If Penn State wants taxpayer money, the university must accept the full-disclosure requirements of the state’s open-records law, Corbett says.

EDITOR: It is time the state and the Lancaster Newspapers make the same demand of Lancaster General Health. They are a 501 (c)3 ‘Public Charity’ but they act as though they are the Mafia.

From ALJAZEERA: …Joblessness among the bloc’s 17 countries rose to 10.4 per cent in December 2011, the EU’s statistics office Eurostat said in a statement… After two years of debt crisis and budget austerity cuts across in the region, the number of Europeans out of work has risen to 16.5 million people, with another 20,000 people without a job in December…

DRUG WAR FACTS: Good news was reported with the December 2011 release of the “Prisoners in 2010” report from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. “The combined U.S. prison population decreased 0.6% in 2010, the first decline since 1972.” [1] While we can somewhat celebrate this downward blip, these numbers need to be put in context.

From USA TODAY: Spending by the presidential contenders in this year’s wildly unpredictable Republican primary has fallen sharply from 2008 levels, but the money flowing from outside groups, including new super PACs, has soared dramatically, new figures show.

From the HUFF POST: … Despite the recent headlines about the rise in sales of prescription painkillers, chronic pain is still significantly under-treated in America. There are a number of reasons why. For one, there’s no diagnostic test to diagnose pain, so doctors must rely on patient descriptions of what they’re feeling.

From the PITTSURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW: ….More than 90,000 students are enrolled in 142 public charter schools, including 12 cyber charter schools, according to the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools. An estimated 30,000 students are on waiting lists…

From the WASHINGTON COUNTY OBSERVER-REPORTER: …The infant dropped off last week at the Washington Hospital emergency room turned out to be the first baby in Washington County to be classified as such under Pennsylvania’s 9-year-old Safe Haven Law…

Please note the our new logo above: NewsLanc.com / RealReporting.org. NewsLanc was an outgrowth of the bitter controversy concerning whether public funding and guarantees should be made available for the development of the Lancaster Convention Center / Marriott Hotel project.

Host Ira Glass tells the stories of two professors, each making a calculation that no one had made before. One gets acclaim. One ends up out of a job. The first, Terry Engelder, a geologist at Penn State, was estimating the amount of natural gas that’s recoverable from the Marcellus shale, a giant rock formation that’s under Pennsylvania and several other Eastern states.

From the CENTRAL PENNSYLVANIA BUSINESS JOURNAL: …Apart from the bond payments, the convention center is performing as or better than expected, [Kevin Moloy, Executive Director of the LCCCA] said. It has beaten its budget targets the past two years and is generating on average 1,500 “spillover” room-nights a month, he said, or 18,000 a year — in other words, nearly 50 rooms a night for other hotels in the area to supply…

CAPITOL WIRE: (Jan. 25) – Justice Ron Castille led a Supreme Court majority to one of the most stunning decisions in state political-legal history today. And he crossed party lines to do it, voting with three Democrats against his three fellow Republican Supreme Court justices, to send the Legislative Reapportionment Commission’s state House and Senate redistricting back to the drawing board.

From the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER: As Pennsylvania State University began its three-day public mourning Tuesday of Joe Paterno’s death, elsewhere on campus an academic debate raged on for more than an hour over whether faculty would formally criticize the board of trustees for its handling of the child-sex-abuse scandal that ultimately cost Paterno his coaching job.

From NEWSWEEK: ….“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros tells Newsweek. “We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression.