Story by Sandy Giordano – Beaver County radio. Published July 26, 2024 10:57 A.M.

(Industry, Pa) Beaver Police reported just before 11 a.m. Friday morning that the trio consisting of Jonathan James Bish, 18, Chantz Isaiah Cottrill, 18 and 17 year old Julie DiBacco of Monaca are in custody. They were involved in a stabbing of three individuals near Industry Park. They went to a home on Midland Beaver Road following the incident that was called in to police at 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday.

Story by Sandy Giordano – Beaver County Radio. Published July 26, 2024 6:18 A.M.

(Industry, Pa) Beaver Police Chief Dan Madgar announced Tuesday afternoon that his department has warrants for Jonathan James Bish, 18, Industry, and Chantz Isaiah Cottrill, also of Industry. A female, Julia Debacco, 17, of  Monaca. The three were involved in a stabbing incident near Industry Park early Wednesday morning and they were last seen when they reportedly went to a house in the 1200 block of Midland-Beaver Road.

Nonfarm payroll employment increased in 27 states and remained unchanged in 23 states and the District of Columbia during the past year. (Rawpixel.com/AdobeStock)
Danielle Smith – Keystone State News Connection

The Keystone State continues offering a favorable landscape for Pennsylvanians seeking employment opportunities.

Claire Kovach, senior research analyst at the Keystone Research Center, said the steady trend has been ongoing for months, with the rate hovering below the national average of 4.1% during the past year.

“Pennsylvania is on a roll,” Kovach asserted. “We added, I think, 15,600 jobs in June, and that’s 11 months straight now that Pennsylvania has added jobs. The data we got showed that Pennsylvania’s unemployment rate is still quite low through 3.4%, and it’s been at that or around that for over a year now.”

Kovach pointed out inflation is falling as nominal wages are growing steadily and the persistence of the combined effects is helping the labor market recover. She noted the number of nonfarm jobs rose to a record high of more than six million.

Kovach emphasized the largest increase in jobs in June was in education and health services.

“There’s just some of the jobs that are most in demand,” Kovach observed. “Jobs, especially like in health services, are consistently projected to be some of the most in-demand jobs over the next years and decades, especially in Pennsylvania. I believe leisure and hospitality also reached a record high in June.”

Kovach added as the economy improves and nears full employment, the jobless rate will not continue to drop forever. It is expected to gradually stabilize at a low level, with the lowest so far at 3.2%.

This composite left to right, shows North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, June 28, 2024, in Raleigh, N.C., Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., June 4, 2024, in Washington, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, July 20, 2024, in Pittsburgh, and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear in Frankfort, Ky., July 22, 2024. (AP Photo)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris is beginning to vet about a dozen possible candidates to be her running mate, according to two people familiar with the matter, as she approaches one of the most consequential decisions of her new presidential candidacy.

Harris launched her campaign Sunday after President Joe Biden bowed to pressure from his own party to step aside, leaving a historically compressed timeline for her to make a selection before next month’s Democratic National Convention. Her party could make her its nominee as soon as Aug. 1 in a virtual vote, and could formalize the nomination of her running mate soon after.

Harris’ goal, according to people with knowledge of the matter, is to keep the process drama-free, as she and Democrats try to project confidence after an extraordinarily tumultuous few weeks for the party.

While much of the political conversation has centered on four names — Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper — Harris’ team has requested information from about a dozen officials, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the confidential process.

The broader list includes Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. At least one of those being vetted is not currently in government.

Initial requests for information went out Tuesday, one of the people said.

Shapiro, who on Tuesday said he had not received any requests for vetting material, was less categorical Wednesday. He referred questions about the process to Harris’ campaign team.

Eric Holder, the former U.S. attorney general, and a team of lawyers at his firm Covington & Burling are taking the lead on vetting potential choices. Typically, those under consideration are asked to turn over financial records and records of past political stances and speeches, and they are asked to submit to interviews with lawyers to identify potential red flags.

Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung was asked by reporters during a rally on Wednesday whether the former president has said anything about Harris’ possible running mate.

“There is a short list of governors and senators. They are all interchangeable,” Cheung said. “It doesn’t matter.”

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Associated Press writers Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Meg Kinnard in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Chris Megerian in Washington contributed to this report.

FILE – FBI Director Christopher Wray speaks during a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill, March 11, 2024, in Washington. Wray is set to testify about the bureau’s investigation into the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, with lawmakers at a congressional hearing likely to press him for fresh details about the gunman’s motive and background.(AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The gunman in the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump is believed to have done a Google search one week before the shooting of “How far away was Oswald from Kennedy?” FBI Director Christopher Wray said Wednesday, revealing new details about a suspect he said had taken a keen interest in public figures but had otherwise not left behind clear clues of an ideological motive.

