Opinion Roundup: Bishop with Raleigh ties brings passion to royal wedding, new GenX bills prompt enforcement worries, exploiting the drug epidemic and more

Monday, May 21, 2018 -- A round up of opinion, commentary and analysis on: Bishop with Raleigh tie brings passion to royal wedding, ten N.C. emergency managers report to Hawaii to help with volcano response, new GenX bills prompt enforcement worries, exploiting the drug epidemic and more.

MICHEL TACKETT & RACHEL SHOREY: Young People Keep Marching After Parkland, This Time to Register to Vote (New York Times reports) -- The pace of new voter registrations among young people in crucial states is accelerating, a signal that school shootings this year — and the anger and political organizing in their wake — may prove to be more than ephemeral displays of activism. Voter data for March and April show that young registrants represented a higher portion of new voters in North Carolina, Florida and Pennsylvania, among other states. In North Carolina, voters under 25 represented around 30 percent of new registrations in January and February; in March and April, they were around 40 percent.

TRAVIS FAIN: Campaign donation crops up from Chemours' head lobbyist (WRAL-TV reports) -- A political action committee tied to GenX manufacturer Chemours gave a maximum contribution to House Speaker Tim Moore last month, one day after a company lobbyist made a small donation to the PAC. The $5,200 contribution came from the Manufacturers Alliance PAC, which gave the same amount to Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger in December. These represent the PAC's biggest donations in years, and Berger and Moore are the top leaders in the General Assembly.

TRAVIS FAIN: Environmentalism, anti-immigration views from major Democratic donor (WRAL-TV reports) -- How's this for strange bedfellows: A wealthy North Carolinian who has funded anti-immigration groups has also given hundreds of thousands of dollars to North Carolina legislative Democrats. Fred Stanback, heir to a headache powder fortune and the best man at Warren Buffett's wedding, has given more than $100,000 in the last few months alone to Democrats hoping to beat the Republican legislative majority in the General Assembly. Twenty candidates got at least $5,000 each.

RICHARD CRAVER: House bill would provide telemedicine standards for providers, insurers (Winston-Salem Journal) -- Rep. Donny Lambeth is taking the first crack at establishing state telemedicine policies. Lambeth, R-Forsyth, and a leading health care expert in the General Assembly, submitted House Bill 967 during the opening days of the 2018 session.

NANCY MCLAUGHLIN: Offering sanctuary, a different kind of service (Greensboro News & Record reports) -- Volunteers at North Carolina churches have been drawn to a slightly different kind of service — still involving the Golden Rule — ever since Juana Luz Tobar Ortega sought sanctuary behind the doors of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church last May.

KARLA ADAMS & WILLIAM BOOTH: Surprise star of Harry and Meghan’s wedding: Bishop Michael Curry from Raleigh (Washington Post reports) -- Curry, the first black leader of the Episcopal Church in the United States, delivered a 14-minute barnstorming address that people in Windsor and beyond were talking about long after Harry and Meghan officially tied the knot. Curry was elected bishop of the Diocese of North Carolina in 2000 and lived in Raleigh for 15 years.

GREGORY KATZ & DAVID RISING: Bishop with Raleigh tie brings passion to royal wedding ceremony (AP reports) -- Nothing captured the trans-Atlantic nature of Saturday's royal wedding as much as the guest preacher whose sermon brought American fire and flair to a very English church service. The Most Rev. Michael Bruce Curry, the first black leader of the Episcopal Church in the United States, was hand-picked by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to address their 600 wedding guests. The bishop's passionate sermon on the theme of love, studded with quotes from the bible, Martin Luther King Jr and African-American spirituals, was a contrast to the more solemn and muted Anglican style the royal family is used to.

Bishop Michael Curry's wedding address -- the full text (Wire reports) -- And now in the name of our loving, liberating and life-giving God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen. From the Song of Solomon in the Bible,

JANINE BOWEN: Ten N.C. emergency managers report to Hawaii to help with volcano response (WITN-TV reports) -- Ten emergency managers and fire service officials from North Carolina departed Saturday for Hawaii, to serve on an incident management team as Hawaii continues to respond to the erupting Kilauea volcano.

