Featured Commentary category, Page 37

Save his comments on accelerating the reduction of the corporate net income tax in Pennsylvania, the only statement that garnered undivided and emphatic applause at Gov. Josh Shapiro’s joint session budget address back in March were his remarks about protecting and promoting options for Pennsylvania’s grade schoolers. Few other topics...

On April 19, 2023, the Boy Scouts of America declared that it has exited its bankruptcy case after clearing one of the last legal hurdles in its way. Some insurance companies and sex abuse claimants objected to the Boy Scouts’ plan to pay claimants, but the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court...

For decades, Fox News thrived because the people behind it understood what their audience wanted and were more than willing to deliver: television news — or what Fox called news — from a populist perspective. Fox is consistently the most-watched cable news channel, far ahead of competitors like MSNBC and...

Finding an affordable place to live can be complicated, intimidating and frustrating. It’s one of the biggest decisions someone can make, and it’s something that impacts everything else in their lives: where their kids go to school, where they work, where they enjoy holidays and events, where they rest and...

PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron is behaving like many other politicians. Following massive demonstrations against his enactment of a law raising the retirement age in France from 62 to 64, Macron seems to be taking a page from America’s Democratic Party playbook — if you can’t beat them, bribe...

This week, the trial begins for the man accused of shooting and killing 11 people at my Pittsburgh synagogue 4½ years ago. Reports say he was motivated by antisemitism, white supremacist ideology and hatred for immigrants, but what made the attack deadly was the guns. On April 13 of this...

I teach in a district that supports culturally affirming practices, which made it all the more surprising when I was asked to remove the word “identity” from a unit title in a ninth grade course. Even though I was not asked to change the curriculum, I could no longer call...

April 23-29 is National Library Week! But maybe you haven’t been to the local library in a while. Quite a while. Your library card expired, say, a couple of decades ago. Maybe you remember having to pay for a card back then. Maybe you’re not “into” books that much. Maybe...

Editor’s note: Many family members of victims of the Tree of Life shooting have advocated for prosecutors seeking the death penalty. Robert Bowers faces 63 federal charges in the case; jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday. We, the thousands of members of L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty, are...

It seems like every industry is struggling with workforce challenges. In the industry of long-term care — nursing homes, personal care homes and assisted living communities — staffing challenges are nothing new. Long-term-care providers were battling a shortage of caregivers well before the covid-19 pandemic. But the last three years...

Amen to Cornell University President Martha Pollack and Provost Michael Kotlikoff for refusing to ratify a proposal introduced by the student senate to mandate trigger warnings into syllabi and course content. In a statement, Pollack and Kotlikoff said such a mandate “would infringe on our core commitment to academic freedom...

Silicon Valley Bank’s failure rattled confidence in small- and mid-sized banks across the U.S. and once again ignited cries to more tightly regulate banks. That’s wrong-headed. We need to step back and examine how non-money center banks, which are essentially depositories, get into trouble and better apply the tools we...

More than 12 million people live in Pennsylvania, and 3 million of them — nearly one-quarter of the state’s population — depend on Medicaid. That’s why it’s so concerning that the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) recently issued new guidelines that will add an extra burden to Pennsylvania’s...

Doctors have known for some time that we are falling short of our humanistic ideals. It was my turn to learn it firsthand. I had avoided covid until February. Although I had a short course — mitigated by Paxlovid— some weird lab results surfaced after I recovered. My internist wanted...

President Biden just released his budget plan for the next fiscal year. It purports to extend Medicare’s solvency by decades and reassure the millions of Americans who rely on the program. But once they realize his approach will grind drug research to a halt, perhaps they’ll come to a different...

Drug and alcohol addiction is a growing problem that continues to cause wreckage in the lives of individuals and families across the country and especially in our local communities. In 1987 alcohol and drug addiction was added to the list of known diseases, and in 2011 addiction was defined as...

PARIS — CIA Director William Burns hightailed it to Saudi Arabia last week, reportedly frustrated, according to the Wall Street Journal, that peace was on the verge of breaking out — the kind that could end the Global War on Terrorism in the Middle East, which has been the pretext...

As we gear up to celebrate Earth Day, it’s now easier than ever to reap the rewards of embracing a cleaner, greener world. The annual spring event, which reminds us to protect the planet that sustains us, is especially poignant this year. It follows the passage of the 2022 Inflation...

The next Allegheny County chief executive must make a critical decision on property assessments, says the research director of the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy. And it’s clear — as a matter of the state Constitution, basic fairness and repeated litigation, the latest of which is wending its way through...

Medical debt is the most common form of debt in the United States, plaguing more than 100 million Americans. Other industrialized nations do not bear the load of medical debt as we do. So only Americans will ever require a GoFundMe or similar crowd-funding page for a beloved community member...

From the beginning politics has always been a contact sport with competing interests attempting to achieve power over each other. A friend recently said to me he has never seen it so bad as it is today. The friend appears to be in his 50s, so he missed the divisions...

The National Commission on Excellence in Education’s release of a report titled “A Nation at Risk” in 1983 was a pivotal point in the history of American education. The report used dire language, lamenting that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of...

In the world of geopolitics, great powers make, break and play by their own rules. Smaller states largely have to make do with adjusting to the world as determined by others. Which is why the decision by Finland — a country of just 5.5 million people, noted for decades as...

The nationwide shortages of Adderall that began in fall 2022 have brought renewed attention to the beleaguered drug, which is used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and narcolepsy. Adderall became a go-to drug for ADHD over the past two decades but quickly came under fire because of overprescription and misuse. In...

The detention of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in Russia on espionage charges marks an unusual throwback to the old Soviet tactics for handling foreign correspondents. Authorities in Vladimir Putin’s Russia have increasingly used criminal charges against their own journalists as part of a “increasing crackdown on free and...