Inquirer.com – Zurich DR

Blog

  • Uncle Giuseppe’s, a gourmet Italian grocer, is coming to King of Prussia and Moorestown

    Uncle Giuseppe’s, a gourmet Italian grocer, is coming to King of Prussia and Moorestown

    Uncle Giuseppe’s Marketplace, a New York-based chain of high-end Italian supermarkets, is expanding into the Philadelphia area.

    The company recently announced plans to open stores in King of Prussia and Moorestown in late 2027.

    The King of Prussia market, the chain’s first Pennsylvania location, is set to open at 320 W. DeKalb Pike, the site of the closed Hobby Lobby in the DeKalb Plaza shopping center.

    The Moorestown store, the first in South Jersey, will be located at 1311 Nixon Dr., replacing the Barnes & Noble and PetSmart in the East Gate Square complex.

    Each of the new locations will be about 58,000 square feet.

    The inside of a recently opened Uncle Giuseppe’s Marketplace in New York.Courtesy Uncle Giuseppe's Marketplace

    “King of Prussia and Moorestown are two markets we’ve been looking at for some time,” Carl DelPrete, CEO and cofounder of Uncle Giuseppe’s Marketplace, said in a statement. “We look for communities where we believe our stores will be a good fit and where customers are looking for fresh, quality food and good service.”

    Founded on Long Island in 2001, Uncle Giuseppe’s now operates 13 locations in New York and North Jersey.

    Every store sells made-in-house mozzarella, homemade pasta, prepared foods, fresh produce, specialty cheeses, imported Italian products, natural and organic items, and more traditional groceries. Each market also has full-service meat and seafood departments, an Italian deli, a scratch bakery, and a catering department.

    Customers can watch workers make pasta at a recently opened Uncle Giuseppe’s Marketplace in New York.Courtesy Uncle Giuseppe's Marketplace

    Company executives call shopping at Uncle Giuseppe’s an experience, one in which customers can watch pasta, mozzarella, and bread being made and see meats being cut to order.

    The company is expanding as some other chain grocers contract — and some consumers cut back due to higher prices.

    Earlier this year, Amazon closed all of its brick-and-mortar Amazon Fresh stores, including six in the Philadelphia region, and Grocery Outlet bargain market closed dozens of stores nationwide, including eight in the Philadelphia area.

    What makes someone love their grocery store? Ask the Philadelphians who are already missing their Amazon Fresh.

    Gourmet grocers have not been spared. Di Bruno Bros., the Philly-based Italian-food retailer, closed three of its five locations this winter, two years after being acquired by Wakefern Food Corp., the North Jersey-based supermarket cooperative that operates ShopRite.

    Despite industry uncertainty, Uncle Giuseppe’s is not the only grocer expanding. Sprouts, the organic supermarket chain, is adding stores, too, including in Havertown, Limerick, and Washington Township.

    The Washington Township outpost will be up and running Sept. 11, with the Limerick store to follow Oct. 2. The Havertown location is set to open in early 2027.

    Opening dates, store hours, and other information about Uncle Giuseppe’s new stores will be announced next year, company executives said.

  • Penn State ‘White Out’ game scheduled for Oct. 10 against Southern Cal

    Penn State ‘White Out’ game scheduled for Oct. 10 against Southern Cal

    One of college football’s best atmospheres has an official date.

    Led by new head coach Matt Campbell, Penn State will host its iconic “White Out” game against Southern California on Oct. 10, the program announced on Tuesday. Kickoff is set for 7:30 p.m. (NBC10, Peacock).

    The tradition started in 2004 with just the Penn State student section and expanded to the entire stadium in 2007. This will be the 19th year with a full “White Out” in Happy Valley.

    Last season, the Nittany Lions lost to Oregon during the “White Out” game in overtime, which set off a string of six straight losses and included the firing of longtime head coach James Franklin. Last year’s loss also ended a six-game winning streak in the annual game, dating back to 2019.

    ‘A sense of urgency,’ focal point of the offense, and more takeaways from Penn State football’s media day

    This matchup will also mark the first time Penn State will host USC in Beaver Stadium since the Trojans joined the Big Ten ahead of the 2024 season. Their only meeting as conference foes came in 2024, when the Nittany Lions overcame a 14-point halftime deficit to win in overtime, 33-30. Overall, USC holds a 6-5 advantage in all-time meetings between the two programs.

    Iowa State head coach Matt Campbell, left, meets with Oklahoma head coach Lincoln Riley, right, before an NCAA college football game, Saturday, Sept. 15, 2018, in Ames, Iowa. (AP Photo/Matthew Putney)Matthew Putney

    Campbell and Lincoln Riley will face off as head coaches for the first time since 2021, when the former was at Iowa State and the latter was with Oklahoma. Riley’s Sooners held a 4-2 advantage over Campbell’s Cyclones, including a Big 12 championship game win in 2020.

