Paul Carpenter been a full-time columnist at The Morning Call since 1989. Described by one hostile critic as a "cantankerous libertarian' (a characterization he embraces), he focuses on legal and constitutional issues and plays a pronounced adversarial role when dealing with power structures. He has worked at various newspapers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and worked for the Associated Press at Philadelphia and then Harrisburg from 1972 to 1980. He was one of several AP staffers assigned to cover the Three Mile Island accident, and eventually became the AP's chief reporter for TMI.
It was a splendid dam, made of creek bed gravel, reinforced by big rocks and topped with large chunks of the sod that had been hanging over the bank. A lovely little waterfall was created by a spillway at one end of the dam, and a scenic pond now extended upstream.
There is something deeply disturbing about last Friday's attacks on two state troopers in Pike County, apart from the wrenching tragedy involving the death of one officer and the wounding of another.
Most of Allentown's attention over the weekend was on the opening of the PPL Center, with Friday's concert by a legendary pop music group and Saturday's Community Open House, mainly for those with season tickets to the Lehigh Valley's first-ever American Hockey League...
Regardless of whose version of Philadelphia's restaurant tipping uproar is correct, Eagles running back LeSean McCoy has rendered our culture a great service.
The good news is that only 381 people were slaughtered last year by drunk drivers in Pennsylvania, down from the 2012 toll of 404 and significantly down from the 534 killed by drunks in 2008.
"The truth will out," says Launcelot Gobbo, a character in a nonsensical scene from Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice." Actually, that's not precisely the way Gobbo put it, but it's the way it is almost universally remembered, meaning that sooner or later,...
News item in Thursday's edition of The Morning Call: Two brothers were released after spending more than 30 years in prison in North Carolina for crimes they never committed — the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl.
The young man's family had emigrated from Belgium to Canada and then to a little town 15 miles south of Buffalo.