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NS should look to future safety issues

The $22 million settlement resolving all of East Palestine, Ohio’s, claims against Norfolk Southern Railroad represents a significant step toward finally putting the disastrous February 2023 derailment there to rest. But unfortunately for the railroad, whose service territory includes Altoona and Johnstown, there are a number of other money headaches remaining that will continue the throbbing inside the company’s financial “cranium.” It’s an unenviable future that awaits N.S., and it seems much too early to predict how and when those predictably burdensome obligations will ...

McCrory’s project should be praised

People look down on those who brag for the purpose of touting their self-perceived greatness or, worse, for ridiculing or belittling others. But, what can be referred to as “controlled bragging” should not be construed as bad in all cases. It can have a positive, useful purpose, if its intent is built genuinely around helping others. Downtown Altoona’s former McCrory’s 5 & 10 building at 1306 11th Ave. is a great example of the latter. Other communities should take notice and heed an opportunity that should become reality, if local leaders, as they ought to do, make that ...

PSU should be transparent in budget woes

Imagine what people of Johnstown would be thinking and feeling if the University of Pittsburgh were to arouse speculation that some of its branch campuses might be targeted for possible closing — and If the university were remaining tight-lipped about which campuses were in danger of being shuttered. It is reasonable to believe that community and businesses leaders would be mobilizing to meet with university leaders to try to ascertain as much information as possible about what was being considered. In addition, those community and business leaders certainly would be planning to ...

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 ...