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  • A Philly charter and its former CEO will pay $4 million to resolve claims they discriminated against Black students

    A Philly charter and its former CEO will pay $4 million to resolve claims they discriminated against Black students

    A Philadelphia charter and its former CEO have agreed to pay nearly $4 million to resolve claims they discriminated against Black students in the school’s admissions lottery.

    Franklin Towne Charter High School, in the Northeast, deliberately fixed its 2023 lottery to exclude students from certain majority-Black ZIP codes, Franklin Towne administrator Patrick Field told The Inquirer that year. The order to shut out those students came from Joseph Venditti, a longtime Franklin Towne CEO, who has since left the school, Field said.

    Field sued the school and Venditti in federal court later in 2023, alleging Franklin Towne retaliated against him after he came forward about the lottery manipulation.

    The U.S. Department of Justice brought the case against Franklin Towne and Venditti after Field’s allegations surfaced.

    U.S. Attorney David Metcalf announced the settlement Friday.

    “Racial discrimination has no place in school admissions,” Metcalf said in a statement. “Selecting or excluding students because of their race is illegal and violates the agreements schools sign when they accept federal grant money.”

    Despite signing off on the settlement, neither Franklin Towne nor Venditti admitted wrongdoing.

    “Defendants deny the United States’ allegations,” court documents read.

    A Philly charter school manipulated its lottery to keep kids out, a top administrator says

    Public schools are prohibited by federal law from discriminating against students based on race or national origin; Franklin Towne violated the federal False Claims Act by its actions, Metcalf’s office said Friday.

    Franklin Towne — a public charter school funded by taxpayer dollars — must pay $3.6 million, and Venditti $275,000 from his private funds, as part of the settlement.

    Part of the money will go to the U.S. government, and part to Field, whose suit raised the issue of the improprieties.

    Field and Venditti could not immediately be reached for comment.

    Franklin Towne’s CEO, Brianna O’Donnell, said in a statement that the school had settled allegations about past enrollment practices that “do not reflect how the school is being led or operated today.”

    “We have taken the necessary steps to address this matter while maintaining our full commitment to serving our students, families, faculty and staff,” O’Donnell said, noting that the school’s operations were “continuing as normal.”

    Federal officials said the school “has made significant governance changes, including replacing the Chief Executive Officer and hiring an independent third party to conduct all future admissions lotteries at the school.”

    Franklin Towne remains a top academic performer, but the Philadelphia school board moved to revoke its charter over the lottery manipulation allegations.

    The revocation hearing’s goal, the board said at the time of the vote, was not necessarily to close Franklin Towne, but to effect change. Board officials said the only tool they possess under Pennsylvania law to trigger a public accounting of serious allegations of impropriety is a revocation hearing, which includes witnesses and evidence before an independent hearing officer.

    Franklin Towne filed suit against the board, objecting to its choice of hearing officer for the revocation proceedings, which have not yet begun.

    Reginald Streater, the school board president, said in a statement that the charter school’s office’s “serious concerns” about Franklin Towne admissions data over several years led to the revocation notice of the school. It’s still pending, Streater noted.

    “The board is committed to striving for fair and equitable access to public education for all Philadelphia students,” Streater said in a statement. “We will continue to uphold the standards and requirements that apply to all public schools and to take action when there are concerns about compliance with those requirements.”

    Staff writer Abraham Gutman contributed to this article.

  • Known Ohio State fan LeBron James lends his voice for his Buckeyes’ football hype video

    Known Ohio State fan LeBron James lends his voice for his Buckeyes’ football hype video

    NBA superstar LeBron James may not have played in college himself, but the Akron, Ohio, native is locked in for the start of Ohio State’s football season.

    James, who signed with the 76ers for two years and $8 million earlier this summer, voiced the Buckeyes’ preseason hype video ahead of Saturday’s opener vs. Ball State, themed around “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Metallica. A Sixers reference? Who knows.

    “In old Ohio, there’s a team, known throughout the land, whose name is met with reverence and understanding of one thing: the bell tolls,” James said in the trailer. “Every new beginning is born from another’s reckoning. A judgment of toughness, of fight. Nothing is given; everything is earned. Once these gates close, there’s no more options. Stand before us. Woe to the vanquished.”

    James has been an Ohio State fan since childhood, having grown up in northeast Ohio. He attended Ohio State’s College Football Playoff national title game vs. Notre Dame in January 2025 — as did fellow Buckeyes fan Bryce Harper.

  • Maria Bartiromo’s attorney denies reports she was fired from Fox News

    Maria Bartiromo’s attorney denies reports she was fired from Fox News

    The attorney for Maria Bartiromo, the longtime Fox News anchor, Friday denied media reports that she was fired from the network.

