Friday’s figure means Pennsylvania’s jobless rate has dropped four straight months from 7.7 percent in August. The national rate was 6.7 percent in December…

The practice of medicine is moving more rapidly than ever from decision-making by individual doctors toward control by corporate interests. The transformation is being fueled by the emergence of large hospital systems that include groups of physicians employed by hospitals and others, and new technologies that closely monitor care.

HARRISBURG PATRIOT-NEWS Op Ed: …Since September, three bills have been introduced in Harrisburg designed to expand the commonwealth’s own prescription monitoring system by establishing a database listing all prescriptions of controlled medications and the identities of the citizens who receive them…

State Insurance Commissioner Mike Consedine on Wednesday announced an agreement Pennsylvania has reached with federal officials to delay the planned 2014 move of families with household income between 100 percent and 133 percent of federal poverty from CHIP to Medicaid.

A half dozen of us learned about the cancellation of the scheduled seminal on the City Reinvestment and Improvement Zone (CRIZ), the hard way.

“…[Edward Snowden] would no doubt bring First Amendment defenses to what he did, emphasizing the public interest in his disclosures and the democratic values that he served,” said David Pozen, a Columbia Law School professor and a former legal adviser at the State Department.

HUFFINGTON POST: … (Bill Gates] says that in Norway, the world’s most generous donor of foreign aid, the amount of its budget that goes to foreign aid is only 3 percent. In the U.S., it’s less than 1 percent, or about $30 billion per year, of which $11 billion goes to vaccines, bed nets and other health causes…

ALJAZEERA Column: On Dec. 20, Canada’s highest court struck down the country’s laws regulating prostitution, saying the laws infringed on sex workers’ right to personal safety. The Canadian legislature has a year to rewrite the laws. The case opened up vigorous debate in Canada and around the world, about much more than just the laws governing sex work.

We confess we did not appreciate how a Convention Center progress reported published by the Intelligencer Journal Lancaster New Era May 17, 2012 would be leveraged to justify, without an apparent scintilla of a feasibility study, to perpetuate the further downward spiral of the City of Lancaster.

Opposition leader Vitali Klitschko accused the government of paying thugs to delegitimize the protests through violence. He said that the thugs, who were tasked with smashing windows and burning cars, were chased away by protesters..

“As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life,” he said in a magazine interview. “I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.” …