The July 6 online search, recovered from a laptop the FBI says is tied to 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, is a reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, the shooter who killed President John F. Kennedy from a sniper’s perch in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

“That’s a search obviously that is significant in terms of his state of mind. That is the same day that it appears that he registered” for the Trump rally scheduled for July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, Wray told the House Judiciary Committee.

The FBI is investigating the shooting, which killed one rallygoer and seriously injured two others, as an act of domestic terrorism. The investigation has thrust the bureau into a political maelstrom months before the presidential election, with lawmakers and the public pressing for details about what may have motivated Crooks in the most serious attempt to assassinate a president or presidential candidate since President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981.

The agency has built out a detailed timeline of Crooks’ movements and online activity, but the precise motive — or why Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, was singled out — remains elusive, Wray said. The FBI’s assessment continues to be that Crooks, who was killed by a Secret Service counter sniper, acted alone.

“We do not know the motive. That is obviously one of the central questions in our investigation, and it’s been very frustrating to us that a lot of the usual kind of low-hanging-fruit places that we would find that have not yielded significant clues about his motive,” Wray said.

But, he added, the bureau has seen indications that he was interested in public figures — officials said at a private briefing last week that besides Trump, Crooks also had photos on his phone of Democratic President Joe Biden and other prominent people — and in the days before the shooting had appeared particularly consumed by Trump and the Butler rally

Crooks is believed to have visited the rally site a week before the event, staying for about 20 minutes, and then returned on the morning of July 13. More than two hours before the shooting, Wray said, Crooks flew a drone about 200 yards from the rally stage for about 11 minutes, using the device to livestream and watch footage.

The use of the drone, which along with a controller were recovered from Crooks’ car, so close to the rally site just hours before Trump took the stage add to the questions about the security lapses that preceded the shooting.

On the afternoon of the rally, Crooks attracted law enforcement scrutiny because of odd behavior around the edges of the event, including shouldering a backpack and peering into the lens of a range finder toward the rooftops behind the stage where Trump would stand within the hour.

Using what Wray said was mechanical equipment on the ground and vertical piping, Crooks was able to hoist himself up onto the roof of a squat manufacturing building that was within 135 meters (157 yards) of the stage. Crooks fired eight shots from an AR-style rifle before he was killed. (The Warren Commission report that analyzed the Kennedy assassination assessed that Kennedy had been shot through the neck at a range of 174.9 feet to 190.8 feet, or about 53.3 meters to 58.1 meters.)

Trump’s campaign said the GOP nominee was doing “fine” after the shooting, which Trump said pierced the upper part of his right ear. Wray said his understanding was that either a bullet or some shrapnel “is what grazed his ear.”

He pledged that the FBI would “leave no stone unturned” in its investigation.

“I have been saying for some time now that we are living in an elevated threat environment, and tragically the Butler County assassination attempt is another example — a particularly heinous and very public one — of what I have been talking about,” Wray said.

He later added, “I think this is a moment where, in the most stark way possible, all of us as Americans can see how out of control political violence is in this country, and it’s an opportunity for everyone to come together and to try to show that this is not the kind of thing we’re going to tolerate in this country.”

The hearing had been scheduled well before the shooting as part of the committee’s routine oversight of the FBI and the Justice Department. Questions about the shooting dominated the session, but other topics included the FBI’s diversity efforts, election interference, the Jan 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol and whether Wray had personally observed any cognitive decline in meetings with Biden that preceded the president’s announcement Sunday that he would not seek reelection.

After Wray testified that his interactions had been “completely professional,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that the FBI director he appointed in 2017 “has to resign, and NOW, for LYING TO CONGRESS!”

The FBI was not involved in ensuring security for the rally and has therefore avoided the same level of scrutiny directed at the Secret Service over the lapses that preceded the event. On Tuesday, Kimberly Cheatle resigned as the agency’s director.

Even so, Wray was not entirely spared the politically charged and occasionally combative questions he typically receives from the Republican-led committee.

That’s a reflection of the lingering perception among some GOP lawmakers that the FBI and Justice Department in the Biden administration have become politicized against Trump — something Wray has consistently denied.

That sentiment was made clear early in the hearing when the committee chairman, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Wray, “I’m sure you understand that a significant portion of the country has a healthy skepticism regarding the FBI’s ability to conduct a fair, honest, open and transparent investigation.”

At the conclusion of the daylong hearing, he praised Wray for having “told us some things that weren’t even prompted by questions.”

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In this photo released by the National Park Service, park staff assess the damage to Biscuit Basin boardwalks after a hydrothermal explosion at Biscuit Basin in Yellowstone National Park, Wyo., Tuesday, July 23, 2024. (National Park Service via AP)

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — A surprise eruption of steam in a Yellowstone National Park geyser basin that sent people scrambling for safety as basketball-sized rocks flew overhead has highlighted a little-known hazard that scientists hope to be able to predict someday.

