Pennsylvania

Submitted by Boyd Roddy of the Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation

Globus Medical’s Inside Job

Last February spinal orthopedic device maker Globus Medical purchased Branch Medical Group, a key supplier and contract manufacturing operation based just three miles away from its Audubon, Pa. headquarters.

The BMG deal was announced on the same day Globus released fourth quarter and 2014 earnings and little attention was paid to what looked like another instance of a high-profile, larger company merging with a small, privately-held one.

Two Roman Catholic bishops who led a Pennsylvania diocese, helped cover up the sexual abuse of hundreds of children over a span of four decades. A grand jury report says that children had been molested by more than 50 priests over the forty year period. Press TV reports According to a grand jury’s 147-page document released on Tuesday, the case is particularly focused on Bishops James Hogan and Joseph Adamec, who were in charge of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Altoona–Johnstown in Pennsylvania from the mid-1960s until 2011.

In the past several years, many trees have been felled and pixels electrocuted in the service of discussion about the impact of Hispanics on the American electorate. No one knows for sure which way they’ll vote in the future but everyone is interested in discussing it. Curiously, though, an even larger political shift is taking place yet receiving almost no attention whatsoever from political reporters—the emergence of post-Christian America.

We’ve written quite a bit this year about the fiscal crises unfolding among America’s state and local governments. Illinois became something of a poster child for the problem when, in May, the state Supreme Court struck down a pension reform bid, triggering a Moody’s downgrade for Chicago.

After that, the situation in Springfield worsened materially and before you knew it, the state was paying out lottery winnings in IOUs and missing hundreds of millions in pension payments.