On your right, you see a miniature horse. Straight ahead, a pig. To your left, a monkey. No, you’re not at the zoo. You’re at the airport, where airlines allow all sorts of untrained “emotional support” animals to fly alongside owners. Yet these same airlines often refuse to ...

(Editor’s note: Bob Jubelirer represented Blair County as state senator from 1975 to 2006 and was the Senate’s president pro tempore from 1984-2006). When news broke recently that Altoona Curve owner and my good friend Bob Lozinak would be receiving minor league’s baseball’s highest ...

Saturday’s sunrise will open the deer season, ending a long custom in Pennsylvania’s outdoors. Since at least the early 1960s, the season has begun on the Monday after Thanksgiving. The board of Pennsylvania game commissioners, responsible for establishing hunting seasons and limits, ...

The Prescription Drug Pricing Reduction Act would stall future drug development and deprive Americans of lifesaving cures — all without reducing patients’ out-of-pocket costs. The bill would alter Medicare Part D, the federal prescription drug benefit for seniors and people with ...

The Pennsylvania General Assembly is considering how to address the issue of balance billing. Emergency physicians applaud them for doing so as no Pennsylvanian should worry about insurance at a time of crisis. However, the most recent attempt to address balance billing, HB 1862, would ...

You know the signs. The thunderous cough. The pounding headache. The full-body fatigue. It’s the flu. Last fall and winter, influenza sickened roughly 40 million Americans and killed 60,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This year’s flu season is nearly upon ...

Rep. John Joyce’s Oct. 15 article (“Time to move on from ’16 election) is one exercise in gaslighting after another. He fails to mention key facts, distorts others and misdirects on the rest. He states that Democrats have been “tirelessly scheming to remove (President Donald Trump) ...

Nearly three years ago, more than 6 million Pennsylvanians went to the polls to exercise their right to have a voice in our American government. The people of our commonwealth, for the first time since 1988, duly elected a Republican to serve as president of the United States. ...

The Senate Finance Committee just advanced a sweeping Medicare overhaul. Unfortunately, the bill does little to help America’s sickest patients; it jeopardizes physicians’ ability to provide timely, quality care to tens of millions of Americans. Congress would be wise to reject it. ...

Pennsylvania has a rich history of higher education, including some of the best independent nonprofit colleges and universities in the nation. Apart from their mission as centers of learning — preparing students for their careers and for the world — these institutions are economic ...

Is anything really wrong with Jay Inslee? Was John Hickenlooper not qualified to be president? And is Steve Bullock a weak candidate? The answers are no, no, no and for all three, “on the contrary.” Any of them could be a remarkably attractive Democratic nominee for president. In a ...

San Francisco, a city described in song for its natural beauty, is descending into an abyss of homelessness, the use of sidewalks as toilets and a place you might not want to visit, much less live. The latest, but surely not the last demonstration of insanity, is San Francisco’s Board of ...

The decade-long fight over Keystone XL, a 1,179-mile underground oil pipeline that would carry crude from Canada to Nebraska, just took another surprising turn. In June, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals lifted an injunction and allowed the long-delayed construction project to move forward. ...

During a December 2015 debate among Republican presidential candidates in Las Vegas, former Florida governor Jeb Bush said to Donald Trump: “You can’t insult your way to the presidency.” Never mind. The question for next year’s election is whether the insulter-in-chief can use the ...

President Donald Trump has backed off tariffs on toys made in China. His commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, said the administration did not want to hurt Christmas. This is an admission against interest that the trade war with China is hurting the American people. Lately, the yield curve ...

One of the credos of the newspaper industry is to “get through the J months, and then something magical happens in the fall.” Or so Circulation Manager Dan Slep, whose family’s Mirror roots date back to 1874, has long maintained. Vacation season is over, the oppressive heat of August ...

I write as president of a cooperative company comprised of independent community pharmacies, typical of the community pharmacies throughout our commonwealth. For more than a century, independent, community pharmacists have served generations of families all across Pennsylvania, providing ...

By Dr. Ralph McKibbin There is nothing I enjoy more as a health care provider than seeing a patient make tremendous progress with their health. And as you might imagine, there is nothing more devastating than watching a patient’s health deteriorate when his or her treatment plan is turned ...

I am writing in response to your series of articles regarding the shortage of primary care physicians in our area. I am speaking on behalf of the Lexington Hospitalist group at UPMC Altoona. We are addressing a few statements made by the primary care providers (PCPs) featured in your ...

How exciting. The presidential sweepstakes are in high gear, and from an Orlando, Florida, extravaganza, the 2020 voting procedures will be the most exciting ever and will be a knockdown/drag out. Good. Without any doubt events of Tuesday night are a continuation of the 2016 election of ...