The hydrothermal explosion on Tuesday in Biscuit Basin caused no injuries as dozens of people fled down the boardwalk before the wooden walkway was destroyed. The blast sent rocks, steam, water and dirt high into the air, according to a witness and a scientist who reviewed video footage of the event.

It came in a park teeming with geysers, hot springs and other hydrothermal features that attracts millions of tourists annually. Some, like the famous Old Faithful, erupt like clockwork and are well understood by the scientists who monitor the park’s seismic activity.

But the type of explosion that happened this week is less common and understood, and potentially more hazardous given that they happen without warning.

“This drives home that even small events — and this one in the scheme of things was relatively small, if dramatic — can be really hazardous,” said Michael Poland, lead scientist at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. “We’ve gotten pretty good at being able to understand the signs that a volcano is waking up and may erupt. We don’t have that knowledge base for hydrothermal systems like the one in Yellowstone.”

Poland and other scientists are trying to change that with a fledgling monitoring system that was recently installed in another Yellowstone geyser basin. It measures seismic activity, deformations in the Earth’s surface and low-frequency acoustic energy that could signal an eruption.

The hydrothermal explosions are believed to result from clogged passageways in the extensive natural plumbing network under Yellowstone, Poland said. A clog could cause the heated, pressurized water to turn into steam instantly and explode.

Tuesday’s explosion came with little warning.

Witness Vlada March, who captured widely-circulated video of the explosion, said steam started rising in the Biscuit Basin “and within seconds, it became this huge thing. … It just exploded and became like a black cloud that covered the sun.”

March’s tour guide, Isaac Fisher, told The Associated Press that he heard a hiss coming from Cliff Pool and told his group it was unusual. It looked like a geyser erupting 60 to 70 feet (18 to 21 meters) into the air for a few seconds and then, “Ba-boom!” he said.

“You felt the shock wave hit your chest and vibrate the bones in your chest,” he said. “The explosion was so significant you felt your feet shaking. You felt the boardwalk shake and you felt everything shaking.”

He estimated the whole event lasted about 25 seconds as the debris plume climbed to about 100 meters (328 feet) into the air.

“I cannot believe nobody got hurt,” Fisher said. “There were rocks whizzing over our heads that were the size of basketballs.”

March’s mother, who was closest to the eruption, pulled her hoodie over her head and face and wasn’t injured, Fisher said.

Some of the rocks hurled into the air measured about a meter (3.3 feet) across, said Poland.

Yellowstone encompasses the caldera of a huge, slumbering volcano that shows no sign of erupting any time soon but provides the heat for the national park’s famous geysers, hot springs, mud pots and various other hydrothermal features. While far less common than geyser eruptions, hydrothermal explosions happen often enough in Yellowstone to be studied — and to be a safety concern.

Scientists don’t know if they’ll be able to devise a way to predict the blasts, Poland said.

For a geologist, seeing one in person is a payday. That’s what happened in 2009, when Montana Tech geology professor Mike Stickney and several other geologists were nearby when one happened close to the scene of Tuesday’s blast in the Biscuit Basin.

“It was very sudden and without any detectable warning, just standing on the boardwalk there. It was just was one ‘whoosh’ and it was done. No one saw it coming,” Stickney said.

Though it didn’t register on a sensitive seismometer at Old Faithful a couple miles (3.2 kilometers) away, he estimated the recent explosion was 10 times bigger.

In May, after scientists found a crater a few feet (1-2 meters) wide in the Norris Geyser Basin 18 miles (29 kilometers) north of Biscuit Basin, they consulted acoustic and seismic data from the basin’s new monitoring system and determined a hydrothermal explosion happened April 15, just a few days before roads opened for spring tourist season.

The data included no obvious precursors, however, that could potentially be used to develop a warning system.

Long-term study of where hydrothermal explosions and other ground disruptions can happen in Yellowstone is a focus of University of Wyoming geology professor Ken Sims, who has used ground-penetrating radar and other techniques to identify problem areas.

The information is critical to building roads and bridges in Yellowstone, he said.

“Whenever you build in a super active system like that, you have to pay attention to what’s going on,” Sims said.

A detection system takes time and money to develop, with monitoring stations that can cost roughly $30,000 each.

Yet even if explosions such as the recent one in Yellowstone could be predicted, there’s no feasible way to prevent them, said Poland.

“One of the things people ask me occasionally is, ‘How do you stop a volcano from erupting?’ You don’t. You get out of the way,” Poland said. “For any of this activity, you don’t want to be there when it happens.”

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Hanson reported from Helena, Montana, and Gruver from Cheyenne, Wyoming.