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Opinion

Grading second Trump presidency, six months in

Editorials

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 ...

Williamson case destined to be a mystery

Editorials

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?

Editorials

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

Editorials

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 ...

McCormick’s leadership on energy impressive

Editorials

We are impressed with the leadership U.S. Sen. David McCormick, R-Pittsburgh, is demonstrating on an issue whose importance our editorials frequently emphasize. McCormick, in only his first year as a senator, organized an energy summit this past week that unveiled vital, private-sector investment in a broad variety of energy-related projects. The investments include natural gas — a sector of energy development that we are fortunate to see create jobs for families and yield revenue for communities throughout our region. It also includes hydroelectric power — a renewable source ...

Faith in 911 system needs to be maintained

Editorials

We take some things for granted. Turn a faucet, and water will pour out. Flip a switch, and lights will come on. Those can be interrupted by circumstances. Don’t pay a bill, and the water or electricity can be cut off. But there are some services we rely on so much that we really can’t imagine them not being there when we need them. Perhaps the service we depend upon the most is 911. On Friday, Pennsylvania’s 911 system began experiencing what was termed “intermittent outages.” They were reported to the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency around 2 p.m. Around ...