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Richard_Robbins

The many ways this day is ‘special’

If this is Sunday, April 23, 2023, then it must be National Table Top Tennis Day ... and National Lost Dog Awareness Day ... and National Picnic Day ... and National Lovers’ Day ... and National German Beer Day ... and National Cherry Cheesecake Day ... and World Book Night ... and St. ...

The problem of men in black robes

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave the green light to the prescription drug mifepristone in 2000. Last week, 23 years and five presidential administrators later, a federal judge in Texas placed a preliminary hold on the use of mifepristone, one drug in a two-drug combination used to ...

In defense of a rules-based world

Robert KaganĢƵ “lesson for all time” is that peace – as in the absence of war among nations – is most often squandered when threats to the peace “are not obvious and the need to do something is not obvious.”This, it seems obvious to say, makes keeping the peace extremely ...

Echoes of the miners’ Mitchell Day

Ed Yankovich has trouble remembering the last big Mitchell Day celebration. Was it five years ago, 10 years ago? Yankovich, former president of the United Mine Workers district headquartered in Uniontown, was unable to pin it down.“It was somewhere in that period of time,” he said the other ...

The shock of a return from Florida

I’m home. The furnace is running. OMG. After a week in balmy Florida, where I dipped into the hotel swimming pool, watched ballgames, and paraded around in shorts and T-shirts, the cold is hardly bearable.Flying from the Gulf Coast to the hill-top airport on the outskirts of Bridgeport, ...

When history leaps from the page

Some years ago I was sitting at a research table at the state archives in Harrisburg. I had filled out a research slip for something or other when I was handed (by mistake) a letter-size envelope containing a piece of canvas – a sample for those in state government in 1861 who bought tents ...