Officials of 18 Pennsylvania counties who accepted gifts, trips or meals from companies competing to sell or lease new voting machines ahead of the 2020 elections apparently didn’t break any state law. Nevertheless, state residents — from the counties in question or from any of the ...
Many Americans, including many people living here, remember hearing reports about the serious health problems suffered later by many first responders to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center in New York. However, probably only a few area people, by comparison, ever ...
The Altoona Area School Board’s recent vote in favor of purchasing a bank building at Sixth Avenue and 12th Street probably surprised a lot of people. While the board, in prior months, has discussed a possible location for its administrative offices that was not included in the section of ...
The proposal to end Roaring Spring’s 99-year-long alcohol, manufacture and sales prohibition is being met with mixed reactions. That is no surprise. But there’s an established path within state law for deciding such a change, and borough residents, now that the issue has surfaced, might ...
If the Legislature really has lost faith in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, as one prominent state lawmaker has suggested, commonwealth residents need to ask why the General Assembly hasn’t been more proactive over the past decade to try to fix things that legislators ...
Pennsylvania’s state parks again are the subject of welcome attention, just as they were in the summer of 2017, when a long-overdue, first-in-25 years public review of the basic mission of the parks system was launched. But while the examination that was begun about a year and a half ago ...
During his statewide listening tour currently getting underway, Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman is destined to hear plenty of support — unfortunately — for legalizing recreational use of marijuana, if a September 2017 Franklin and Marshall University poll remains an accurate barometer ...
(Editor’s note: The following editorial was written by former Mirror Staff Writer Amanda Gabeletto in 2013. We liked it so much, we decided to run it again this year.) Love covers a lot of ground. There is the love between a parent and a child. There’s love for one’s partner, sibling, ...
This part of the Keystone State is taking the Pennsylvania Game Commission to task for wanting to kill more than 2,000 deer in Blair and Bedford counties in a concerted attack against chronic wasting disease, a malady showing up increasingly in the commonwealth’s whitetail population. As the ...
The good news in the immediate aftermath of Gov. Tom Wolf having delivered his 2019-20 Pennsylvania state budget proposal on Tuesday was that lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle spoke confidently about prospects for completing a spending package by the June 30 deadline. Legislative ...
Venezuela is the 10th-biggest oil producer in the world. It may have larger petroleum reserves than any other country. Yet socialism has devastated the nation’s economy to the point that there are shortages of food. About three million Venezuelans have fled their homeland during the past ...
Many area landowners and hunters remain angry about the method the Pennsylvania Game Commission would prefer to use to try to halt — or at least greatly slow — the spread of chronic wasting disease in the state’s deer population. The commission wants to employ U.S. Department of ...
To Americans of a certain age, the conflict in Afghanistan is beginning to look a lot like the Vietnam War. There are crucial differences, however, and they need to be borne in mind. U.S. troops continued to fight — and die — in Vietnam long after Washington stopped trying to win that war. ...
As reported in a front-page article in the Jan. 27 Mirror, Blair County’s anti-blight initiative is poised to move another step forward, now that about $66,000 has been collected through an additional $7.50 charge added to the recording of deeds and mortgages, effective in September ...
Pennsylvania lawmakers in Harrisburg seem busy, based on developments at the state capital over the past week. However, some state residents — specifically, those who support a “window” for long-ago victims of the Roman Catholic Church child-sexual-abuse scandal to sue the church and ...
The first and most important responsibility of our elected officials within Congress is to protect the United States of America and its citizens. In this regard, it is clear that our representatives in both parties have failed miserably. Any problem can be solved by breaking it down into ...
Amtran’s reported low ranking among its bus-service-provider peers, based on a Pennsylvania Department of Transportation performance report covering a five-year period that ended in 2015, has cast a shadow over its operations and the strong image it has tried to maintain. Exacerbating that ...
Many Pennsylvania residents will be interested in hearing what Gov. Tom Wolf has to say when he delivers his 2019-20 state budget address on Feb. 5. No state taxpayer should embrace a lackadaisical attitude about the details of that fiscal message, even though taxpayers won’t have to fear a ...
A voter-approved study is the right way to ascertain whether adoption of a home rule charter might be good for Blair County government and the county as a whole. Even if a study were conducted, there would be no certainty that home rule would be implemented. After the study, the county’s ...
Conemaugh Nason Medical Center’s new cardiac catheterization lab, which began offering services at the Roaring Spring-area hospital on Jan. 15, is a win-win for Blair County. The new service further enhances Blair’s already-strong standing as a state-of-the-art medical destination. And ...