    Ohio State and Oregon are 1-2 in preseason Top 25 football poll; Penn State 18th

    Before Penn State hosts USC for the White Out game, it will face Marshall (Sept. 5) at home, travel to Lincoln Financial Field for a noon kickoff against Temple (Sept. 12), and host Buffalo (Sept. 19). Then, Big Ten Conference play begins with the opener against Wisconsin (Sept. 26) before traveling to Northwestern’s new Ryan Field for a Friday night in Evanston, Ill. (Oct. 2).

  • Study’s alarming finding: At least 1 in 4 NFL players gets brain disease

    Study’s alarming finding: At least 1 in 4 NFL players gets brain disease

    Since the degenerative brain disease known as CTE was first scientifically linked to football about 20 years ago, and as hundreds of former professional football players have been diagnosed with the disease after their deaths, a haunting question has lingered:

    Just how many NFL players will end up with CTE?

    New data provides a sobering indication: At least 1 in 4 of all the people who have played in the NFL might expect to end up with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, according to a study of hundreds of cases over a recent six-year period.

    Researchers considered every former NFL player who died from 2016 to 2021. There were 878. Some died in their 20s, some in their 80s, most in between.

    The study’s main finding was simple math: At least 215 of those 878 former players — 24.5% — had CTE.

    The actual prevalence could be far higher. The roughly 25% rate does not consider the 643 brains that were not examined. Some of those, maybe many of them, likely had CTE too.

    CTE is a progressive neurological disease caused by repeated impacts to the head. It can be definitively diagnosed only by examining the brain after death.

    Studies have shown that the rate of CTE in people who have not sustained repeated impacts to the head is nearly zero.

    If the new study’s statistics were applied to today’s players — 1,696 on the league’s 32 regular-season rosters, not including more than 500 members of practice squads and those ineligible due to injury — at least 400 of them would be diagnosed with CTE.

    Experts say that the rate of brain disease represents an occupational safety hazard with little comparison in the American workplace.

    “There are workers who’ve been exposed to high levels of asbestos exposure, which leads to very high rates of lung disease,” said David Michaels, who led the Occupational Safety and Health Administration during the Obama administration and is now a professor at the George Washington School of Public Health. “And certainly, you know, a lifetime working in coal mines leads to very high risk of black lung disease.

    “But a degenerative neurological disease — I’ve never seen anything comparable.”

    CTE was first discovered in boxers nearly a century ago and termed “dementia pugilistica.” Symptoms can include memory loss, confusion, and uncharacteristic mood swings, decreases in executive function, and increases in erratic and impulsive behavior, including addiction.

    These days, CTE is most commonly associated with football players, but it has been found in the brains of other athletes who sustained repetitive blows to the head, including hockey, rugby, and soccer players, as well as wrestlers and bobsledders. Those in the military who work with artillery also seem susceptible to the disease.

    For years, the NFL downplayed the risks of repeated head trauma, often insisting that not enough is known about CTE to draw conclusions about its dangers, origins, and prevalence. Uncertainty has left room for inaction; scientists have yet to decipher, among many things, why some people can play football for decades and not get CTE, while others have had severe cases in their teens.

    But the prevalence rate now reported by researchers might be hard to ignore. It is the latest research from neuropathologists and other scientists mostly affiliated with Mass General Brigham, Boston University, and the UNITE Brain Bank, which have led CTE research and handled most donated brains of former athletes over the past two decades.

    Researchers involved in this study, published Tuesday in the BMJ, hope to produce a subsequent paper in the coming months estimating the overall rate of CTE in all NFL players at the time of their death.

    Making such an estimation is complicated by unknowns. What is certain, researchers said, is that CTE is preventable.

    “We know what’s causing it,” said Daniel Daneshvar, the lead author of the study, the chief of brain injury rehabilitation at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. “It’s a neurodegenerative disease where we know and have complete control over the risk. And understanding the extent of that risk is one of the steps into making sure that we can mitigate and decrease that risk.”

    Daneshvar said the biggest predictor of CTE is the cumulative force of hits to a head over a lifetime — including those sustained before reaching the NFL.

    “We can change that cumulative force without changing the game of football,” he said, suggesting that children refrain from playing tackle football and that teams at all levels eliminate hits during practices.

    The 25% rate cited in the latest research may surprise fans or others who view the game from a distance, but not those close to football.

    “I bet the real number is a lot bigger,” said Randy Grimes, 66, who played center for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers from 1983 to 1992. “Obviously, it’s going to be a lot bigger if you add the untested ones.”

