Pope Francis arrives in Philadelphia in less than a week. And so, right now, city workers are scurrying all over town, scrubbing buildings, towing cars and tacking banners onto every foreseeable surface, just to be sure Philadelphia seems spotless and…

Jerry Iannelli Jerry Iannelli Jerry Iannelli Jerry Iannelli A throng of close to 300 Philadelphia service workers — mostly janitors and security guards, all members of the local service worker’s union, 32BJ SEIU, and wearing matching purple shirts — poured…

Wikimedia Commons The Brookings Institution today published a list of the 25 colleges and universities whose students owe the most debt — though the list was populated, in large part, by for-profit colleges, which have a long history of preying…

Jerry Iannelli The U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a press conference today it is charging six Philadelphia Prison System guards  — four current, two former — with attempting to smuggle Oxycontin pills and, in some cases, cell phones into city…

Source: Twitter A week ago today, Pope Francis said that during the church’s upcoming “Year of Forgiveness,” which will last from Dec. 2015 to Nov. 2016, Catholic priests will be allowed to forgive the “sin” of abortion. In response, Philadelphia magazine writer…

On July 1, City Paper reported that Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey announced that the department would begin releasing the names of officers who fire their weapons on the job within 72 hours of an incident, unless doing so would endanger the…

Mark Stehle A renovated school in Northeast Philly remains dark. The Pennsylvania Board of Education’s Pre-K Counts program, which launched in 2007 and helps more than 10,000 students, many of them low income, attend preschool in communities across the state,…

Jerry Iannelli Two weeks ago, City Controller Alan Butkovitz’s office sent 250 surveys to businesses that sit within the papal traffic box (the big, green box that cars cannot enter on the papal security map), hoping to gauge how well…

Wikimedia Commons The Philadelphia chapter of the National Organization for Women today condemned the “demeaning, misogynistic and racist emails” sent by former state prosecutors Frank Fina and E. Marc Costanzo when the pair worked for then-Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane.…