Bill Fuller did his job, and because of it, we’ll never know how many people weren’t murdered or robbed or raped or scammed or shot or cut or beaten over the past 40 years. We don’t know how many houses weren’t burglarized and how many more kilograms of crack cocaine weren’t sold on our streets.

We don’t know those things because Fuller took so many of Danville’s criminals off the streets; the fact that new criminals took their place speaks to the nature of crime more than the aggressiveness of the prosecutor

Teens aren’t nearly as smart as they think they are. Take the practice of “sexting” —using cell phones and the Internet to distribute nude pictures and videos.

Most adults would be smart enough not to send erotic pictures and videos of themselves to other people. They would assume — correctly — that something sent to one person could easily be forwarded to the entire world.

They would be right.

Republican congressional candidate Robert Hurt has the primary he wanted. On Saturday, Fifth District Republican leaders voted 19-13 to hold a primary to select the GOP candidate to challenge Democratic Rep. Tom Perriello in November.

Given the trouble the county already has in raising taxes the people want raised and making sure that tax breaks are given only to those who earned them, maybe the best thing for Ecker to do would be to find other ways to help the county’s promising green energy generation sector

In most instances, Timothy M. Kaine has been a good governor for Virginia and for the Dan River Region. His attentiveness to economic development issues followed the work of his predecessor and will no doubt make life easier for his successor.

In the short run, the young people at the Boys & Girls Club will hold a “Hope is Not Extinct” community event Saturday, Dec. 19. In the long run, their work — and the work of their peers — represents one of this community’s best hopes for turning the tide of random violence

The Worsham Street Bridge had to come down, but what’s going up in its place is a real testament to the future of this community — an active future that connects people to the river.

The Dan River Region has been good to Robert Hurt’s political career. His campaigns for Chatham Town Council, the House of Delegates and the state Senate have been on friendly turf.

Hurt has certainly never faced an opponent like Albemarle County real estate investor Laurence Verga, one of his Republican challengers in the fight for the 5th District GOP congressional nomination.

It’s been 68 years since America was bombed out of its isolationist slumber at Pearl Harbor.

The surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor became a rallying cry for a generation of Americans to fight World War II — and to remain ever-vigilant.

But it’s easier to say “Remember Pearl Harbor” than it is to understand an enemy that may — or may not — try to attack us. History teaches us that the warning signs were there before both Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

For a lot of reasons, though, knowing those warning signs didn’t save American lives.

Danvillians have to wonder where Mayor Sherman Saunders is going with his proposed, “Working Together for a Safe Danville Coalition.”

Saunders cares about street crime. He knows what it does to people — and to the community he so clearly loves. He’s been on the front lines, going as far as to help organize his neighbors into a watch group to fight burglaries.

While reasonable people can argue whether this latest county reassessment accurately measures every downtick in the local real estate market, the advantage of this process is that county residents have the right to appeal their new property assessments.

We encourage all county residents who dispute their properties’ new values to do so.

An era came to an end this week. No more will restaurant hostesses greet customers with the question, “Smoking or non-smoking?”

Smokers lost the war over lighting up in restaurants and bars because cigarette smoke doesn’t know how to stay put. Restaurant “smoking areas” turned out to be more of a temporary political accommodation than a permanent solution.

In the tobacco-tolerant Dan River Region, most people would have been happy with warning signs outside restaurants that said, “smoking allowed.”

But that wasn’t going to happen.

The economy is still struggling, but that probably won’t be true for much longer. As we see more and more signs of recovery, the question is what this community will be like as more job opportunities reshape not only the local economy but the lives of individual residents.

We live in the present, but we’re not tied to it. The future is on its way, and if we don’t get ready for it, we’ll be as lost then as we are struggling now.

Republicans in the Fifth District have plenty of candidates willing to try to unseat Rep. Tom Perriello next year — but only one chance to get it right.

The party’s leaders will most likely choose their congressional candidate in a convention or other party-only process.

Street crime is not new, of course, but the spike in local gang-related violence hasn’t gone unnoticed.

The tough question is what can be done about it, but social problems defy easy answers because they involve changing the behaviors of people.

Black Friday, the official start of the Christmas shopping season, has come and gone. We call this the “Christmas shopping season,” of course, because not referring to this time of the year as Christmas does a disservice to the real meaning of this season.