    At least two of his former offensive linemates, both guards, were diagnosed with it: Tom McHale, who died at 45; and John Bruhin, who died at 57. Another teammate, linebacker Keith McCants, had CTE and died at 53.

    If the new data were applied to the rest of his teammates over his career, Grimes is likely to have played with dozens of CTE victims, who either died without being tested or who are aging quietly in the shadows.

    Grimes said he has yet to feel the symptoms that would make him worry about his own cognitive health. But he runs a nonprofit organization that counsels retired athletes, including football players, and sees symptoms that he suspects are associated with CTE.

    “It’s not something that’s brought up, it’s not something that players want to talk about,” Grimes said. “We probably could move forward faster in our research if we did talk more about it. But players don’t want to do it. They don’t want to think they have it, they don’t want to think they’re seeing it. Deep down, we all know that probably the majority of us are going to have some form of CTE.”

    While hundreds of former NFL players have been diagnosed with CTE, typically after loved ones donate the brains because of worrisome symptoms, most CTE cases are not publicly disclosed.

    Only a few cases reach public consciousness, usually when attached to a famous name, like Junior Seau, Ken Stabler, and Frank Gifford, all inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

    Others become notorious because of criminal behavior that might later be explained, in part, by CTE, like Aaron Hernandez and Phillip Adams, who committed murder and were diagnosed with CTE after their own deaths. In July 2025, Shane Tamura, who played football but did not reach the NFL, killed four people in a New York City building that houses the league’s headquarters. After Tamura’s death, an autopsy confirmed that he had CTE.

    CTE cannot be diagnosed in the living, though some ex-football players, like Hall of Fame running back Tony Dorsett, presume they have it. Some players, like Chris Borland and John Urschel, walked away from their professional careers early as a preventive measure to protect their brains.

    The growing roster of CTE cases has done little to diminish football’s popularity. The NFL reportedly earned more than $23 billion in revenue in 2024.

    “The NFL continuously strives to make the game of football safer, including by implementing strategies to reduce concussions and head impacts,” the league said in a statement. “The NFL remains committed to ensuring that the NFL community has access to a robust — and expanding — set of resources to enhance their physical and mental well being.”

    The NFL Players Association, the union representing players, said the new study “is a sobering reminder that football carries real risks, and those risks can have lasting consequences for players and their families.”

    It added: “The findings should serve as a call to action across the entire football ecosystem.”

    Scientists hope to soon be able to clinically diagnose CTE in the living with a large degree of certainty, the way that other neurodegenerative diseases, like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, often are.

    For now, most brains of NFL players are never examined, so an unknown number of possible CTE cases go undiagnosed. As awareness of the disease grows, family members are increasingly donating the brains of recently deceased former players who displayed CTE’s stew of symptoms. The brains that are donated are not a random sample. Telltale signs of the disease were often evident.

    In 2017, 110 of the first 111 brains of former NFL players that had been donated to that point were diagnosed with CTE.

    What is different for the latest study is that it applied CTE cases to the broader context of a general NFL population in the same time period — not just those whose brains were donated.

    Researchers tallied all of the former NFL players known to have died between 2008 and 2021 (2,079 of them) and found that 16.6% — 1 in 6 — had been diagnosed with CTE.

    They narrowed the data to the most recent six-year period because, they said, it coincided with a surge of brain donations after several well-publicized cases of CTE and the 2015 film Concussion. (In 2014, 17 brains were donated to what is now called the UNITE Brain Bank. In 2018, 53 were.)

    In that subset, 235 brains had been donated for examination. Most of them, 215, were found to have at least some level of CTE.

    That means, “under the most conservative of assumptions,” researchers wrote, 24.5% of the players who died had CTE. The total does not include several other brains examined by scientists not affiliated with the researchers, and thus unverifiable, or those widely presumed to have had CTE due to the severity of symptoms but who were not tested at death.

    The identity of most CTE diagnoses is not made public, but loose extrapolation can be revealing. How many CTE victims in NFL history played for, say, the New York Giants? (Thousands, perhaps.) Or for coaches like Bill Belichick or Pete Carroll? (Hundreds, probably.) How many were teammates of Tom Brady? (Scores, at least.)

    The growing sample size of CTE cases makes for stark realizations. For example, eight members of the 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only undefeated team in modern NFL history, have been diagnosed with CTE.

    The latest, previously unreported, was Mercury Morris, the speedy halfback who played eight seasons in the NFL, struggled with headaches and drug addiction in retirement, and died in 2024 at age 77.

    Not all CTE cases belong to long-retired players in their geriatric years. The 2001 New England Patriots, who won the Super Bowl, had seven former players die between the ages of 35 and 50, according to the Boston Globe. At least three were diagnosed with CTE, researchers said.

