Today's News

John and Cynthia Ferrante have some friends from South America living with them. They’re wooly, friendly and have faces like little camels.

    The Ferrantes raise alpacas on their farm, Otter Peaks Alpacas, in Thaxton. Alpacas are a species of camelid, the family of animals to which camels and llamas belong. Alpacas are domestic animals that have been raised in the Andes mountains for millennia, bred specifically for their thick wool. In the Andes, they graze at altitudes of between 13,000 and 15,000 feet.

The night before his closing argument was the hardest for Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Wes Nance to sleep during Wesley Earnest's trial.

    He had spent the previous two weeks making his case before a Bedford County Circuit Court jury that Earnest had killed his estranged wife on Dec. 19, 2007, and had spent more than two years prior up to the trial heading up the prosecution of that case.

    Now it was time to put the case in the jury’s hands.

New health reform law

    The debate over a new healthcare reform plan that has been waged for over a year has finally resulted in a law.

    Unfortunately the end of this debate did not yield bi-partisan results, and the law currently going forward will not likely survive the Supreme Court. There are a few reasons I do not support this final law, which are, among others:

More than 7 million jobs have been lost in the last three years and over 3 million of those jobs have been lost since the President signed the so-called stimulus plan into law last year.  Unfortunately, these are numbers that the American people are all too familiar with and yet the Congress continues to pursue an agenda that will further threaten American job creators.  While Americans are asking “Where are the jobs?”, the Majority in Congress continues to demonstrate that they do not understand the priorities of our constituents or appreciate how private sector