Not made clear is that homes and businesses built are taxed at values comparable to what they would have been taxed had they existed during the re-assessment period.

After four years of seeing pension costs grow — the state spent about $500 million on pensions in the last budget before Corbett took office, compared to more than $1.7 billion this year…

PENNLIVE.COM: Former U.S. Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell’s ninth quarterly review lacked the pizazz of September’s lifting of the ban on football bowl games…

But his estimate assumes a wholesale price of gas that drillers in the Marcellus right now can only dream about. At current prices and production, a 5 percent severance tax would produce about $675 million a year…

Rarely do deaths lead to murder or manslaughter charges. Research by Philip M. Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green State University, reports that 41 officers were charged with either murder or manslaughter in shootings while on duty over a seven-year period ending in 2011.

“Before newspapers we had town criers,” Robbins said recently. He quotes a late 2012 poll by Quinnipiac University that indicates only 13 percent of those polled said they relied on newspapers for their political news and information.

“We are currently unprepared legislatively, socioculturally, and practically for this, the next phase in the drug market,” he writes. “Legalization is not the answer, banning drugs is not the answer, leaving things as they are — in complete unregulated anarchy in both the old and the new drug markets — is not the answer… There must be a concerted effort not only of harm reduction, but of urgent damage limitation… The explicit and implicit message from drug users themselves is that no law will ever change nor has ever changed their desire to get high.”

The violent subduing the student protests in Tiananmen Square, Beijing in 1989 has hung over China as a dark cloud and has been perceived by the world as a badge of shame ever since.

The result gives the GOP its ninth Senate-seat pickup in this year’s elections. Republicans will have 54 Senate seats next year, and Democrats will control 46…

BUCKS COUNTY COURIER / AP: Any day now, a grand jury could render an opinion on whether Attorney General Kathleen Kane or anyone in her office should face charges for allegedly breaching secrecy laws.

In her introduction, [Karen] Dawisha, a professor of political science at Miami University in Ohio, explains: “Instead of seeing Russian politics as an inchoate democratic system being pulled down by history, accidental autocrats, popular inertia, bureaucratic incompetence, or poor Western advice, I conclude that from the beginning Putin and his circle sought to create an authoritarian regime ruled by a close-knit cabal…who used democracy for decoration rather than direction.”…

Nearly a hundred years after Freud posed that question, we’ve firmly established that women do indeed want sex but scientists are just starting to understand how that works. And the year 2014, in particular, has borne witness to a seemingly unprecedented number of studies examining female sexuality and especially female orgasm. Are we finally unlocking the secrets of female sexuality? Can scientific research sweeten our sex lives? Let’s find out…