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Falling in love all over again in the Southwest

Local Columns

(Editor’s note: This column is the second part of a two part series.) As we continued our journey through the Southwest, our next stop brought together two of my great loves, history and natural beauty at Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado. Here, an ancient window into the past flings wide open, offering visitors like me a rare opportunity to peer inside. What little I knew of this ancient place came from my childhood View-Master reels. I remember eagerly clicking through the 1960s edition of Mesa Verde, longing for the day I’d witness its wonders in person. ...

Community effort lights up the night

Editorials

Lewistown always wakes with the sound of birds and the flow of the Juniata, but the last Sunday in June brings a different anticipation. The air in the morning after the fireworks is charged, as if the night’s thunder and color still hangs over the rooftops. It’s the echo in the chest, the memory of those sky-bursts over the river, that gets people talking in the checkout line and lingers in photos on phones and social feeds. Or maybe it’s what the fireworks stand for — the one hour when a small town stops, looks up, and remembers it is part of something larger than ...

Court rules correctly on firearms purchases

Editorials

We appreciate that a federal judge has correctly struck down an effort in California to sidestep the Second Amendment by placing undue limitations on how many firearms law-abiding Americans can purchase in a month. The judge noted Supreme Court precedent clearly protects the right to purchase the firearms that the Second Amendment acknowledges Americans have the right to own and bear. “When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct,” the Supreme Court decision upon which the ruling is based, as ...

Impact fee just part of gas industry’s success

Editorials

$6.9 million. Lycoming County and its municipalities are yet again benefitting from the natural gas impact fee. This year’s $6.9 million disbursement brings the total, since the fee was enacted, to about $134.5 million. The projects on which that money has and will be spent would otherwise require county and municipal governments to dip into tax revenue — whether by diverting it from other necessary expenses or by raising taxes — or postpone or reject some of the projects altogether — projects that help improve the quality of life in our region. Our position on the ...

Work on derailment needs to continue

Editorials

An Associated Press article about the Feb. 3, 2023, Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, said the accident prompted a national reckoning with rail safety and calls for reform, although proposals for new industry rules stalled in Congress. Unfortunately, though, with each new development related to the 2023 accident, that well-intentioned reckoning still underway seems farther from completion than it was just days before. A new development provided ample testimony to that. A specialized plane equipped with advanced sensors that the government deploys to ...

Editorials

Families don’t always look the same. Sometimes they are small and nuclear. Sometimes they are blended from remarriage. Sometimes they are extended with grandparents or grandchildren. And for many people, families include animals. According to Forbes, 66 percent of American households include pets. That’s almost 87 million families. Most pets are dogs in about 65 million households. There are 46.5 million homes with cats — and the math tells us there are plenty of people who have both. For many people, these furry family members are just as important as the ones they married ...