    Fox News on Thursday announced the departure of the host, who was one of its biggest backers of President Donald Trump. The network did not provide a reason for the abrupt exit after more than 12 years, but it later described the move as a “business decision.”

    Status, a publication focused on the media industry, and Puck News reported that Bartiromo was fired after sending White House officials sensitive internal Fox communications. The Washington Post has not corroborated their reporting.

    However, a person familiar with the details, who spoke to the Post on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters, said that “Bartiromo’s departure was Fox’s decision.”

    Bryan Freedman, Bartiromo’s attorney, said Friday that his client was “still employed by Fox.”

    “The irresponsible reports that have been published stating that Maria Bartiromo was fired or is no longer an employee of Fox are absolutely and unequivocally false,” Freedman said in a statement.

    “Make no mistake, we have the receipts and witnesses and they will come out whether through the courthouse or otherwise. Those reporting her firing or the incredulous facts supporting that fiction have exhibited a complete and utter reckless disregard for the truth.”

    Freedman has previously represented high-profile journalists ousted by their networks, including CNN’s Don Lemon and Fox’s Tucker Carlson.

    Bartiromo was the host of Mornings With Maria and Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street on Fox Business. On Sundays, she also anchored Sunday Morning Futures on Fox News.

    She promoted Trump’s false claims about fraud in the 2020 election and came under scrutiny in a defamation suit against the network over claims made about Dominion Voting Systems’s software, which resulted in Fox settling Dominion’s claim for $787 million.

    Status reported that Bartiromo was alleged to have told White House officials about Fox guidance to employees to avoid giving credence to false claims Trump made in a July speech about 2020 election fraud. Freedman’s statement did not address the specific allegations.

    Fox News declined to comment on Freedman’s statement.

  • Behind on 2030 climate goals, states are cutting or even scrapping them

    Behind on 2030 climate goals, states are cutting or even scrapping them

    After President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement during his first term, many Democratic-led states passed their own laws to curtail carbon emissions.

    But most states that set goals for 2030 are not on track to meet them. Now, with voters worried about inflation, and with the war in Iran raising energy prices, some states have begun to cut back or abandon those goals instead.

    New York’s plan, like those in other states, was to meet the target by passing a series of individual climate regulations affecting transportation, home heating, industry, and utilities. The law allowed citizens to sue if regulations to meet emissions targets were not enforced.

    With the state behind on its goal, it had a choice: drastically push forward on its emissions target, or abandon it.

    In May, New York scrapped the state’s 2030 emissions target. Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said sticking to the plan would have imposed “additional crushing costs” on New Yorkers.

    New York is not alone in falling behind its goals. Almost every state that passed an economywide emissions target for 2030 is behind pace.

    Most states need to decrease emissions 4% to 6% per year to hit their 2030 goals. But in the late 2010s and early 2020s — around the time when states were setting their targets — emissions in many such states were falling by only 1% to 2%, or in some cases rising. (The latest data we have for most states goes through 2023.)

    With energy prices increasing and emissions targets seemingly out of reach, other states have begun loosening their goals as well as the policies designed to hit those targets.

    This year, California’s main climate regulator effectively reduced the cost of emissions that power plants must pay as part of its “cap-and-invest” program; the regulatory board said it was responding to affordability concerns. Connecticut, Arizona, and North Carolina have relaxed or removed goals for renewable energy and emissions generated while producing electricity.

    The Trump administration has made it harder for states to reach these goals. It has removed consumer tax credits for electric vehicle purchases and heat pump installations, canceled federal grants for solar projects, sued states over plans to make polluters pay, halted offshore wind projects, and scaled back funding for EV chargers.

    But there is another reason these states with ambitious goals are struggling to reach their targets: Most of them had already made a lot of progress. On the whole, they had lower per capita emissions than the U.S. average when they enacted the goals.

    One major issue: States with goals already have relatively clean electricity generation. Because cleaning the power sector is one of the simplest ways for states to reduce emissions — they have authority over utilities — this puts them at a disadvantage for future reductions. (These states almost always trade electricity with other states, as well as with Canada and Mexico, but most calculations and targets take into account only the electricity generated in-state.)

    “The low-hanging fruit is mostly gone in many places,” said Danny Cullenward, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania. “We need to instead be thinking about the deeper and more difficult cuts.”

    There is still low-hanging fruit in a state like Kentucky, which has no climate goal. It has decreased carbon emissions more than almost any other state in the past decade, in large part because it retired coal-burning power plants while opening new natural gas plants, which are much cheaper to run and emit less carbon dioxide.

    New York, on the other hand, had phased out almost all coal by the early 2010s. It already generates a significant amount of its electricity through renewables and nuclear — which means it has fewer levers to pull. Regulators have blocked the construction of new natural gas plants as part of the state’s efforts to hit its 2030 goals, but even if New York replaced all of its natural gas and oil power plants with clean energy, it would not reach its original 2030 target without additional emissions reductions in other areas such as transportation or home heating.