    The latest research, however, suggests that at least 10 others from that team might have CTE, if the 1-in-4 ratio applies.

    The 2009 Chargers, a team that went 13-3 in the regular season, already have three deceased players who were found to have CTE and whose names were made public.

    One was Vincent Jackson, a three-time Pro Bowl receiver who died in a hotel room of alcohol poisoning at 38. Another was Kevin Ellison, a defensive back who died at 31 when he was struck by a car after wandering onto a California freeway.

    The other was defensive back Paul Oliver, who was 29 in 2013 when he shot himself on the stairs of his family home in front of his wife, Chelsea, and their two young sons.

    Chelsea Oliver said she occasionally hears from her husband’s former teammates or their family members, worried that they, too, are feeling the effects of CTE. She suspects that the 25% figure is far lower than the reality.

    “I feel like if we were able to test everybody for CTE while they’re still alive, the majority would have CTE,” she said.

    Her husband played four years in the NFL and sustained a series of concussions, she said, and then became someone “who just wasn’t him.” He lived with headaches, became delusional and paranoid, and began drinking heavily, she said. The couple discussed the prospect of CTE shortly after Seau, the longtime Chargers star who finished his career with New England, shot himself in the chest to preserve his brain for testing.

    Learning that, statistically, her husband might have had a dozen or more teammates with CTE, that he was not alone with his disease, does not bring any measure of solace, Oliver said. “It just makes me sad.”

    She does not expect fans to understand. She reads comments on stories about former football players behaving badly or dying by suicide. “You’ll see multiple people, like, ‘Bet they’re going to blame CTE.’ I just shake my head. These people have no clue. They just don’t, because they haven’t lived it firsthand. So I can’t fault them.”

    “To them,” she added, “concussions, CTE, that’s a not-them problem.”

  • Amtrak to expand daily service between Pittsburgh and New York before Thanksgiving

    Amtrak to expand daily service between Pittsburgh and New York before Thanksgiving

    A second daily Amtrak passenger train between New York’s Penn Station and Pittsburgh will begin operating in mid-November, after an $80 million state investment in track and safety upgrades, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation announced Monday.

    Bringing another Pennsylvanian train into service will double travel options for people traveling east-west between the state’s two largest cities; it also will provide more capacity for riders to and from New York.

    The train currently has stops in Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Altoona, Johnstown, Latrobe, Greensburg, and Pittsburgh.

    “The people of Western Pennsylvania have waited a long time for more passenger rail service and my administration has chased every opportunity to get this done,” Gov. Josh Shapiro said in a statement.

    The Pennsylvanian travels the Norfolk Southern-owned Pittsburgh Line, part of a main artery for freight moving between Chicago and metropolitan New York. The freight railroad has major terminals in Toledo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and the Lehigh Valley.

    To expand passenger rail service on the line, the Shapiro administration in 2023 obtained $143 million in federal passenger rail funding for infrastructure improvements, including crossovers, sidings, and signals. Construction continues and is scheduled to be finished by 2030.

    In fiscal year 2025, the daily round-trip Pennsylvanian carried 236,000 passengers, according to Amtrak.

    Details about schedules and booking information will be released closer to when the expanded service begins, Amtrak spokesperson Beth Toll said.

  • China rebukes Trump’s economic pressure campaign seeking to isolate Iran

    China rebukes Trump’s economic pressure campaign seeking to isolate Iran

    China sharply condemned the sweeping new sanctions campaign against Iran and its trading partners announced by the United States, vowing retaliation against measures that would target countries doing business with Tehran.

    Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday he is contacting unspecified world leaders as part of an effort to “economically asphyxiate” Iran’s economy and force an “endgame” to the drawn-out conflict in the Middle East.

    China is Iran’s top trading partner and the newly announced U.S. economic pressure campaign risks a flare-up in relations just as President Donald Trump has sought to ease tensions and secure a broader economic deal with Beijing.

    A Treasury list released Monday includes more than a dozen small Chinese and Hong Kong firms, most linked to shipping and supply chains, suggesting Washington’s opening salvo includes targeting illicit shipments to Iran without directly hitting major Chinese refineries or banks.

    Still, the move rankled Beijing, which in recent months has sent envoys to Washington to lay the groundwork for a meeting between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the White House in late September.

    “China will do everything necessary to firmly safeguard its rights and interests,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian on Tuesday, criticizing what he described as “illicit unilateral sanctions that have no basis in international law.”

    Analysts say the rebuke is a warning sign that further actions could derail the fragile truce built between Washington and Beijing.

