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Project timing could have been better

Most area residents did not anticipate the Arctic-like temperatures that this region experienced this month. Even old-timers who remember brutally cold winters like some of the 1960s and 1970s also were fooled into thinking that those kind of frigid conditions would not revisit this part of Pennsylvania during this year’s coldest season. Unfortunately, all were wrong. Mother Nature challenged even the most hardy among us, not to mention home and business heating systems, vehicle batteries and, in some communities, waterlines. Now, more than at any other time since late fall, ...

Doctors eye gut health as part of cancer probe

“There’s no question we’re missing something,” said Dr. Marwan Fakih, a gastrointestinal oncologist at City of Hope in Duarte, Calif., while lamenting about a cancer mystery that is confounding doctors and other medical researchers. Fakih’s comment was included in an article in the Jan. 4-5 edition of the Wall Street Journal — an article headlined “Focus on young people’s cancer turns to gut.” According to the Journal’s article, cancer rates have fallen for older adults in recent years, but gastrointestinal cancers, across the world, are increasing among people ...

King’s work changed the world

“By November 1968, Americans were desperate for shelter from the year’s howling storms. Republican candidate Richard M. Nixon, whose career once seemed over, engineered one of the great resurrections in U.S. political history by divining the mood of millions of Americans who were outraged by violence and disorder. He won the presidency not so much by promising cures for the nation’s ills as simply by cataloging and decrying them.” That was a paragraph from Time magazine’s hardcover book “1968,” whose paper covering, under a picture of Earth taken from space, described the ...

State should eye incentives for service roles

Powerful winds sometimes accompany storms passing through the Southern Alleghenies region comprising Blair, Bedford, Cambria, Somerset, Huntingdon and Fulton counties. However, this region is blessed in not having to endure windy onslaughts such as the hurricane-like Santa Ana winds that are responsible for the devastating, fast-spreading blazes that are wreaking havoc and causing mass destruction in California’s Los Angeles area. The recovery there, when all of the blazes finally are extinguished and a full assessment of the devastation is completed, is going to be long, costly, ...

Residents should follow prison plans

The month of March will mark five years since Blair County officials appeared to get serious about addressing the need for a new prison. Unfortunately, county residents are justified in questioning the less-than-aggressive degree of urgency that, from the beginning, seemed to be attached to the effort. That flawed sense of urgency remains evident from the fact that the county still is years away from even starting new prison construction. It is anyone’s guess what the eventual timetable will be for completing construction and putting the new incarceration facility into full ...

Public should be consulted on wage hike

Pennsylvania residents have heard the same argument many times about why the Keystone State’s minimum wage should not be increased. Raising the $7.25 minimum wage could cost as many as 5,000 jobs, even if the increase were only to $12 an hour, opponents of the increase say. Thus, proposals for an increase in this state since 2009 — the year of the last federally mandated increase — have died. Meanwhile, along has come 2025 and, across the United States, 21 states have approved increases. Pennsylvania is not one of them, of course, sticking by the old jobs fear-mongering ...