing story, and the kind of fun head-scratcher and pleasant surprise that would not have been made possible without us first seeing it written on a smaller scale by an Imperial High School student earlier in the year on our IVHigh web site.

Imperial High student Arlene...

What could have been is a scary thought, and what was might even have been preventable, if one considers the harried past of the Harrier.

Four-thirty in the afternoon on a Wednesday, that’s prime time in the Imperial Valley. Kids are riding their bikes in the street, playing basketball in the driveway. Dads are getting home from work, maybe drinking a beer in the front yard with a neighbor, maybe watering the grass. Mom might be getting the mail, getting home from work herself, unloading the babies and the groceries from the SUV.

In an instant, someone could have been killed. In an instant, any one of those Rockwell-ian scenes could have ended in real tragedy, wiping out a son, a daughter, a mom or dad from flaming wreckage or falling debris from a crash site that destroyed three homes in a relatively quiet tract-home neighborhood. Someone could have been burned to death, trapped in a...

Can one single, hour-long news special change a person’s mind about Edward Snowden? Is it possible to go from thinking of him as a traitor to seeing him as a patriot, or vice versa?

I don’t know, but his eloquence, his reasoning and what seemed at times like meticulously scripted and greatly thought-out responses were powerful, and had the mesmerizing effort of tapping into that sweet spot of each and every Constitutional literalist in the country.

Yet there were moments that caused a double-take, moments that cemented “traitor” in my mind, just as I was convinced “patriot” in my heart.
Regardless, that was one hell of a piece of journalism Wednesday night by NBC and a dynamite interview by Brian Williams.

Snowden sat down for his first American interview from Moscow, where he is exiled and living one year of temporary amnesty courtesy of the Russian government as he evades criminal...

When many Americans think of the term coup d’etat, visions of bloody regime changes come to mind, warring in the streets between oppressive governments wielding military might and rebel factions pitching rocks and Molotov cocktails, similar to what played out in the Ukraine over the winter.

Yet ask El Centro resident Jonathan Willis about the current military coup in Thailand, where he has been vacationing with his girlfriend since May 17, and his answer might be surprising.

“It’s a major inconvenience at best,” said the Imperial Valley attorney from his Bangkok hotel room Friday evening, which was Saturday morning local Thai time. “It’s nothing like you think would occur in a more unstable country like in South America or the Middle East, where there would be gunfire.”

In fact, about the only discernible impact for Willis has been the presence of military checkpoints at major...

I have a man crush, and his name is Neil deGrasse Tyson. He’s the natural scientific successor to my original boyhood bromancer, Don Herbert.

Somewhere in between I strayed, becoming enamored with heavy metal icons, gonzo journalists and a cavalcade of rebels, anarchists and assorted troublemakers.

Today, though, I’m back to where I started, in the world of science, from “Mr. Wizard” to Dr. deGrasse Tyson.

I was taken down memory lane in the best possible way this week when a dear childhood friend posted on social media that Herbert’s archives had been acquired by the Smithsonian Institution. The Archive Center of the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., had amassed his personal papers, files and other personal effects from his family to eventually curate and display, I would hope.

That, to me, was about as exciting news as I would hear that day, and I took to...

When children hurt, sometimes we do assign them a different level of attention based on what pains them. It’s a sad and inevitable fact, yet it’s not something anyone does consciously.

It’s a snap judgment, an arbitrary decision, and one that is almost completely fueled by the high emotion of a tragic event.

So yes, we might just “coddle” the child of a dead parent more than the child of divorce or the young victim of a family crippled by drug abuse, separated by military service or even an inattentive parent.

And it is by no means intentional. But, gosh, it feels like it is — to the child, to the parent, maybe even to a part of the community looking in from the outside.

We get hundreds of letters to the editor sent to this newspaper every year, and many of them never make the light of day for various reasons. Recently, we were emailed an anonymous letter titled “The lost children of...

Born and bred into comfort and convenience, with hardly any idea of what it means to truly want or suffer, I am an American. I’ve never lived through famine, a war outside my door, disease for which there is no cure and no hope, or the threat of being kidnapped and sold into child slavery.

That armed men could burst into my community and round up more than 300 teenage girls without much, if any, opposition, and take them away to be sold into human slavery is as alien to me as anything I am likely to ever experience.

The first time I even understood that children could be the targets of such evil was as a 10-year-old watching “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” where Indy liberates hundreds of Indian children stolen from a village and taken to work the mines beneath Pankot Palace. That, to me, was the extent of my knowledge of child slavery, and for many American kids of my...

In America today, the cannabis conversation has shifted from “Dude, where’s my car,” to “Dude, what’s my ROI on this killer Blueberry Kush after I give the local and state governments their percentage?”

It looks like this might just go down as the year the counterculture came bursting from the billowing haze of a thousand Phish concerts and summer reggae jams to don a suit, tie and spreadsheet to talk the economics of recreational pot usage.

The greenbacks are definitely softening society’s position toward the green buds, taking cannabis to a very mainstream place and making governors, legislators, police chiefs and presidents reconsider their long-held opinions on the decriminalization of marijuana for all Americans, not just the “medicinal” users who have come by their cards in a variety of legit and sketchy ways.

How much more mainstream do you get when easily three-quarters of...

It’s been 16 months since 20 children and six adults were killed by a crazed gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn.

Since then, there have been at least 44 more school shootings in this country, killing 28 people and injuring 37, according to a survey published earlier this year by anti-gun groups Moms Demand Action and Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

And yet those statistics fail to include both the lesser-known and high-profile mass shootings at military bases, malls and other public places in the near year and a half after a groundswell of public outrage took America in a direction toward more firearms regulation.

That outrage, however, has seemingly suffered an outage, all but fading from the front porch of the American consciousness except for an ardent few. There are no more presidential proclamations promising action, no more bipartisan coalitions grabbing headlines to...

California is thriving in spite of itself. In spite of its political leadership.

Tax referendums put in place by the voters have all but restored education, cash flow and a general state of virtual insolvency that scared the good sense out of many concerned Californians.

It’s been a long time since any state, let alone a mega-state like California, saw a supermajority in its midst, where one party had complete control of all houses of government and the executive office.

Was it fear of truly going bankrupt in California that drove the ouster of all Republican leadership? Did the gridlock that crippled this state for so many years lead longtime Republicans and many more moderates to move toward the Democrats en masse?

The death of any conservative leadership in California has killed any real challenge to the governor, and that has proved to be the perfect foil for the criminal...