Editorials category, Page 6

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...

When is a political event not a political event? When everything is very carefully phrased. On Tuesday, Pittsburgh sat at the intersection of politics and money. Carnegie Mellon University was the site of the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit. It was coordinated by U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Pittsburgh. President Donald...

Laurel: To new access. We hear a lot about the dangers of technology, especially related to artificial intelligence. Yes, there are valid questions to raise. Yes, Hollywood movies and science fiction books have postulated vivid scenarios. But artificial intelligence also can give back accessibility that makes life easier. In some...

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...

Bella Seachrist never had a chance. Bella missed an opportunity for simply living. She was just 3 years old — almost 4 — when she died, slowly, of starvation. Poverty will do that to a child. That isn’t what happened to Bella. Her stepmother, Laura Ramriez, had a room in...

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...

In a remarkable achievement, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act got worse with each iteration before finally being enacted. On plausible assumptions, the final version will add more than $5 trillion to deficits over the next 10 years, moving the track of public debt from unsustainable to all but unhinged....

Rising waters threatened. Alerts were issued. Girl Scouts were evacuated. It might sound like the story of the flash floods in Texas, where 27 people were killed at a Christian girls camp by the sudden weather. But it isn’t. It’s the story of 105 people escorted from a Kummer Road...

When government needs more money, it has a few options. There are fees: a cost for a driver’s license or a hunting license or a copy of your birth certificate. There are fines, although this should never really be looked at as a revenue source. It’s more about enforcing the...

Laurel: To intervention. There is no tragedy greater than a loss of life — except a loss that could have been prevented. In Westmoreland County, an effort is being made to find ways to reduce the number of suicides. The county’s Suicide Fatality Review Team convened for the first time...

Oversight is important. One function of government is to decide how money is spent. Whether it’s the state, a municipality or a school board, government agencies take in tax money, grants or pass-through funds from a higher level of government and plan how best to distribute it. Another function is...

Is diversity disappearing? In 2015, the Westmoreland Diversity Coalition was created. Carlotta Paige founded the organization by expanding her work on the annual Unity Rally. “The issue of diversity, nobody wanted to deal with (it),” she said. “It’s been a challenge every day.” After 10 years, Paige is retiring and...

A serious interaction with law enforcement can have deadly consequences. In 2024, there were 32 fatal incidents of police shootings in Pennsylvania. The first was Jan. 7, when Christopher Lee Shepherd, 48, of Upper St. Clair was shot as SWAT officers responded to his home during a mental health event....