    That’s true for almost every state that has set a carbon goal. In these states, emissions from buildings and transportation typically make up the majority of emissions, dwarfing other economic sectors.

    That’s a pretty different picture from most states that don’t have goals.

    And building and transportation improvements are harder to make, Cullenward said, because states have no central regulators in those sectors the way they do for the electric power sector. These are also the areas where the end of the federal tax incentives — including rebates for solar panels, heat pumps, and electric vehicles — will slow state goals.

    Many states passed climate goals when energy use was relatively flat, electricity was getting cleaner and emissions were dropping.

    Rising demand for electricity and higher energy prices have revived debates over the cost of transitioning to green energy — including in New York.

    State Sen. George Borrello, a Republican, said New York’s emissions goals had been an “unmitigated disaster” that helped make electricity significantly more expensive than the national average.

    “We’ve set goals with no actual real plan to achieve any of those goals,” he said.

    As part of New York’s climate goal, regulators were preparing to establish a cap-and-invest program that would have taken fees from polluting power plants and distributors of heating fuels, gasoline, and diesel. Those costs would have been passed on to consumers as higher gas and electricity prices; the revenues would have gone back to consumers as rebates, and would have helped fund new clean plants.

    Hochul directed the state to delay that plan last year, citing already-high energy prices.

    In many states, the political debate revolves around how much money consumers will pay under the new programs. Hochul cited a state agency report estimating that some upstate households could pay an additional $2,500 a year under a cap-and-invest program. Many lawmakers and environmental groups dispute that estimate.

    State Sen. Pete Harckham, a Democrat who is a sponsor of the 2030 targets, said that even with the setbacks, the original goals had helped accelerate solar power in the state. This year’s state budget included $1 billion for solar projects, and solar is the cheapest per-kilowatt electricity source in New York, he said.

    “What was driving high utility costs over the winter was not the state’s climate law or clean energy,” he said. “It was a price of natural gas on the spot market.”

    States aren’t likely to reach emissions reductions at the scale of the Paris agreement without help from the federal government, said Joshua A. Basseches, an assistant professor of public policy and environmental studies at Case Western Reserve. But targets are still useful, he said, for guiding the state and steering utilities.

    “If you come up with these incremental policies, they may not be sufficient, but they’re so much better than nothing,” Basseches said. “Global communities of scientists might set targets, but the reality is the status quo is the worst.”

    This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

  • Trump administration scrubs data on gender-based bullying from school civil rights survey

    Trump administration scrubs data on gender-based bullying from school civil rights survey

    The Trump administration this week quietly released an update to a major survey on civil rights in schools that was scrubbed of all data related to nonbinary students or bullying based on gender identity.

    The numbers come from the Education Department’s Civil Rights Data Collection, a federal survey of nearly every public school in the nation. The release this week covers the 2023-2024 school year, when the survey included “nonbinary” as a gender category alongside male and female.

    However, an Associated Press analysis shows that in every column for information related to gender identity, the numbers were replaced with a code indicating “Suppressed in Compliance with Executive Order.” That refers to an executive order that President Donald Trump signed on his inauguration day calling for the federal government to define sex as only male or female.

    The government also suppressed the number of allegations of harassment or bullying on the basis of gender identity in schools, information about whether the districts had written policies prohibiting such harassment, and any links to those policies.

    Those questions in the data collection are designed to capture the experiences of transgender and nonbinary students — whether they experience harassment, participate in sports, or face overly harsh discipline, said Seth Galanter, a senior fellow at the Edley Center on Law and Democracy and a former attorney with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights under the Biden and Obama administrations.

    Only school districts that already collected data on trans and nonbinary students were required to report it to the federal government, Galanter said, and roughly 1,800 out of the more than 13,000 U.S. school districts reported data in the last collection.

    “We’re losing the granular experience of those kids,” Galanter said. “They exist in the world, their schools acknowledge their existence, but we now no longer have any way to have any kind of local, state, or national picture about these kids and what their school experience is like.”

    In a written statement, the Education Department said the Office for Civil Rights would be releasing more data in coming weeks. It also said the Trump administration is “realigning the functions of OCR to align with its statutory mandate.”

    White House has targeted efforts to accommodate trans students

    The data suppression reflects the Trump administration’s wider efforts to target protections for transgender and nonbinary students in schools. The White House has repeatedly clashed with schools and colleges over accommodations for transgender students, with the Justice Department this week announcing a federal lawsuit against the school system in Kansas City, Kan., over its policies on transgender students.

    It’s also one of many instances in which the administration has removed data related to gender from government resources.