Where we will go? (Greensboro News & Record) -- An eviction is a cold, unforgiving thing. Where can you go when there is nowhere to go?

CELIA RIVENBARK: A Miranda warning for N.Y. voters (Wilmington Star-News column) -- Let me be clear: I have nothing against Cynthia Nixon. She was great as Miranda in “Sex & the City,” both the HBO series and the films that followed. A tough-talking corporate lawyer with an occasional tender turn -- who can forget when she lovingly bathed her dementia-addled mother in law? -- Miranda was my favorite of Manhattan’s four fancies.

STEPHANIE CARSON: 'Notorious RBG' Has Ties to NC (Public News Service reports) -- This weekend, thousands flocked to a documentary profiling the country's second female Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. While final box office numbers for its first weekend in nationwide release aren't yet in, "RBG" made more than $2 million in two weeks of limited release. Justice Ginsburg is recognized as the lawyer who established the standard for gender discrimination eventually accepted by the Supreme Court. She's now lovingly referred to as the "Notorious RBG." Law professor Shannon Gilreath at Wake Forest University explained her connection to N.C. "Suzanne Reynolds, our dean, and Justice Ginsburg are actually close friends,” Gilreath said. “And Justice Ginsburg, on account of that friendship, I think, is a very good friend of the law school as well, and has visited campus and lectured on campus and, in fact, taught in our summer program."

End-of-Year Tests Have Gone Astray (Southern Pines Pilot) -- We’re coming up on the last two weeks of school, so everyone with kids in school knows what season we’re approaching: annual testing.

NOUR MALAS: Pakistani Family’s Nightmare; Daughter Studying Abroad Killed at Texas School (Wall Street Journal reports) -- The foreign students were wrapping up a retreat in an N.C. town, sharing stories about their first six months in the U.S., when Sabika Sheikh captivated the room with a spur-of-the moment speech: she prayed every night to wake up to a world of peace, her friend at the retreat recalled her saying. Ms. Sheikh, a 17-year-old from Pakistan, faced the opposite of peace last Friday, just a few weeks shy of the end of her year abroad in Texas when a Santa Fe High School student attacked the school. She was one of eight students killed, along with two teachers.

ELIZABETH ALMEKINDER: Virtual Public School enrollment in NC now 2nd-largest in country (EdNC/Carolina Public Press reports) -- While the N.C.Virual Public School may be unfamiliar to many N.C. residents and not every school system cooperates with its program, the state has the second-largest virtual public school system in the country, with enrollment climbing from 17,000 at inception in 2007 to 58,000 students across the state today. Only Florida has higher enrollment in its comparable program. North Carolina teachers developed the 150-course curriculum, which is aligned to state high school graduation requirements.

PAUL FAIN: Republicans Like Higher Ed (Inside Higher Ed reports) -- New America survey finds a more nuanced, positive view of higher education among Republicans than previous surveys, but a partisan divide on who should pay for college.

STEVEN PEARLSTEIN: Blame George Mason faculty not Koch donations (Washington Post/Norfolk Virginian-Pilot column) -- Thanks to a group of courageous and persistent students, George Mason University was recently forced to acknowledge that it had accepted millions of dollars from billionaire Charles Koch and other conservatives under arrangements that gave the donors input into several appointments to the university’s famously libertarian economics department.

DOUG LEDERMAN: Champion for Low-Income Students Gets a Boost Itself (Inside Higher Ed reports) -- By embedding college advisers in schools with many underrepresented students, College Advising Corps has helped 300,000 enter postsecondary education. It aims to hit 1 million by 2025.

KIRK ROSS: New GenX Bills Prompt Enforcement Worries (Coatal Review reports) -- GenX-related bills filed late last week in the N.C. General Assembly quickly drew criticism from environmental groups and a former regulator that they could create unintended consequences in the enforcement of existing pollution laws.

