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Canada measles outbreak shows that vigilance must not slip

The next outbreak of serious disease is merely “a plane ride away,” public health officials have long warned. The current crop of measles cases in Canada proves that point. A traveler infected with measles visited a community in New Brunswick with a low vaccination rate, sparking a national outbreak of the disease in 2024. About 50 people were sickened in that incident, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada. Meanwhile, others who were unvaccinated visited the community, traveled home and thus the disease spread across a country where conditions were ripe for an ...

State’s fiscal challenges are alarming

Since all seats of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and about half of those of the state Senate will be on the state’s 2026 election ballots, it’s safe to surmise that commonwealth residents need not fear a state income tax increase, no matter when the Legislature completes its work on a budget for the 2026-27 fiscal year. The purported deadline for completion of that budget is June 30, but it took the General Assembly more than four extra months beyond June 30 of this year for work on 2025-26’s $50 billion spending package to be finished. It was a mess for which the ...

Road salt issue should be simple

Pennsylvania residents who watched as the just-concluded 2025-26 state budget-preparation debacle played out might be thinking that the Legislature surely might now be able to find an issue that it can handle more quickly and more efficiently. But, in fact, will it? There’s an issue “out there” involving road salt, but state lawmakers have found a way to make it more difficult than it ought to be. Some state lawmakers — and presumably some non-elected officials — believe that road salt’s use ought to be curbed in order to reduce environmental damage stemming from ...

School funding a state-created problem

Education is built on the basics. ABCs become words, then sentences, then books. Counting becomes adding, then long division, then algebra. If you don’t get a good grounding at the primary level, everything gets harder until the learning process falls apart with the advanced material. That might be the issue with school districts and cyber charter schools. They are facing off over money as well as accountability and test scores. But this isn’t a fight they started. It’s a battleground the state controls. The latest example is a lawsuit from four regional schools: Leechburg ...

Thankfulness can be an abstract concept

In 2006, a few days before Christmas, doctors announced my wife had six months to live. She had, they said, a rare form of cancer that had spread to her lungs. There was really nothing that could be done. We had a one-year-old and I had been told my job was coming to an end the same day of the diagnosis. Thankfully, it was a misdiagnosis. Not only did I keep my job, but I kept my wife. Ten years later, doctors informed my wife they suspected she had a genetic form of lung cancer. Had my wife not been misdiagnosed in 2006, they would not have known about her lung cancer in 2016. My wife ...

Put that smile to work, Mr. Mayor

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s smile carried him a long way toward being elected. And he used his affability again on Friday, turning the meeting he had requested with President Donald Trump into an Oval Office lovefest. Now it’s time for the mayor-elect to employ the power of smiling to make day-to-day life better for New Yorkers when they are compelled to interact with city employees. Mamdani needs to call on the 300,000 city employees to show warmth, respect and courtesy to the public. The spirit of a smile. Walk into a city agency or court building seeking help, ...