    “Washington has a difficult needle to thread: isolating Iran economically while trying to keep U.S.-China relations stable,” said Wendy Cutler, a former U.S. trade negotiator and now senior vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

    “Depending on how far the U.S. goes, it’s not out of the question that Beijing would threaten to cancel or postpone Xi’s planned U.S. visit next month,” she said.

    China is the primary buyer of Iran’s oil, importing an estimated 1.4 million barrels a day before the war, largely through an unreported shadow network of hundreds of tankers operating outside normal legal channels.

    Economically isolating Iran from that support would be difficult, requiring far-reaching sanctions on Chinese banks and refineries, and perhaps including military and investigative resources to disrupt an ever-shifting network of hundreds of Chinese-linked shipping firms and shell companies spread across Asia and the Middle East.

    Bessent on Monday said the “economic D-Day”sanctions will be “the single greatest financial offensive ever” against Iran and will target countries that support Iran’s economy to sever the “economic lifeline that sustains Tehran.”

    He suggested China would not be exempt from the penalties.

    “If they facilitate transactions and are part of the ecosystem that turns Iranian oil into money, into repression, they will be targeted. … We want to make clear here today that no one is above the reach of U.S. sanctions.”

    Without naming Beijing, Bessent said the U.S. Treasury is prepared to engage in “frank discussions” with relevant countries to shut down Iran’s oil sector.

    Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin defended China’s cooperation with Tehran on Tuesday, saying it is “conducted within the framework of international law” and “should not be disrupted.”

    Washington has already attempted this year to crack down on the shadow trade in oil and chemicals between China and Iran, imposing sanctions on hundreds of vessels and entities, and seizing sanctioned ships carrying Iranian oil. But analysts say those efforts represent a game of maritime whack-a-mole, as targeted networks adapt quickly.

    In one such raid in April, when U.S. forces commandeered the Tehran-bound ship Touska, which had docked at a Chinese port known as a loading point for chemicals used as rocket-fuel precursors, Trump said U.S. authorities found “a gift from China” on the ship, “which wasn’t very nice.”

    That seizure temporarily spiked oil prices but did little to upset relations between Beijing and Washington, as the two leaders met with friendly fanfare the following month.

    But Bessent’s new maximum pressure sanctions campaign could have deeper impacts, analysts say, beyond just a canceled summit.

    “In light of the retaliatory toolbox Beijing has been building in recent years, it has many levers to pull to harm U.S. interests, including export restrictions, sanctions on U.S. companies, and slowing down or even halting U.S. agricultural purchases,” Cutler said.

  • Pa. Democrats vow to keep fighting for mail voting after Supreme Court ruling creates uncertainty as November approaches

    Pa. Democrats vow to keep fighting for mail voting after Supreme Court ruling creates uncertainty as November approaches

    A Supreme Court decision on mail voting has created uncertainty with 70 days until critical midterm elections, but Pennsylvania Democrats are trying to reassure voters that they will have the option to cast a ballot by mail.

    More litigation over this highly watched issue is expected and further rulings could still come even after November, affecting the next presidential election.

    “We will continue to fight at every stage — including in the Supreme Court the moment they attempt to implement this — to make sure every eligible Pennsylvanian can cast their ballot by mail, free from federal interference,” said Montgomery County Commissioner Neil Makhija, a Democrat and an attorney who sits on the county’s election board.

    The procedural update, issued Monday, does not rule on the underlying legality of President Donald Trump’s March executive order that directed the U.S. Postal Service to help decide which voters should receive mail ballots but rather whether lower courts had the authority, at this stage, to block it.

    Pennsylvania was among the states suing to block the order.

    “Absolutely nothing has changed here in Pennsylvania. You can vote in person on Election Day or you can vote by mail before Nov. 3,” Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro said Tuesday evening during a visit to the Eagles’ training camp.

    “Your vote will be counted. Your vote is safe and secure,” Shapiro said. “No matter how many times the president wants to try and undermine people’s right to vote in this commonwealth, he needs to know that he will be met with a swift rebuke from me.”

    Shapiro noted that the election is administered by the state and its counties under the Constitution.

    Revival of the debate about the availability and security of mail voting, and the temporary clearance, however, may instill doubt among voters that their ballot will be received and tabulated, Makhija said.

    “With just weeks until ballots go out, last-minute federal interference sows chaos for the voters we serve,” he said.

    Trump’s efforts to restrict mail voting, part of his long-standing grievance against the system despite repeatedly utilizing the method himself, are still working through the courts, and several experts doubt the proceedings will move fast enough to affect the November elections, when four swing districts in Pennsylvania could help determine control of the U.S. House.

    “Whatever may ultimately happen in this litigation, I’m pretty skeptical that anything is going to change for this November’s election,” said Ben Geffen, staff attorney at the Public Interest Law Center in Philadelphia, a nonprofit group that monitors election issues.

