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Early intervention needed to stop teen suicides

There are some injuries where you have to wait to respond. You can’t put a cast on a leg before it breaks. You can’t give chemotherapy before someone has cancer. Taking out an appendix proactively is not only useless, but it’s also wrong. Then there are the ones that require intervention before the problem occurs. Suicide — especially among teenagers — can’t wait for the break to happen first. The problem is the “break” doesn’t look like a crisis at all. It looks like normal teenage behavior — until it doesn’t. That can leave shattered families trying to ...

AI regulations from social media mistakes

Twenty years ago, no one really knew where social media was going to go. Facebook had just dropped “The” from its name. It was not yet ubiquitous. It was only beginning to move beyond college campuses and into broader public use. By 2006, it opened the doors wide. There were just two requirements: have an email address and be at least 13. It was a revolution without a war. We can remember a time when we weren’t in years-long WhatsApp group chats or documenting every sandwich on Instagram. But the inch-by-inch way social media’s before and after bled together can obscure how ...

State should consider I-99 extension

People unfamiliar with Blair County’s mid-20th century highways probably cannot grasp the picture fully of how major roadway projects over the subsequent decades were the springboard for great economic progress. Interstate 99 has been the biggest economic generator up to now for the county as a whole and it isn’t done yet, as this editorial will discuss. However, numerous other improvements, including bigger ones such as the modern, four-lane, limited-access Route 22, Altoona’s 10th Avenue Expressway and 17th Street corridor, plus the improvements to Plank Road, Logan Boulevard ...

Narrowing tax base would be a self-inflicted progressive wound

One of the most consequential trends in American politics is that Democrats are increasingly discovering what Republicans have known for decades: Voters don’t like taxes. Now the gubernatorial primary in California has become an experiment in how far tax cuts might take a Democratic politician in one of the country’s bluest states. Katie Porter, one of the most progressive legislators during her six years in Congress, is running for governor and polling in the middle of a crowded field. To boost her languishing campaign, she has proposed eliminating state income taxes — for ...

Freedom is not really free

At the height of the energy crisis in the 1970s, when oil prices more than sextupled, The Economist magazine showed a map of the Persian Gulf on its cover with the headline, “What’s a Nice Thing Like Oil Doing in a Place Like This?” The Iranian miscreants, with whom we are now at war, understand that, although they could care less what their own citizens think, in free countries public opinion and support is vital to a president’s ability to wage war. By impeding the movement of ships through the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil supplies pass, they ...

As rent pressures increase, lawmakers must focus

Affordable housing remains a challenge for Ohioans — and that challenge only grows as rent puts a greater strain on an increasing number of households. According to the 2026 Gap Report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition and the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio, there are 422,098 extremely low-income renters in the state, and 73% of those report spending more than half their income on rent. That is an increase from 66% only five years ago. “For people at the bottom of the pay scale, rent is gobbling up most of their paychecks. But this report shows the ...