Editorials category, Page 2

President Donald Trump is mulling a move on marijuana. The president said Monday his administration was considering rescheduling the substance, moving it from Schedule I to a Schedule III. Scheduled drugs are medications or other substances classified based on their impacts. Marijuana is a Schedule I drug, meaning it has...

Partisanship is what happens in the quiet spaces between calamity. When trains are derailing or cars are crashing, there is no question of affiliation. When a building is burning, no one asks how the firefighters voted. When a hurricane smashes against the shore, Democrats and Republicans and those who have...

The Federal Reserve resisted pressure from the White House on July 30 and left its policy rate unchanged. It was the right decision. As Chair Jerome Powell acknowledged, the case for a cut was a bit stronger this time than in June — and two of the Fed’s policymakers, in...

There are certain things we can depend upon in Pennsylvania. As certain as the sun will rise, there will be potholes, there will be football rivalries and the state Legislature will lock horns over something that should be an easy compromise. But hey, sometimes the potholes get paved (except at...

A company has to make a profit to stay in business. Everything has a cost, and those costs go up. To stay ahead of that curve, and to make sure the owner or investors are also getting a pay day, a company needs to make more money than it pays...

Laurel: To appropriate action. Allegheny County President Judge Susan Evashavik DiLucente has taken the right steps to address a problem in the courtrooms, and she did it with a two-line email. “Dear Judges, I write to remind you all that you only have authority to adjudicate cases and enter orders...

Problems exist nationwide in recruiting and retention of police. There are almost 18,000 police agencies in the United States, and many have been seeing their ranks thin since 2019. The International Association of Chiefs of Police surveyed departments in 2024 and found, on average, departments operating at about 91% capacity....

On Monday, a man in a dark blue prison jumpsuit stepped out of a Westmoreland County Sheriff’s van at the courthouse. His wrists were circled in handcuffs and bound to a chain around his waist. His ankles were similarly shackled. He looked like what he is: a criminal. He looked...

When will Pennsylvanians get fed up? The Pennsylvania General Assembly is among the highest-paid legislatures in the country. The lowest is New Hampshire, where a lawmaker pulls in just $100. The highest paid? Neighboring New York at $142,000. But the Keystone State is close to the top, with a salary...

Delta Air Lines says it is rolling out “personalized fares,” which sounds benign and even sweet but is precisely the opposite. What is really going on is the massive airline is phasing in artificial intelligence-powered ticket pricing that may offer you a different fare for a particular trip than your...

The first lawsuits over the fatal 2023 explosion in the Rustic Ridge development in Plum have been filed in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court. This was to be expected. The two-year anniversary of the explosion is rapidly approaching. The incident has been investigated. The timing is appropriate. Last week, suits...

In the biblical Book of Judges, a story is told of a test. When the Gileadites vanquished the Ephraimites, the defeated people tried to escape across the Jordan River. The Gileadites, however, countered by testing refugees. Knowing the Ephraimite language didn’t have a “sh” sound, they asked people to say...

Laurel: To accountability. You can get almost anything at a good mall: jeans, televisions, candles, cinnamon rolls. It’s hard to get much of anything at the Pittsburgh Mills mall. Most stores stand empty, and the parking lot is a mix of craters and overgrown plants. But Namdar Realty Group, the...

Imagine that Pennsylvania was not named by Charles II after founder William Penn’s father, a British admiral. What if, instead of christening it in the Latin for “Penn’s Woods,” the king listened to one of the admiral’s most bitter enemies? What if the same happened with William Pitt, the Earl...

The state of Pennsylvania makes it easy to figure out if your hair stylist or architect or real estate agent or any other licensed professional is able to work legally. The Department of State’s website can answer your questions about permits and authorizations. The Pennsylvania Licensing System Verification Service allows...

In two years, there will be no Nittany Lions on the Penn State campuses in New Kensington or Fayette County. What will be there remains to be seen. In May, Penn State trustees voted to follow the recommendations of President Neeli Bendapudi’s administration and close seven Commonwealth Campuses at the...

White House budgets, generally speaking, aren’t serious governing documents. Even so, they’re a declaration of national priorities — and by that measure, the latest blueprint is deeply troubling. What sort of administration aspires to shrink its budget for scientific discovery by 40%? Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy...

The world of fiction makes it seem like the death penalty is a simple, almost foregone conclusion in a courthouse. It isn’t, at least not in Pennsylvania. The Keystone State has a complicated relationship with capital punishment. Much like with a federal death penalty case, it is a multistep process...

The Veterans Affairs Pittsburgh Health System is dealing with deep losses to its workforce. In an exclusive interview with TribLive, Pittsburgh VA director Donald Koenig spoke about the reductions. Since January, 238 employees have been lost. Another 87 will be gone by the end of the year. There are 151...

Laurel: To making progress. Four Hempfield fire departments are moving ahead with dissolving their charters. The good thing here is not that they are going away. It is that they are finding a way to continue to serve their communities. By dissolving as individual chartered entities, the departments will move...

The boys are back in town. On Wednesday, Saint Vincent College in Unity became the center of the Pittsburgh Steelers universe as players arrived on the scene for their annual training camp. This is where the players begin the process of becoming a team. Sure, they all have numbers and...

The Allegheny County Jail leadership did the right thing Monday in suspending a corrections officer. Brian Davis has worked at the jail for five years. He most recently worked in the facility’s intake unit. That is where new detainees are brought into the system and processed. It is the introduction...

The total population of senior citizens is 55.8 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Of that, 1.3 million are in nursing homes. That’s about 2.3%. Maybe that doesn’t seem like a lot, but the issue is it’s a moving target. For some people, a stay in a nursing home...

When the first nuclear bomb test took place 80 years ago, the scientists who gathered to observe the explosion in the New Mexico desert recognized they were playing with fire. Physicist Enrico Fermi tried to break the tension by taking bets on whether the bomb would ignite the atmosphere and...

Protesting on college campuses is a rite of passage — part of the process of growing up and learning. It is universal. Student protests happened in medieval France, in the streets of China in the 1980s and in South Africa against apartheid in the 1970s. It is all over the...