When I interviewed Falk on the Burbank Studios lot in 1986 it was easy to see where the lovable Columbo got his eccentricities — and his raincoat. One of my favorite interviews in LA in the ‘80s was with the beloved actor Peter Falk, who died in 2011. 1986 “Columbo” the TV show may have…

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Here’s a look back at how the Diocese of Pittsburgh’s inner-city Catholic schools used lots of love and discipline to give young black kids the education they needed and their parents wanted. In 1994 when I realized the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had not written two words about the Diocese of Pittsburgh’s three inner-city “Extra Mile Schools,”…

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On the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, as the country was in shock from the horrible events in New York, Washington and Shanksville, Pa., my job at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review was to go out into the abandoned and strangely silent city of Pittsburgh and report what I saw.  Here’s what I wrote: Empty Downtown offers…

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Here’s a radical concept that will save us a lot of virtue signalling by politicians like Nancy Pelosi in the future: Privatize all statues. Remove all statues from government property and never again use government money or land to put up another one. Statues to leaders and heroes, as we’ve seen, are inherently political. Leaders…

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In April of 1988, when the Soviet Union’s evil empire was teetering and the Berlin Wall was about to fall, I caught up with my brother Dan’s touring rock band Kingdom Come in Germany. One of the articles I wrote for the L.A. Times was my search for a popular cafeteria in shabby East Berlin.…

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