But since 2003 most motorcycle riders in Pennsylvania have been allowed to go helmet-less in the name of freedom. The results have been predictable. The Governors Highway Safety Association reports a rising national epidemic of motorcycle fatalities, including 210 in Pennsylvania last year — a 5.5 percent increase.

The country is beginning to realize that it cannot enforce or imprison its way out of the addiction problem. But to create broadly accessible and effective treatment strategies for the millions of people who need them, it must abandon the “drug war” approach to addiction that has dominated the national discourse in favor of a policy that treats addiction as a public health issue…

The framework of the deal calls for selling the incinerator to the Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority, and entering a 40-year-plus public-private partnership with Standard Parking, which runs Harrisburg International Airport garages and is the nation’s largest parking facility operator.

After years of insisting that the primary cure for Europe’s malaise is to slash spending, the champions of austerity, most notably Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, find themselves under intensified pressure to back off unpopular remedies and find some way to restore faltering growth to the world’s largest economic bloc.

The survey conducted for the New-York based Commonwealth Fund from April to August 2012, found that thirty percent of U.S. residents, or 55 million people, were uninsured for at least part of the year, while another 16 percent, or 30 million people, were underinsured, the Huffington Post reported Friday.

Since then, Mr. Compton said this week, the turnpike has begun a review of contracts and reiterated its procurement policies to vendors. The review — announced in the days after the charges — initially targeted contracts from about 2003 to 2010, the years targeted in the investigation…

For the past week, reporter Bill Keisling has ‘buried himself’ in records obtained from the LCSWMA through an open records request. He has discovered startling information that provides hard facts and substantiation to previous NewsLanc speculations and contentions, as recently described in “Can the LCSWMA fish swallow the Harrisburg Incinerator whale?”

So why would the National Rifle Association — which promotes gun ownership and gun rights — take over an outdoor show and ban gun sales? Local gun shops say the NRA’s decision has less to do with the Second Amendment and more to do with money. In announcing and promoting its new Great American Outdoor Show…

PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER: Determinate vs. indeterminate sentencing isn’t a topic that comes up in everyday conversation – until a convict’s jail term or release boils over into a public controversy…

PHILLYBURBS: Long-standing case law on the ownership of below-ground minerals and natural gas that has guided the booming natural gas industry since it began exploring the vast Marcellus Shale formation is still in force, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE: Westmoreland County officials could once again choose to abolish the position of jury commissioner under a bill sent to Gov. Tom Corbett on Wednesday.

NEW YORK TIMES: On a stormy evening this spring, nurses at Dr. Gary Stuck’s family practice were on the phone with patients with heart ailments, asking them not to shovel snow. The idea was to keep them out of the hospital, and that effort — combined with dozens more like it — is starting to make a difference: across the city, doctors are providing less, but not worse, health care.