    The Williams Institute, an LGBTQ+ law and policy research center based at the UCLA School of Law, has identified around 360 cases where the Trump administration removed information related to sexual orientation or gender identity from federal data collections, ranging from Medicare surveys that asked about discrimination in doctors’ offices to data on homeless youth.

    The author of the Williams Institute’s report, Lauren Bouton, said the Office for Civil Rights could have used the data to identify schools that have a problem with bullying of nonbinary students and then require them to follow an action plan to improve. “No one’s being held accountable to these kids,” Bouton said.

    The Civil Rights Data Collection is one of the country’s most important and comprehensive sources of data related to educational opportunity in public schools. As required by federal law, the Office for Civil Rights collects information from every school in the country on topics like discipline, corporal punishment, bullying and harassment, and access to advanced coursework.

    The lack of transparency around the most recent update could erode public trust the government has worked to build for its civil rights data, said Ivy Morgan, director of research and data at EdTrust, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that advocates for educational equity.

    “The way this data was released is part of a long-standing pattern that we have observed for the last two years,” Morgan said. “This administration just does not care about data, doesn’t care about research, doesn’t care about evidence. And it particularly doesn’t care about that information when it is helping us understand the experiences of students and people who are marginalized in our society.”

    The survey went to schools shortly before Trump took office

    Preparations for the latest data collection began under President Joe Biden’s administration, and Morgan said the attempt to gather data on nonbinary and trans students was one of the most comprehensive efforts to date from the federal government. The survey went out to schools a month before Trump was inaugurated.

    While Trump had previously announced his administration would remove questions related to gender identity, it was unclear whether that would affect the 2024 data or only future surveys.

    The last time that the data collection was updated, under the Biden administration, it came with a detailed report on trends in educational equity and opportunity, including findings that Black and Latino students were far more likely than white students to attend schools where the majority of teachers were not certified and were far less likely to have access to advanced math courses in high school.

    This year, the new data came out with no accompanying report. There was no official announcement from the Education Department that new data had arrived. The only indication of the change was a single row added to the department’s list of data tables. As of Friday, the homepage of the data collection website listed 2021-2022 data under the heading “What’s New?”

  • Cathy Engelbert did next to nothing to help the WNBA. Its next commissioner has to be a real leader.

    Cathy Engelbert did next to nothing to help the WNBA. Its next commissioner has to be a real leader.

    Cathy Engelbert was the Jalen Hurts of the WNBA, the subject of the same kind of questions about whether a prominent figure on a speeding ship was the captain or a passenger — except with her, the answers were more definitive and damning.

    For these last few years, for the period in which the league has made its greatest gains in popularity, relevance, and quality of play, she was at best a nonfactor and at worst an impediment. The people behind those gains were the players, one in particular, and with the announcement Friday that Engelbert, a Collingswood native, was “retiring,” the WNBA has a better chance of accelerating its growth and calming the churning waters around it.

    No one looks or will look at Engelbert’s tenure atop the WNBA and credit her for the league’s progress, and no one should. The rise of women’s sports in America, particularly of women’s basketball, already was a wind at her back when she became commissioner in 2019.

    Title IX had been doing its good work on behalf of girls and young women for nearly two generations by then. Because the WNBA, founded in 1996, rarely has players to enter the league after leaving college early, women’s college basketball has been a fertile garden of talent and star power, feeding the league long before Engelbert oversaw it. UConn, Tennessee, Notre Dame, Baylor: These programs and others like them pumped out stars who had spent four years in school setting records and competing in Final Fours, whose names and games had become familiar before they’d ever signed their first professional contracts.

    The WNBA’s biggest stars include Caitlin Clark (left), Aliyah Boston, A’Ja Wilson, Olivia Miles, and Jessica Shepard.Nam Y. Huh

    That tide turned into a wave that has crested with Caitlin Clark, with the woman who can lay claim to the title of the most popular and important female athlete in the United States. The NBA lifted off in the early 1980s — once talent poured in after the league merged with the ABA, once Magic Johnson and Larry Bird brought their rivalry to the Lakers and the Celtics — and the WNBA should be on its way to telling a similar story. It has Clark. It has A’ja Wilson and Paige Bueckers and Olivia Miles and Breanna Stewart. It has a depth and breadth of talent unmatched in its history. The games should matter more than they ever have. The games should matter most.

    Before she helped negotiate the WNBA’s ‘life-changing’ CBA, this Philly lawyer hooped at Lower Merion and Penn

    Except … they don’t. Who wants to hear that story now? Out of Engelbert’s lack of leadership, out of her inability and unwillingness to speak simple truths in plain language or take strong stands to benefit it, the WNBA has morphed into a cudgel in the culture war.

