Three Democratic candidates for president, and perhaps more, are hoping to gain votes by proposing all-out prohibitions on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, used in the oil and natural gas industries. Sens. Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have all proposed the bans. Look ...
Let us hope and pray the world is not about to witness something like what happened 30 years ago in Beijing. If it happens again, this time in Hong Kong, there will be absolutely nothing the United States or anyone else can do to stop it. During late spring and early summer in 1989, an ...
Altoona isn’t alone among the cities of America in being home to substandard curbs, including curbs that are in violation of the federal Americans With Disabilities Act. Some cities are engaged in the process of installing curb ramps that allow people in wheelchairs to get on and off ...
The three Altoona Area School Board members who walked out of a meeting on Sept 9 rather than hear a presentation from a representative of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association did not enhance the board’s image. That should be the conclusion of both the district residents who oppose the ...
A new — albeit limited in scope — pilot program being launched by the New Jersey Department of Education is worthy of being watched by educators in Pennsylvania and other states, even if it doesn’t spur widespread change outside of Pennsylvania’s neighbor to the east. Anyone ...
Justice Elena Kagan, dissenting in the U.S. Supreme Court’s gerrymandering decision in June, unearthed a marvelously descriptive word: Dummymandering. Gerrymandering is a made-up word, drawing on Elbridge Gerry and his drawing of a Massachusetts voting district that looked like a salamander ...
The images of the two horrific assaults-by-air against the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, remain as vivid today as during any time in the last 18 years. Many Americans still feel shaken by the realization of how unprepared this country was in terms of quashing the terrorist ...
Blair County First Assistant District Attorney Pete Weeks believes Pennsylvania should toughen its penalties for those convicted of abusing an elderly person. Some people who read the Aug. 31 Mirror article “Caregiver gets prison term for abuse” might have a similar opinion, even though ...
The Antis Township supervisors are working to finalize how to pay for replacement of the 25-year-old township-owned stormwater collection system that serves Parkview Estates, a development off old Route 220 near the Northern Blair Recreation Center. But besides trying to deal with the ...
State Rep. Frank Ryan, R-Lebanon, does not advocate taxing retirees’ Social Security benefits to help boost Pennsylvania’s coffers. However, he is wrong in advocating that those former workers, who paid taxes that helped keep the state government afloat throughout their employment years, ...
It seems appropriate that the political division responsible for the Pennsylvania government’s inertia often is described relative to Interstate Route 80, which divides the state roughly in half from east to west. Political analysts often talk about issues regarding their impact “above or ...
It has been about three years since Pennsylvania stopped requiring annual license plate stickers on vehicles as a means for confirming up-to-date registration. Evaluation of new policies or programs is important after they’ve been in effect for a while. Therefore, the scrutiny currently ...
A judge should have no difficulty deciding on a course of punishment for the individual or individuals responsible for vandalism to four fire hydrants in the Bedford area that resulted in a loss of 150,000 gallons of water. Of course, that observation is built upon the premise that all ...
A judge should have no difficulty deciding on a course of punishment for the individual or individuals responsible for vandalism to four fire hydrants in the Bedford area that resulted in a loss of 150,000 gallons of water. Of course, that observation is built upon the premise that all ...
America’s news media continue to be the target of a verbal beating by President Donald Trump, who has continued to call the reporting of many news outlets — print and electronic — “fake news.” The president also has voiced many other unflattering phrases directed at the media and ...
Despite agreement across Pennsylvania that bullying in schools is a problem that needs much more preventive action, it is hard to imagine that proposals being prepared by state Rep. Frank Burns, D-Johnstown, will achieve passage without formidable challenges. It is reasonable to wonder how ...
Getting U.S. troops out of Afghanistan would be quite a coup for President Donald Trump. It would give him a foreign policy advantage going into next year’s election — one no Democratic candidate could criticize. But would it also be setting the stage for a bloodbath? Would it mean a ...
Police officers and sheriff’s deputies are accused regularly — and as a class — of being too eager to use violence, especially against African-Americans. Those who have that attitude ought to consider what happened last Wednesday night in Philadelphia. During the day there, police ...
Pennsylvania lawmakers still are trying to think of ways to undo the Legislature’s shortsightedness and narrow-mindedness when they passed a law in October 2017 to abandon what was then the commonwealth’s archaic, overly restrictive fireworks rules. The effort to bring rules governing ...
The finding that a former northwestern Pennsylvania district judge misclassified more than 800 civil claims raises serious questions that need to be addressed. Probably the most basic one in many people’s minds is whether district judge training is all that it should be in terms of ...