It didn’t take long for the remnants of Hurricane Ida to soak the Dan River Region before opponents of uranium mining were out in force taking pictures and shooting video.

Against the backdrop of an economy that is sputtering back from recession, the community is working to help God’s Storehouse buy a new headquarters on Memorial Drive. Despite the economic pain Danvillians have endured over the past decade, they’re still willing to support the million-dollar project to buy and renovate a former car dealership on Memorial Drive and convert it into a place for hungry people to go.

The revelations of the past few weeks have put Danville City Council in a tough spot.

It has been learned that the City Code was ignored and that council’s own policies and procedures were violated during the development of Coleman MarketPlace.

Retired City Manager Jerry Gwaltney apparently allowed an extra $465,000 in city money to be spent on the project — utility improvements the shopping center developer should have paid for. Also, there are too many gaps in the public record, shocking for a project of this size, cost and importance to the city and its residents.

Despite the revelations, far too many members of Danville City Council seem to think that it’s time to move on.

It’s not time to move on, Danville. It’s time to get answers.

Tomer deserves thanks. He’s done his job as a representative of the people and he deserves recognition for being the taxpayers’ friend on Danville City Council.

WILA is no more, sold to new owners that will debut an entirely different kind of radio station here New Year’s Day.

“Danville, I love you. Thank you for this opportunity to live out my dream,” WILA co-owner Lawrence Toller said.

“I’ve enjoyed it immensely. It’s been wonderful. It’s been gratifying. But I’m signing off.”

Tremon Antonio Wimbush faces life in prison when he is sentenced in a few weeks for the July 11 murder of Latoya Hubbard.

Wimbush murdered Hubbard in a drive-by shooting on Ross Street, but his real target was Hubbard’s brother, George Henry.

“He got two people he wasn’t even shooting at,” Judge David Melesco said. “It was a dastardly act with no regard for human life.”

The first and most obvious lesson of this shooting is that violence solves nothing. Hubbard’s life was swept away. A man wounded in the attack, Frederick Douglas Ferguson, has to date required three surgeries to repair his damaged leg.

The American political system was built to handle dissent and disagreement. It’s more than strong enough to survive the controversy over the proposed health care reform bills now before Congress.

Complaints and questions about Danville Regional Medical Center have long put Danville City Council in an awkward position.

Congressional Democrats have enough votes to pass a health care reform bill this year. That political reality infuriates the bill’s opponents, who know they probably can’t stop a bill from becoming law.

Health care reform is far from a done deal, though.

No measure of this or any community would be complete without acknowledging the role of groups like the Community Foundation of the Dan River Region.

In the deepest recession since the Community Foundation began in 1996, it received gifts of more than $4.5 million last year — while awarding grants of $1.6 million to 100 area organizations and giving another $196,000 in scholarships to 64 students.

The reasons why people chain their dogs are not as important as what Danville City Council is willing to do about it. The recent public hearing was exactly what city council needed to hear on this issue. The advocates for animals in our community are to be commended.

Former Fifth District Rep. Virgil Goode often complained about runaway federal spending while simultaneously working hard to get federal money for local projects.

Goode believed that as long as someone was shaking the Washington money tree, the Fifth District ought to get its share.

In today’s politically charged atmosphere, that contradiction might have been enough to get Goode branded a “RINO” — or “Republican In Name Only.”

If that’s the case, then maybe Rep. Tom Perriello, D-Fifth, stole Goode’s playbook. Perriello tucked $500,000 for a Halifax County sewer project into an appropriations bill, voted against the bill because he thought the entire piece of legislation was too fat with government waste and then proceeded to praise the individual earmark.

Are Pittsylvania County’s voters ready to approve Sunday beer and wine sales? Until Tuesday, the conventional political wisdom was that question was a dead issue in the county.

The voters had already said no — twice. But now that voters in the Callands-Gretna magisterial district and the town of Gretna have approved Sunday sales, the issue is once again in play.

The political winds didn’t blow in McDonnell’s favor this year. Instead, he knew which winds would carry him to victory. McDonnell followed in the political footsteps of Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, two Democrats who knew that Virginians wanted their next governor to be a jobs governor.