    On one side are the sexists and misogynists who don’t watch women’s basketball — and wouldn’t dare confess to tuning in even if they did — but whittle away their days complaining about the sport and attacking its athletes on Twitter/X. On the other are the activist players, coaches, fans and compliant media members so defensive and discomfited over the slightest criticism or question — about the inevitable byproducts of a major pro sport going mainstream and gaining a new audience — that they seem to wish that only people like them were permitted to play and watch and cover it.

    Engelbert let those sides squish her like a grape. It was bad enough for the league’s image, for its attempts to shake the perception that it was small-time in its operations and approach, that she botched the pronunciation of Golden State Valkyries coach Natalie Nakase’s last name when she presented Nakase (nuh-KAH-say) the WNBA Coach of the Year Award. That it took Clark’s presence and some timely social media posts before Engelbert stopped insisting teams fly commercial and instituted a charter flight program for the league. That her communication skills with the players were so poor that one, Napheesa Collier, felt emboldened enough to say that the league “had the worst leadership in the world.”

    No, what has been worse is Engelbert’s cowing in the face of obvious problems with obvious solutions. The league should have started hunting for better, more qualified officials years ago, rather than waiting until May to … form a task force about the topic. Engelbert must have been living in a dream world when, according to Collier, she said that Clark and the WNBA’s other stars “should be on their knees” thanking the league for the prominence it has given them … when it’s actually the other way around.

    But it’s the latest and silliest controversy — over the league’s policy, or lack thereof, on transgender athletes — that brought Engelbert’s weakness most clearly to bear.

    A.J. Brown and the Patriots vs. Jalen Hurts and the Eagles is the perfect rivalry for our hot-take age | Mike Sielski

    Royce White and Enes Kanter Freedom are clowns for their publicity campaign to declare themselves to be women so they can join the league. A commissioner with any spine would have swatted them away like gnats simply by pointing out what everyone can already see: Royce, you’re 6-foot-8. Enes, you’re 6-10. You guys played in the NBA! Do you have any idea how pathetic you are for begging to be in our league?

    A commissioner with any spine would have pointed out that FIBA, the IOC, and the USOPC already have policies that only biological females can compete in women’s sports, that the WNBA’s players follow those guidelines when they compete internationally — as they are right now, in the FIBA World Cup — and that the league’s policy reflects those policies. Instead, Engelbert has stayed silent, allowing the issue to fester, allowing this sideshow to dominate conversation about the sport.

    This is a critical moment for women’s athletics and for the WNBA. The league is expanding, adding three more franchises in the next four years, including one here in Philadelphia. It has an opportunity both to solidify its existing fan base and build upon it. It has an opportunity to climb to a level that, just a decade ago, few would have thought reachable. It will need a new commissioner who can be more than the one Cathy Engelbert was, more than someone sitting on the deck, doing nothing to avoid the swells and crashes, more than someone just along for the ride.

  • A 6-week-old Amish baby died from measles in Pennsylvania, local coroner confirms, as feud between Shapiro and RFK Jr. continues over the deaths

    A 6-week-old Amish baby died from measles in Pennsylvania, local coroner confirms, as feud between Shapiro and RFK Jr. continues over the deaths

    A six-week-old Amish infant from Lancaster County died from measles last month after receiving the care of a community clinic for a deadly genetic disorder, Lancaster County Coroner Stephen Diamantoni said Friday.

    The disclosure comes amid an escalating clash between Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and President Donald Trump’s administration over whether two deaths reported by the state last week should be attributed to the ongoing measles outbreak in Pennsylvania.

    The six-week-old infant died from measles at home and had been in the care of the Clinic for Special Children, a Lancaster County-based treatment and research center focused on diseases found in Old Order Amish and Mennonite communities, LancasterOnline first reported.

    The baby had been getting treated for a deadly genetic disorder, Amish lethal microcephaly, prior to the child’s death from measles, Diamantoni confirmed.

    The baby had been receiving palliative care and was not expected to live much longer than six months due to the genetic condition that occurs in one in every 500 newborns within Pennsylvania’s Amish community, Diamantoni said.

    The announcement follows a nearly two-week-long public feud between Shapiro and U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over whether to classify the Pennsylvania deaths as measles-related. Their standoff has led to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention taking the unusual step of withholding the deaths from its measles tracker, reportedly under pressure from Kennedy.

    Shapiro, a first-term Democrat seeking reelection in November, initially provided little detail about two measles-related deaths when he announced them last Tuesday in a news conference, saying only the state’s first deaths from the highly contagious disease since 1991 involved residents of the county who were unvaccinated.

    What do we know about the deaths reported in Pennsylvania’s measles outbreak?

