A Pennsylvania court has ordered counties to count about 880 mail-in ballots that lack a handwritten date on the envelope. Republican Senate candidate David McCormick is pushing to have those ballots counted in his bid to make up roughly 900 votes that separate him from Mehmet Oz in last month's primary election. However, because of pending U.S. Supreme Court action on the issue of undated mail-in ballots, Commonwealth Court Judge Renee Cohn Jubelirer ordered counties to keep those contested ballots separate from other ballots and to count them separately. State law requires a voter to write a date next to their signature on the outside of their mail-in ballot return envelopes.
Two people were shot Thursday night in Allentown. It happened in the area of North Fourth and West Turner streets around 8 o'clock. Both men were taken to the hospital and are expected to survive. There's no word yet on whether anyone has been arrested.
Closing arguments in the Holly Grim murder trial are expected this morning in the Monroe County Courthouse. Michael Horvath, who is accused of killing his coworker back in 2013, chose not to take the stand in his own defense Thursday. Horvath's defense has repeatedly pointed out that his wife, Cathy Horvath did not like Grim and warned her husband to stay away from her. Still, the defense has not specifically suggested anyone who may have killed Grim and police have ruled out Horvath's wife as a suspect.
Officials in charge of the investigation into the Pottstown home explosion that killed five people last Thursday are not yet ready to say what the cause was, but they will say what it wasn’t. It was not a methamphetamine lab, as has been speculated relentlessly on social media and elsewhere. Four children and their grandmother died in the explosion.
A new area code will soon be coming to our area. Starting this fall, new phone numbers in the Lehigh Valley, Berks County, the Poconos and southeastern Pennsylvania will start with the area code 835. That's because the supply of phone numbers with 610 or 484 is running out. There will be no changes to current numbers, only to new phone numbers. The earliest an 835 number would be assigned is Sept. 2. The 610/484 calling area serves residents and businesses in all or portions of Berks, Bucks, Carbon, Chester, Delaware, Lancaster, Lebanon, Lehigh, Monroe, Montgomery, Northampton, and Schuylkill counties.
Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman’s wife, Gisele, says doctors are “very happy with how he is healing” from his stroke. Mrs. Fetterman says “Cognitively, he’s perfect and well on his way to a full recovery and his heart is looking good. The pacemaker is working as it’s supposed to.” She added, however, the doctors want him to continue to rest and that doctors are not yet sure when it will be safe for her husband to return to the campaign trail. Fetterman suffered the stroke just before the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate primary election last month.
The Philadelphia Department of Health's Dana Perella says despite a likely case of monkeypox now found in her city, there's absolutely no need to panic. "It's an extremely rare occurrence, while we will likely see more cases it's not posting the same risk as when we saw COVID enter into this area," Perella says. She says monkeypox is generally pretty easy to contain. The official diagnosis is waiting test results.