Additional financial info needed

February 18, 2023

The Southern Alleghenies region is perceived to be faring reasonably well despite the inflationary pressures and other economic challenges consumers and borrowers from coast to coast in this country have been facing daily for much of the past year. However, “perceived to be faring” can be quite different from how consumers/borrowers actually are faring. Thus, it would be helpful for more information to emerge for people here to better understand how this region stacks up against other places. This region’s banks possess a wealth of data capable of unveiling much of the true ...

Derailment underscores train danger

February 16, 2023

The Feb. 3 fiery freight train derailment at East Palestine, Ohio, involving dozens of cars, including tankers carrying hazardous materials, has understandably caused great anxiety in many people living near railroad tracks, including some here in Pennsylvania. All considered, that reaction is understandable. The scope of current anxiety in and around East Palestine in the derailment’s aftermath was captured in a quote included in an Associated Press article published in the Mirror’s Feb. 10 edition. East Palestine area resident Brittany Dailey told reporters, “I’m scared ...

Open your heart today, every day

February 14, 2023

(Editor’s note: The following editorial was written by former Mirror Staff Writer Amanda Gabeletto in 2013. We liked it so much, we’ve run it annually since.) Love covers a lot of ground. There is the love between a parent and a child. There’s love for one’s partner, sibling, friend, pet. There is even the very real love a child feels for a favorite stuffed animal. Any parent who has had to wash that stuffed animal or search frantically for it can attest to that. Some might say love varies in its degrees — that the love one has for a spouse cannot compare to the love ...

Shortage of mental-health staff alarming

February 11, 2023

The federal Health Resources and Services Administration says about 158.4 million Americans currently live in areas with shortages of mental-health workers, while a decade ago a “mere” 94.8 million people resided in such areas. According to that federal agency, the number of mental-health professionals needed to address the scarcity in question grew to 7,957 in 2022, up from 2,593 in 2013. Public-health officials and advocacy groups are pressing the message that the shortage results from both increased demand for services and a lack of mental-health professionals caused in part ...

County dropped ball on Act 165

February 10, 2023

The Feb. 3 Mirror article “Blair targeting hazmat scofflaws” seems to depict a situation reminiscent of the municipal governments decades ago that made pronouncements about their intent to crack down on those violating the municipalities’ junk-vehicle ordinances. The important point that most of those municipalities failed to address while revealing their intentions to crack down was why they hadn’t enforced their ordinances all along, rather than having allowed junk vehicles to accumulate in yards, vacant lots, alleys and along streets — and who knows where else. If a ...

Troubling statistics on gonorrhea

February 4, 2023

The coronavirus pandemic and, before that, AIDS captured much of the public’s health-concerns attention beyond illnesses and conditions including cancer, heart disease and strokes. However, another serious medical problem has been lurking in the proverbial shadows — a culprit people generally are reluctant to talk about publicly, but which produced almost 700,000 confirmed cases in the United States in 2021. That total was a 130% increase since 2009, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, quoted in the Jan. 30 edition of the Wall Street Journal. Also ...