    States across the country will soon begin preparing applications and mailing ballots to voters.

    Pennsylvania voters, who can cast a ballot by mail for any reason, must complete an application by Oct. 27, and all ballots must be returned by Nov. 3 at 8 p.m., according to the Pennsylvania Department of State’s website.

    “Turning that battleship around in a matter of days is extremely unlikely,” Geffen said.

    A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of State said the ruling does not change state law, and voters should be confident that counties will continue to ensure eligible voters can cast their ballot by mail.

    “The USPS action is not lawful, and we will continue to challenge that rule to ensure that Pennsylvania voters can have their voice heard — whether they vote in person, on demand, or by mail,” Geoff Morrow, the department spokesperson, said.

    Geffen’s advice for those concerned is to start early. Get your mail ballot application in right away, and as soon as you receive your ballot, fill it out and return it. For now, you can still send your ballot through the U.S. mail. But you can also drop it off at your county election board, and many counties offer satellite locations and drop boxes.

    If you prefer to vote in person on Election Day, go in the morning, he said.

    “You have options for how to vote, and you will get to vote. Nobody’s taking away the election, and just jump on it early,” he said.

    After Trump, through his directive, ordered the Postal Service to withhold mail ballots to individuals who are not on an approved list, which he instructed states to develop in order to prevent noncitizens from voting, Shapiro promised to protect Pennsylvanians’ right to vote by mail. In April, he used his power as governor to join other Democratic states in a lawsuit that argued the order violated states’ constitutional power to carry out elections.

    The unions representing postal employees also criticized Trump’s push to restrict mail voting as November approaches.

    A statement from the National Association of Letter Carriers, the union that represents about 200,000 postal workers throughout the country, underscored their dedication to delivering ballots reliably and securely.

    “Any insinuation that voting by mail is not safe and secure is severely misguided. Letter carriers have securely delivered ballots for decades, and there is no evidence that the existing system requires substantial changes,” NALC president Brian L. Renfroe said in the statement.

    Gwen Ivey, president of the American Postal Workers Union, Local 89, which represents between 1,300 and 1,400 U.S. clerks in Philadelphia who process mail, maintenance employees, and drivers who transport mail, also warned against inserting the Postal Service into decisions over voting.

    “The Postal Service is a public institution that serves the American people,” Ivey said Tuesday. “It should not be placed in a position of determining who is entitled to participate in elections or becoming an instrument for restricting access to the ballot boxes.”

    Trump has long railed against mail voting, referring to the ballots as “crooked” in his State of the Union address and suggesting they amount to cheating. But his 2024 victory in Pennsylvania was thanks, in part, to a higher rate of mail voting by Republicans.

    The practice is particularly useful for seniors and voters in rural areas — often with strong Republican bases — where voters may live far from their nearest polling location.

    “If you want to win, mail it in, that’s our message to our Republican voters,” then-Pennsylvania GOP chairman Lawrence Tabas said two years ago. The Pennsylvania GOP did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

    Pennsylvania Republicans have been more supportive of Trump’s SAVE America Act, an election reform proposal stalling in Congress that he insists will make voting more secure, though most election experts say new guidelines in the legislation would make it harder to vote.

    A spokesperson for Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.), who has repeatedly championed the SAVE Act, did not respond to a request for comment on the court ruling.

    A separate but similarly Trump-aligned bill supported by House Republicans, including U.S. Reps. Rob Bresnahan and Ryan Mackenzie — two of the four incumbents in Pennsylvania’s competitive congressional districts — would ban universal mail voting and require mail ballots to be received, not just postmarked, by Election Day to be counted.

    Neither lawmaker immediately commented Tuesday on the Supreme Court ruling.

    This story was updated to include Gov. Josh Shapiro’s Tuesday evening comments.

  • Kennedy Center finances deteriorated sharply after Trump name change

    Kennedy Center finances deteriorated sharply after Trump name change

    Ticket sales and fundraising collapsed after President Donald Trump’s name was added to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, even as the center’s leaders publicly touted a financial turnaround, according to confidential documents obtained by the Washington Post.

    Ticket sales had already dropped in the 10 months following Trump’s takeover, but both ticket sales and donations plunged after the Trump-led board of trustees voted in December to rename the center after him and put his name on the front of the building, according to the records.

    The documents show that leaders knew both were cratering even as they publicly portrayed Trump’s takeover as a financial rescue. In a failed June request to keep Trump’s name on the building, for instance, a Justice Department lawyer wrote that renaming the center after Trump “represented a saving of The Kennedy Center which, if this doesn’t happen, would go into financial and structural collapse” — even suggesting in a new filing Monday that without Trump’s name and renovation plan, the building “will be required to be taken down.”

