It’s August. So it’s Shark Week | Five for Your Weekend

Happy weekend, everyone!

Sharks aren’t a top concern in landlocked Pennsylvania, but for those visiting East Coast beaches and shores during Shark Week this year, the fear is real.

For the last 32 years, Discovery Channel has had us on the edge our seats for one solid week in August to catch stories and footage of these powerful sea creatures.

Thankfully, Shark Week is still happening this year, kicking off this Sunday, Aug. 9. 

Here’s the lineup for those of you planning to watch!

Cheers to a leisurely weekend,

Cassie Miller | Associate Editor

National and battleground state polls currently show that Joe Biden is favored to kick Donald Trump out of the White House and with potentially large enough coattails to flip the Senate too.

As a result, you might’ve expected those trends to show up in the voter registration totals both in Pennsylvania and nationwide. That has not been the case.

It appears the pandemic is deflating Democratic efforts to register new voters while the GOP makes up some ground.

Two months ago, the Democratic margin throughout the commonwealth was 803,427. Now it stands at 783,116. All told, that’s 4,101,080 Democrats, 3,317,964 Republicans and 1,223,971 others for a grand total of 8,643,015 registered voters.

Now let’s dive in.

In a statement released Tuesday, Rep. Tom Murt, R-Montgomery, claimed that Rep. Brian Sims, D-Philadelphia, told him in the call that Sims would “ruin” Murt and that Murt was “finished.”

Murt, a seven-term lawmaker, is not running for reelection.

Murt said what sparked the call was unclear, but he speculated it was over a proposal he released this week for an LGBTQ bill of rights.

Now, with less than a month until the school year traditionally starts, most of the money still hasn’t been spent – even though districts are increasingly accepting that remote instruction will be the reality for hundreds of thousands of school children this fall.

Gov. Tom Wolf has total authority to allocate the grant that Pennsylvania received from the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief (GEER) Fund, a pot of money created in the federal CARES Act, and controlled by the U.S. Department of Education.

So far, he’s distributed just one-third of Pennsylvania’s award, giving $3 million to preschool programs and $28 million to colleges and universities.

But his administration can’t say when they’ll release the remaining $73 million to K-12 schools or how they’ll decide to dole it out.

Pennsylvania is home to 121 state parks, spread across the commonwealth’s 67 counties. Think you know which ones cracked the top ten of Pennsylvania’s most visited parks?Take a look at this list, based on data from the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources’s Bureau of State Parks.

The warning comes in a three-page letter, sent to potentially thousands of Pennsylvanians, who were in close contact with someone who was positive for the coronavirus.

The letter advises recipients to stay indoors for 14 days since their last contact with the positive individual, to take their temperature twice daily, and to cooperate with the department. The warning comes in the second to last paragraph.

And that’s the week. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. We’ll see you all back here on Monday.