An-Li Herring

Officials at the Allegheny County Jail announced Monday that 10 jail employees were diagnosed with COVID-19 over the past weekend, with another 50 quarantined. Since March, some 33 staffers at the jail have tested positive for the virus.

Although Democrats failed to flip the Pennsylvania legislature this year, divided government could give them more say than Republicans in the upcoming redistricting process. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf will need to sign off on the state’s new congressional map, for example, and the mostly Democratic Pennsylvania Supreme Court could weigh in on the separate process for drawing state legislative lines.

One of the biggest challenges for contact tracing apps aimed at fighting COVID-19 is a lack of participation – and distrust in Western Pennsylvania appears to run particularly high, thanks in no small part to partisan feelings. But a team at Carnegie Mellon University thinks it can inspire greater buy-in with a new approach that helps users to prevent infection in the first place.

After coming under fire on social media, Pittsburgh lawyers Ron Hicks and Carolyn McGee have asked to be removed from a federal lawsuit that seeks to undo votes cast in Pennsylvania.

With Election Day less than a day away, former Vice President Joe Biden visited western Pennsylvania to make his final pitch to voters. After speaking in Cleveland earlier in the day Monday, Biden kicked-off a three-stop swing through the region with a mid-afternoon speech in Beaver County.

Allegheny County Council joined Pittsburgh City Council Tuesday in voting unanimously to ban hair discrimination in employment, education, housing, and other settings. 

Prospects remain unclear for an Allegheny County Council bill that would mandate paid sick leave throughout the county. A committee met to discuss the bill Thursday, but six months after the legislation was introduced, there are no signs it will receive a vote anytime soon. 

Even before President Donald Trump received the drug remdesivir to help treat his case of COVID-19, Pennsylvania Treasurer Joe Torsella was raising alarms about the price of the medication.

Allegheny County Council took up a bill Tuesday to regulate the acquisition and use of surveillance technology by county officials, including the district attorney and sheriff. 

Pennsylvania’s chief fiscal watchdog on Tuesday criticized a state program under which businesses could seek permission to operate during Gov. Tom Wolf’s pandemic shutdown, saying waivers were granted inconsistently and with little transparency and comparing the process to a “Keystone Kops routine." 

Hours before the doors even opened for President Donald Trump's rally at a Pittsburgh International Airport hangar, hundreds of supporters were gathered to welcome their champion on yet another stop in western Pennsylvania.

Two hundred Pittsburgh households will soon get an extra $500 a month as part of a two-year foray into offering residents a guaranteed income. On a call with leaders from other cities Wednesday, Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto said the city will start to make the payments later this year as part of a pilot program funded by philanthropic donors.

After nearly two years of evidence-gathering and hundreds of interviews with people who have been held at the Allegheny County Jail, civil rights lawyers have sued the county and jail officials for the alleged mistreatment of inmates with psychiatric disabilities.

Black girls in Allegheny County were 10 times more likely than their white counterparts to be involved in the juvenile justice system last year, according to a study released Monday. The county’s Black boys, meanwhile, were seven times more likely than local white boys to end up in the system, the research shows.

The coronavirus crisis has forced companies across Pennsylvania to cut workers’ hours. But thanks to a little-known program called “shared work,” some of those businesses have kept their staff off the unemployment line.

Unemployed barista Sharyn Sefton learned less than two weeks ago she would not get her job back, even though the Crazy Mocha coffee shop she had led until COVID-19 hit had already reopened – and even though the Cranberry-based chain is sitting on federal money meant to encourage the rehiring of workers. 

At least eight residents of a long-beleaguered apartment complex in Penn Hills will be forced to move out by Monday – the same day a moratorium that has protected Pennsylvania renters from eviction during the coronavirus crisis is set to expire. 

Under newly proposed legislation at Allegheny County Council, the county could join cities and states across the country in banning chokeholds and strangleholds. But as with previous attempts at county council to rein in the power of police, the bill’s impact could be limited by rules that bar the county from setting municipal police policy.

Members of Black, Young, and Educated said on Monday that the recent arrest of a Black Lives Matter protester was part of an effort by Pittsburgh police to silence demonstrators. And they said the tactics officers used to make the Saturday arrest belie statements by city officials that safety is their top priority in monitoring protests.

When Pennsylvania businesses shut down en masse on March 16 due to the coronavirus, Bloomfield resident Abbey Rideout lost both her jobs within a day. She had worked as a barista at Pittsburgh’s Tazza D’Oro and Crazy Mocha cafés, but nearly five months later, she’s still out of work – and now she's lost a crucial lifeline that helped keep her head above water.

Local restaurant and bar owners plan to gather in Bethel Park Thursday to advance their own plan to manage the risk of COVID-19.

Pennsylvania is one of three states featured in a new report that details how probation and parole have swelled U.S. prison populations by “often [setting] people up to fail.”