TIM WHITE: Hidden report adds to our water worries (Fayetteville Observer column) -- Throughout this GenX saga, I’ve wondered about the EPA, the federal agency that’s responsible for enforcing the Clean Water Act — the federal agency that’s being dismantled by the Trump administration and its anti-regulatory zealot Scott Pruitt. And yet, for months, the only apparent role the EPA played was in offering some assistance to state regulators and setting safety levels for GenX and other compounds in the same chemical family, used in the creation of coatings like Teflon.

N.C. officials assess damage from fatal mudslides (AP reports) -- Officials in one North Carolina county are assessing damage from floods and mudslides in hopes of qualifying for federal disaster aid.

JACK IGELMAN: Wilderness protection for coveted trails divides cyclists, conservationists (Carolina Public Press reports) -- While the U.S. Forest Service manages Wilderness Study Areas as wilderness, the areas lack permanent wilderness protection. The Forest Service may recommend late this summer that the two study areas, both within Pisgah National Forest, be added to the National Wilderness Preservation System as part of the ongoing Pisgah-Nantahala National Forest management plan revision process, slated to be finalized in 2019.

JOHN MURAWSKI: Will a rare mussel delay construction of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline? (Durham Herald-Sun reports) -- The yellow lance mussel is North Carolina's newest species of wildlife protected under the federal Endangered Species Act. And the 3-inch long fresh-water mussel, which was declared environmentally "threatened" just this month, could be the focus of the next legal showdown over the planned Atlantic Coast Pipeline.

AMY JULIA HARRIS & SHOSHANA WALTER: How N.C. rehab boss exploited the drug epidemic - with impunity (REVEAL-Center for Investigative Reporting/AP reports) -- For years, a drug rehab program in North Carolina sent people with addictions to work for free as caregivers for elderly and disabled patients, often with disastrous results, a new Revealinvestigation has found. Participants at Recovery Connections Community bathed patients, changed diapers and sometimes dispensed the same drugs that sent them spiraling into addiction, according to interviews with dozens of former participants. Rather than getting treatment, they worked 16-hour days at care homes across the state, with little training or sleep, internal documents show.

JARED WEBER: QuitlineNC Offers Free Nicotine Patches and Quit-coaching Sessions (N.C. Health News reports) -- The state-funded phone service will mail free nicotine patches, as well as either gum or lozenges, to people who apply before the end of the month. Studies show that combination therapy has proven to be an effective procedure for smoking cessation.

MARK TOSCZAK: Errant Cancer Diagnosis, Unneeded Surgery Leave North Wilkesboro Woman with Pain, Numbness (N.C. Health News reports) -- A retired Wilkes County teacher had mouth tissue removed after a Wake Forest Baptist pathology report mistakenly indicated she had cancer. Her case raises questions about the extent of problems in the Winston-Salem health system’s pathology lab.

Insurer, hospital dispute is bad medicine (Winston-Salem Journal) -- One of these days a seriously ill or injured person is going to walk into a rural hospital in need of immediate care and learn that payment for that treatment will be reimbursed at a much lower rate — or not reimbursed at all — because that hospital is fighting with a major insurance provider.

JEFF MILLS: Greensboro Grasshoppers' Miss Babe Ruth dies (Greensboro News & Record obit) -- The 12-year-old black Labrador retriever was a fixture at Greensboro Grasshoppers games all her life. She was diagnosed with inoperable cancer in January.

JENNY DRABBLE: Mount Airy doctor is the only person to finish 1,000-mile arctic race in Alaska (Winston-Salem Journal reports) -- A Mount Airy doctor braved blizzards and frostbite to traipse 1,000 miles — on foot — through Alaska’s unforgiving winter.

MICHAEL FUTCH: Authorities seize truck hauling 120 gallons of liquid meth (Fayetteville Observer reports) -- Two men were arrested in connection with an ongoing Harnett County Sheriff’s Office investigation into a multi-million dollar drug operation involving the transportation and trafficking of methamphetamine.