The state Chamber of Commerce has long been an advocate for reasonable legal reform in West Virginia. As the legislative season approaches next month, they are strongly urging adoption of needed reforms critical to the Mountain State. The following is a list of a number of those reforms:

Comparative Fault - Additional legislation will be sought from the 2015 legislature to require a person or entity to be held liable only for his or her degree of fault as determined by a jury.

Tax laws on timber transactions are very specialized knowledge that are not commonly known. Yet they are important to timber owners in terms of the ongoing cost of owning and managing timber, forest stewardship and compliance to the tax law. This USDA Forest Service bulletin reviews the major federal income tax laws to help forest owners in filing their 2014 income tax returns. The information presented here is current as of Sept. 30, 2014.

It was nearly 400 years ago that the Pilgrims sat down with the Wampanoag to share the feast that is immortalized as Thanksgiving. We don’t know the exact menu. According to Kathleen Wall, foodways culinarian at Plimoth Plantation, venison, fowl and corn were documented by attendees. Beyond that, we can only speculate. I asked if we could speculate about chestnuts.

"We can’t say for sure, but the odds are pretty good," she says. "They’re right in season. Both cultures knew them and used them."

Then a fungus killed almost all of them. The chestnut blight was first spotted in 1904 and is believed to have arrived here in Asian chestnut trees, which have some resistance to it. American chestnuts have none, and all but a few hundred of the 3 to 4 billion trees were wiped out in just a couple of decades.