PHILLY.COM Column: PENNSYLVANIA’S push to privatize its lottery – or, as I like to call it, fixing a problem that doesn’t exist – presents political risk and opportunity for Republican Gov. Corbett….

NEWSMAX: The United States faces a “material risk” of losing its AAA status if there is a repeat of the wrangling seen in 2011 over raising the country’s self-imposed debt ceiling, credit ratings firm Fitch said on Tuesday…

Last year’s total is the highest since the Pentagon began closely tracking suicides in 2001. It exceeds the 295 Americans who died in Afghanistan last year, by the AP’s count…

With a nearly non-existent constituency, mental health budgets have been cut, by one estimate, $5 billion since the Great Recession began in 2007. Two decades ago there were 559,000 hospital beds in the U.S. dedicated to treatment of mental illnesses. Today that total is closer to 43,000, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

Long, long ago, while covering Three Mile Island, screenwriter Mike Gray (“The China Syndrome”) made the point to me that a fatal error of aircraft pilots (and nuclear control room operators, and writers) is to focus on one gauge, and one theory, in a crisis, and in so doing limiting the operator’s ability to look for other signs of trouble in a complex accident.

The top staff announced by Attorney General-elect Kathleen Kane last week is a strong sign that Gov. Tom Corbett has a lot to worry about in the coming investigation of his handling of the Jerry Sandusky child abuse case.

Imagine the following: LCCCA Chair Kevin Fry to Wells-Fargo Sr. Vice President: We would like you to lower the high fees and excessive interest rates that will come into effect in April and render the Convention Center even more insolvent.

He said his father had investigators do research into the assassination and found that phone records of Oswald and nightclub owner Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald two days after the president’s assassination, “were like an inventory” of mafia leaders the government had been investigating…

HUFFINGTON POST / REUTERS: -The late British TV presenter Jimmy Savile, honoured by both the queen and the pope, sexually assaulted hundreds of people, mainly children, at BBC premises and hospitals over six decades of unparalleled abuse, a police-led report said on Friday…

“Each year we have extreme weather, but it’s unusual to have so many extreme events around the world at once,” said Omar Baddour, chief of the data management applications division at the World Meteorological Association, in Geneva. “The heat wave in Australia; the flooding in the U.K., and most recently the flooding and extensive snowstorm in the Middle East — it’s already a big year in terms of extreme weather calamity.”