    Just the week before the June filing, the center’s own financial projections showed ticket revenue and fundraising had plummeted after the name change, putting it on track to fall nearly $100 million short of its revenue target.

    The records — internal budgets, management forecasts, board minutes, and financial presentations — provide the first comprehensive accounting of the center’s financial deterioration in the year and a half since Trump replaced dozens of board members with allies and installed himself as chairperson. Even after slashing expenses, center officials projected earned revenue this fiscal year to miss its budget target by 70% and contributed revenue to fall 25% short. The revenue miss was projected to leave the center with a $23 million deficit.

    “The center took a huge hit when the takeover happened,” and then appeared to stabilize, according to an official familiar with the center’s financial situation. But after the name change, “it was just an absolute fiscal cliff. Donors disappeared, ticket sales disappeared, artists disappeared — like it was doomsday.”

    Andrew Taylor, director of American University’s arts management program, who reviewed the documents at the Post’s request, described the declines as “a nosedive.”

    Trump’s takeover “had a consequence,” Taylor said, “and the consequence was a catastrophic drop in revenue.”

    In response to detailed questions from the Post, a Kennedy Center spokesperson blamed the center’s financial problems on its previous leadership, saying it inherited years of financial mismanagement. Putting Trump’s name on the building attracted new donors and helped raise money for renovations, the spokesperson said, adding that a proposed fiscal 2027 budget is balanced. The center did not dispute the Post’s account of its internal fiscal 2026 projections.

    The center is months late to releasing its independently audited financial statements for its first fiscal year under Trump’s leadership, which should include definitive data about its financial condition through the first months of the takeover.

    Promising a turnaround

    Upon taking control of the Kennedy Center, Trump and his allies said they had inherited a troubled institution.

    They accused the previous leadership of spending too much on unpopular programming, running persistent deficits, and obscuring its financial condition, which past leaders denied. Trump promised to remake the institution, while Richard Grenell, the ally he installed to lead the center, repeatedly argued that the new administration was imposing fiscal discipline.

    Grenell defended deep staff cuts as prudent and said the center had raised $117 million from donors. He told the Washington Examiner in November that every department had been instructed that its shows needed to break even: “If you can’t sell enough seats, you find a donor.” Corporations, he said, were “writing checks because they trust us not to turn every show into a political statement.”

    The White House on Monday defended Trump’s stewardship of the center by citing his renovation plans but did not directly address questions about this year’s drop in revenue.

    “President Trump did what Democrats wouldn’t by finally committing the resources and the leadership needed to restore the Kennedy Center and make it the finest performing arts facility in the world,” spokesperson Liz Huston said in an email.

    Leaders also credited Trump with securing $257 million from Congress for repairs last year, an enormous amount relative to the center’s usual federal appropriation.

    The center’s board has gone further. In a resolution this month supporting another effort to install Trump’s name on the building, trustees argued that the Kennedy Center “would be in financial ruin” without the president’s “unique stature as both an unparalleled fundraiser and world-class developer.”

    But the internal projections told a different story.

    The center had budgeted about $220 million in revenue for fiscal 2026, which began in October and ends Sept. 30. By late May, officials projected it would bring in only about $124 million.

    Officials cut projected expenses by roughly a third, but even that was not enough: The center still projected a $23 million deficit.

    The cuts involved slashing staff and programs, which the center has described in court filings as a logical part of the board’s decision to close for repairs.

    Industry experts described a chicken-or-the-egg dynamic, saying cuts can be a reasonable response to falling revenue but can also hollow out the staff and programming an organization depends on to generate future income.

    Karen Gahl-Mills, director of the Indiana University arts administration program who reviewed the financial records for the Post, said the documents showed that some of the decline in spending simply reflected a smaller institution.

    “They’re smaller than they were,” she said.

    Taylor said the financial problems were striking in light of what the center’s board appeared to be focused on. During their March board meeting, Trump and the other trustees talked almost entirely about the building, renovations, and aesthetic details without addressing the artistic performances that happen inside before voting to close the center for two years, according to minutes of the meeting.

    “The conversation is really about real estate development,” Taylor said, adding: “It’s almost nothing about programming in that meeting, except for how we’re going to wind down programming when we shut down.”

    The center defended the planned renovation as a way to improve its finances, saying it would produce a projected $3.4 million surplus. An alternative, involving rolling closures throughout the building over four years, would produce a projected deficit of about $78 million, the spokesperson said.

    Rep. Joyce Beatty (D., Ohio), one of the few trustees not appointed by Trump, has challenged the board’s actions in federal court, arguing that in voting to close for two years, its majority has put the president’s interests ahead of its responsibility to the center’s duty to bring performing arts programming to the public.