    Diamantoni, an elected Republican who is also a physician, subsequently said his office was investigating the death of a newborn who had measles, but did not believe measles contributed to the child’s death. He said the newborn died of a lacerated spleen, and postmortem testing showed a measles infection acquired before birth. He later said “measles” was included on the newborn’s death certificate under a section that lists “significant conditions contributing to death but not resulting in the underlying cause.”

    The deceased baby’s family, who are also Amish, told The Atlantic they believed a severe case of measles during pregnancy contributed to their newborn’s death.

    The discrepancies between Diamantoni’s statements and the state’s created an opening for anti-vaccine activists, including Kennedy, to publicly question whether the deaths could be attributed to the measles. Kennedy accused Shapiro of fearmongering about the disease — suggesting his office may have even fabricating the deaths.

    But the six-week-old infant reported Friday was confirmed to have died from the measles, Diamantoni said, after his office investigated the child’s death that previously was not reported to his office.

    The Clinic for Special Children did not know it was necessary to report the death to the Lancaster County coroner’s office, Diamantoni said.

    Diamantoni said he reported the six-week-old baby’s death to the CDC on Friday, but had not reported it to the state Department of Health.

    He said he did not know whether the six-week-old was the second measles-associated death reported by Pennsylvania last week.

    The Pennsylvania Department of Health said it was aware of the information shared by Diamantoni, noting the state had no new measles-related deaths to report Friday.

    The state has said the Pennsylvania health department’s epidemiology team’s thoroughly investigated and determined the two announced deaths were measles-related.

    The state defines a measles-associated death as deaths of people where evidence of measles is present, even when the disease may not be assessed by the coroner as the immediate cause of death.

    The Shapiro administration has said state privacy laws have limited their ability to release more personal information about the two measles-related.

    Shapiro reshared Friday a local news article about the six-week-old baby’s death and criticized Kennedy in an X post for choosing “to sow doubt, play politics, direct the CDC not to acknowledge these deaths, and even accuse me of fabricating these tragedies.”

    “That led to a firestorm of conspiracy theories that denied these families’ pain, invaded their privacy, and undermined public health,” Shapiro added.

    Kennedy highlighted the Lancaster coroner’s new disclosure in another X post later on Friday, noting “the facts emerging now demonstrate why CDC waited for the evidence rather than allowing political grandstanding to dictate its reporting.”

    A rare death

    As of Friday, there have been 577 measles cases in Pennsylvania, including 115 reported within the last week, according to the health department’s online measles dashboard.

    Measles deaths are rare. About three in 1,000 children who contract measles will die. While many infections are mild, measles can also cause severe complications, especially in young children, including pneumonia and brain swelling.

    Babies with Amish lethal microcephaly frequently die from respiratory infections due to the genetic condition leading the baby to develop with a severely small head and underdeveloped brain, Diamantoni said.

    But infants with the genetic condition usually do not die from the measles because the disease had been largely eradicated in the United States until recent years due to widespread vaccination, he said.

    “Usually there are not a lot of cases of measles, until recently,” Diamantoni added.

    Staff writer Sarah Gantz contributed reporting.

  • Russian drone strikes Ukraine security service headquarters as U.S. talks on the war are expected

    Russian drone strikes Ukraine security service headquarters as U.S. talks on the war are expected

    KYIV, Ukraine — A Russian drone struck the headquarters of Ukraine’s security service in central Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday, ahead of diplomatic talks with U.S. officials on ending the war.

    The air war between Russia and Ukraine has intensified as the conflict stretches toward five years since Moscow’s invasion of its neighbor. Russia recently has been using fast-flying, jet-powered drones, and the recurring wail of air-raid sirens has become part of daily life in Kyiv.

    Ukraine’s security service headquarters, near the historic St. Sophia Cathedral and international hotels, is among the agencies carrying out deep strike operations inside Russian territory. Twelve people were wounded in Friday’s attack, local authorities said.

    “The drone was deliberately targeted at the head of the SBU’s office in that building,” Zelensky said Friday.

    Zelensky wrote on Telegram that acting security chief Oleksandr Poklad had briefed him on a response, including possible targets.

    Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha called Friday’s drone strike a “major escalation” that came as potential peace talks were building momentum.

    “Moscow launched this strike during a renewed push for peace — laying bare its true rejection of diplomacy,” he said in a post on X.

    U.S. envoys expected in Moscow and Kyiv

    U.S. President Donald Trump confirmed Friday that envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner will travel to Moscow and then Kyiv over the weekend and into early next week. The U.S. has not provided more specific timing for the stops.

    “They are bringing with them a proposal to end the war,” Trump said.

    This would be their first visit to Kyiv. U.S. efforts to negotiate a settlement have yet to produce a path to peace.

