Breaking News

Editorials

It’s important to take precautions against ticks

There has been no shortage of news stories warning of ticks and the dangers they pose to both humans and their four-legged companions. No one is immune to the unwanted stowaways that latch on during a long hike through the woods or a quick stroll through the back yard. All it takes is momentary contact in tall grass or shrubs, and the tiny pests will dig in, questing for their next blood meal. Pennsylvania is among the top 10 states in the country for the disease, with the State Department of Health reporting 16,620 confirmed cases last year. The most common variety, the ...

Grading second Trump presidency, six months in

Over the course of four years’ banishment to America’s political wilderness while subjected to both a would-be assassin’s bullets and the humiliating and unprecedented spectacle of criminal prosecution by his political opponents, Donald Trump seems to have intuited a key life lesson: Time is of the essence. Carpe diem, seize the day. And so it has been. Like a thoroughbred bursting out of the Kentucky Derby starting gate, the second Trump administration has been racing full speed ahead ever since Trump was inaugurated once again as president of the United States. If the Derby is ...

What standard? What scandal?

Following the resignation of Astronomer CEO Andy Byron after he was caught on a Jumbotron at a Coldplay concert in Boston, cuddling with Human Resources chief Kristin Cabot (who is not his wife), the company issued the following statement: “Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability, and recently that standard was not met.” That got me thinking. There are standards? Haven’t we been living at least since the 1960s with an “if it feels good, do it” philosophy which promotes the notion that if standards exist they are personal and subjective, ...

Williamson case destined to be a mystery

It’s an almost universal reality that when a news report deals with a crime or criminal court case, that account either explicitly reports, if it’s been confirmed, or at least hints about, what efforts there might have been — or probably were — to conceal the crime and/or protect its secrecy for evermore. A major mystery or puzzle in Gallitzin’s nearly 45-year-old Stella Williamson case, in addition to the current mystery about where some of the remains of the five infants found in her attic might be today, is that there apparently were no efforts to forever guarantee that ...

What Will AI Do for Our Happiness?

The West faces a series of serious economic challenges: a demographic collapse that undermines growth; a welfare state that sucks money from the future and dispenses it in the present; a regulatory structure that focuses more on redistributionism and top-down control than on innovation. But, we are told, there is one enormous hope for the future of the global economy: artificial intelligence. AI will skyrocket economic productivity; it will provide us both information and innovation; it will solve insoluble problems and shrink timeframes to the infinitesimal. Marc Andreessen, investor ...

Energy can’t take a back seat to power

The Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit at Carnegie Mellon University was ostensibly, as the name implied, about energy and innovation. In reality, it was about money and jobs. The event provided an opportunity for investors and politicians to get a moment in the sun as they announced a roster of investments in projects in the Keystone State. The bottom line of the list totaled more than $90 billion. Not every company attached specific employment numbers, but those that did totaled more than 40,000 between construction and permanent jobs. It was a lot. Of the 15 companies ...