    Zelensky said Friday that he was expecting Witkoff and Kushner to visit Kyiv on Sunday, after visiting Moscow. He said in a Telegram post that Ukraine will refrain from airstrikes during the negotiations and called on Russia to reciprocate to allow the talks to proceed safely.

    “As with previous diplomatic visits by the American side, we will ensure the normal functioning of Russian airspace so that the negotiators can arrive safely. We are concerned about their safety, not about Russia,” Zelensky said.

    Speaking with journalists Friday, presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov refused to confirm reports that Kushner and Witkoff would visit Moscow, saying only that the media would be informed if such a meeting took place.

    Kushner and Witkoff last visited Moscow in January, where they met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. After that meeting, Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov described talks as constructive but said that “reaching a long-term settlement can’t be expected without solving the territorial issue.”

    Further talks have lost momentum, with the White House’s attention focused on its conflict with Iran.

    Deadly strikes in Ukraine

    The latest diplomatic developments coincided with a “massive” overnight Russian attack on the Odesa region that killed one person and injured at least five others, including a child, regional head Oleh Kiper said in a post on Telegram. The attacks damaged multiple residential buildings, including two multistory blocks.

    Overnight strikes elsewhere in Ukraine killed two police officers in Dnipro, officials said, while a drone attack in Kyiv wounded three people after hitting a residential building.

    Russian forces have relentlessly struck civilian areas. Previously, these attacks occurred mostly at night, but now they are happening during the day as well. The front line in eastern and southern Ukraine remains largely deadlocked.

    Russian oil depots set ablaze

    In Russia, a large-scale Ukrainian drone strike hit the Black Sea resort city of Sochi and the nearby district of Sirius, regional officials said Friday. They said the attack sparked a blaze at an oil depot but gave no further details. Russian media outlets reported two depots were hit, with one fire in Sochi and another in Sirius.

    Ukraine has repeatedly targeted oil facilities that form the backbone of Russia’s economy, one of the world’s largest energy producers. Growing economic pressure and public frustration have mounted in Russia after months of escalating Ukrainian strikes on refineries and e-commerce hubs that have caused nationwide disruptions.

    The barrages prompted Putin last month to decree that the state can temporarily seize control of critical infrastructure facilities if private owners fail to protect them from Ukrainian drone attacks or don’t rebuild them after strikes. Analysts said the move was aimed at forcing companies to pay for their own security and bring damaged assets back into service, despite the cost.

    Drone washes up in Finland

    Finnish authorities said they were investigating how a Russian-made drone ended up on a rocky shoreline in the Pellinge archipelago east of Helsinki.

    Finland’s Border Guard said what appears to be a Geoscan 701 drone, manufactured by a Russian company, was found on the shore. “The device model in question is used by both state and civilian operators, and it is not possible at this stage to determine its intended use or identify the country or entity operating it,” the Border Guard said in a statement.

    State broadcaster Yle reported the drone was discovered Tuesday by an angler.

    Geoscan describes itself as one of Russia’s leading drone manufacturers, and says the 701 model is designed for large-scale aerial surveying.

  • Ariana Andonian leaving the Blue Coats to become Los Angeles Sparks general manager

    Ariana Andonian leaving the Blue Coats to become Los Angeles Sparks general manager

    The WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks have plucked their new general manager from the 76ers front office.

    The Sparks are hiring Blue Coats general manager Ariana Andonian for the role, a source confirmed.

    Andonian came to the Sixers under former president of basketball operations Daryl Morey. Though she’s only 31 years old, she has had an extensive career working in college and the NBA, including stints under Morey with the Sixers and under Memphis Grizzlies general manager Zach Kleiman. She also consulted for Duke’s program while earning a graduate degree from the school, according to an Inquirer profile of Andonian from 2025.

    Five key stats to remember as the Sixers enter a season with title hopes

    The job will bring Andonian, a Los Angeles native who grew up a Lakers and Kobe Bryant fan, closer to home. Andonian first met Morey while in college at Southern Cal when she gave his daughter a tour of the USC campus and later joined the family for lunch.

    After that meeting, Andonian earned an internship with the Houston Rockets when Morey was the general manager there. She began as a scout and was coordinating the team’s college scouting group by age 23. A 2017 story from Bleacher Report cited her as the league’s only female scout at the time.

    Andonian’s career went from there to Duke, where she led the team’s high school scouting group while completing her MBA. She cites former coach Mike Krzyzewski and current coach Jon Scheyer as mentors.

    “It was almost like I had to tell her when she had to stop watching video,” Morey told The Inquirer of Andonian in 2025. “ … She picked up things quick and fit into a group.”

  • An all-cat band is performing this weekend in Philly. Good luck getting a ticket.

    An all-cat band is performing this weekend in Philly. Good luck getting a ticket.

    Even by rock and roll standards, the egos and drama within Tuna and the Rock Cats are something to behold.

    Sometimes, in the middle of a show, the band’s lead guitarist — St. Claude — will decide that he’d prefer to play Christmas music, and begin performing “Jingle Bells.”

    Roux, on clarinet, is a prodigy. But Annie, who plays the chimes, can be volatile; sometimes, if it gets too hot during a show, she’ll simply lie down onstage, refusing to continue.

    “Annie also plays guitar,” says Samantha Martin, the band’s founder. “But she wants to beat up the keyboard player, and we can’t have brawls onstage.”

    Behind the meowsic

    Despite this artistic anarchy — or perhaps because of it — Tuna and the Rock Cats have become an extremely hot ticket. Billed as the world’s only all-cat band, the Georgia-based group has been selling out venues across the country for years — strumming guitars, pawing piano keys, and batting at chimes from Seattle to St. Louis.

    Just how big are The Rock Cats?

    In Philadelphia, their current stop on a two-month U.S. tour, they were originally slated to play four shows at the 350-seat Suzanne Roberts Theatre on Broad Street.

    When those quickly sold out, a fifth show was added.

    Eli Milton Gizmo (Name Pending) handles drums for the band. Samantha Martin describes the cat as “not the brightest, but he’s very pretty.”Photo courtesy of Weekly Whiskers

    On Instagram, the group has nearly 100,000 followers. They’ve been featured on the Netflix series Cat People. A couple years ago, they left Theo Von mesmerized during an appearance on his wildly-popular podcast, This Past Weekend.

    “It really is just fascinating to think about them cats and everything they’re doin’,” Von gushed.

    Martin, a former wildlife educator, has been directing this Meowtly Crüe for about two decades, in addition to training animals for TV and film.

    Early in her career, she gravitated toward “misfit” animals: snakes, spiders, rats. (“Rats will never let you down,” she explains.) But then she eventually met Tuna, a cat “so brilliant I said, ‘Let’s give this cat thing a try.’”

    The band’s first show was in 2006, at an art gallery in Chicago. The group had only three members then, but when people heard there was a troupe of cats ready to perform, they lined up to get in.

    The show, Martin says, was “horrible.”

    Which is to say, it went fabulously.

    “People loved that the show was horrible,” Martin says. “They love the fails more than the successes.”

    Since then, she’s taught an array of cats to “play” a variety of instruments, some better than others. During performances, Martin joins the band onstage, giving visual and verbal cues — she mimes a tapping motion when she wants a cat to paw its instrument, for instance — and doling out treats for a job well done.

    How are the Rock Cats, musically?

    That depends who you ask.

    While their commercial success is undeniable, critical acclaim has been mixed. One reviewer, in Seattle, described the group’s style as “an unpredictable assortment of instrument clanging,” adding that “rarely does it sound like the cats are playing the same song, let alone an actual, fully realized piece of music.” Another bemoaned the fact that, at a Christmas-themed performance, the band did not actually play much holiday music — though this critique seemed a bit harsh.

    They are, after all, cats.

    On the road

    Tour life is not all bottle-service and Fancy Feast.

    Packed onto their tour bus at any given time are Martin, tour manager Ashley Murnan, tour assistant Amanda Fenick, feline care coordinator Willie Zamora, roughly 15 cats, and a chicken named Cluck Norris, who plays the cymbal.

    While the cats largely have the run of the bus, “the humans have a six-foot, coffin-sized bunk in a drawer,” says Murnan. Earlier on their current tour, in Baltimore, their generator — which powers the entire bus — went out for two weeks, putting them 10 days behind schedule.

    And this is to say nothing of the challenge inherent in managing 16 distinct personalities — a mixed bag of climbers, swatters, and what have you.

    “The band is chaos,” says Martin. “They’re all over the place.”

    She never misses a show.

    Martin has performed with a broken foot, with cancer, and with a voice so raspy it could hardly be heard through her microphone. Once, she paid to have the band’s broken-down tour bus towed from Wisconsin to Chicago in order to get to a show on time.

    “It was a $2,000 tow,” she says, “but we made it.”

    Twix is one of three guitarists for the (mostly) all-cat band, Tuna and the Rock CatsPhoto by David Soder (Courtesy of Rock Cats Rescue, Inc.)

    Despite the drama, Martin adores the cats, all of whom were once orphans, rescues, or strays. When they’re not touring, they live with her in Georgia, where she cooks them fresh chicken and salmon and turkey. (Martin also runs a nonprofit — Rock Cats Rescue, Inc. — that partners with local organizations to get cats adopted.)

    Even Miki — her impossibly apathetic trumpet player who was found abandoned in a discarded Huggies box — has stolen her heart.

    “They put a roof over my head,” she says. “Granted, it’s leaky and the gutters are falling off.”