    Ticket buyers and donors retreat

    Audiences began retreating soon after Trump took control of the center, but the confidential documents show revenue troubles became far more severe in fiscal 2026, which covers the bulk of the first programming season under new leadership, the name change, and the attempted closure.

    The Post previously reported that ticket sales dropped by half in the week after Trump announced his takeover in February 2025. By that fall, ticket buyers were spending less at the center than during any comparable period since 2018 except the pandemic, and subscriptions were down sharply. At the time, current and former employees attributed the decline to an audience boycott over the politicization of the center.

    By June, officials were reviewing an annotated line chart that showed quarterly ticket sales over several years: a recovery from the pandemic, a drop after the board overhaul, and a precipitous fall after the name change.

    At the same time, the center had downsized its fundraising operation as donations faltered. One internal report said fundraising at the beginning of this year contrasted sharply with the months before the name change. Pledges fell by more than 100% because of “adjustments and write-offs,” according to the report — an unusual figure that Taylor said may reflect older pledges that donors withdrew or that the center determined it was unlikely to collect.

    The simultaneous decline in audiences and philanthropy can be particularly damaging for performing arts organizations because the two sources of revenue are closely connected: Many ticket buyers are also donors.

    Together, the losses in audiences and donors helped leave the center projecting nearly $100 million less in total revenue than it had anticipated — a decline experts said went far beyond the broader financial pressures facing cultural institutions.

    An outlier

    Preliminary fiscal 2025 data compiled by SMU DataArts, an arts research center at Southern Methodist University, shows a far different picture across the cultural sector. Large cultural organizations generally remained financially stable, ending the year with modest surpluses even as some experienced declines in ticket sales and philanthropy.

    Jennifer Benoit-Bryan, executive director of SMU DataArts, said the Kennedy Center’s trajectory was “remarkably different” from the broader pattern, with severe reductions in both earned and contributed income and a sizable deficit.

    “That’s a huge hole for an organization to recover from, even one as significant and sizable as the Kennedy Center,” Benoit-Bryan said.

    The center has traditionally been unusual among cultural institutions because it makes more money selling tickets than collecting donations, Benoit-Bryan said. Most arts nonprofits lean more heavily on philanthropy, which makes up about 60% of revenue on average.

    That reliance on ticket sales and other earned income makes the board’s vote to close for two years of renovations particularly consequential, she said, calling it “a questionable choice.”

    Beatty argued in her lawsuit that the decision was worse than misguided. Her lawyers characterized the closure as a betrayal of the center’s mission to bring the performing arts to the public — and an attempt to hide the “embarrassing fact” that renaming the center after Trump had sparked a financial collapse.

    “Such a self-interested gambit, sacrificing the Kennedy Center to save face, represents a quintessential breach of fiduciary duty,” they wrote.

  • Dolly Parton, superstar whose songs spoke to millions, dies at 80

    Dolly Parton, superstar whose songs spoke to millions, dies at 80

    Dolly Parton, the rhinestones-to-riches daughter of Appalachia who for six decades ruled country music with an outsize personality and country wit that enshrined her as one of the 20th century’s most cherished American originals, died Tuesday in Nashville, Tenn. She was 80.

    The death was announced in a video posted on social media by her nephew, Bryan Seaver. No cause was provided. Concerns about Ms. Parton’s health, which began last year as she postponed and later canceled a Las Vegas residency, grew to the point that she took to social media last fall to confirm that “I ain’t dead yet.” In May, she said she had responded well to treatment after, as she put it, her immune and digestive systems “got all out of whack” in recent years.

    Ms. Parton’s life, as depicted in autobiographical songs such as “Coat of Many Colors” and “My Tennessee Mountain Home,” was the stuff of make-believe, from her hardscrabble beginnings in Appalachia to her glittering stardom in Nashville and beyond.

    Writer Chet Flippo likened her to the Big Rock Candy Mountain, the Depression-era symbol of abundance personified by Ms. Parton’s voluptuous figure, rhinestone-studded stage costumes, and blond bouffant wigs. Her songs spoke to millions, confronting privation and loss even as they radiated possibility and hope.

    She was, quintessentially, a uniter of people. In 2019, the New York Times ran a story with the headline “Is There Anything We Can All Agree On? Yes: Dolly Parton.”

    Ms. Parton cannily exploited — and transcended — rural stereotypes and kitsch to fashion a down-home chic entirely her own. (“A country girl’s idea of glam,” she called it in the song “Backwoods Barbie.”) In the process, she became an international celebrity who headlined stadium tours, starred in Hollywood movies, built a business empire, and appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. Her at times girlish soprano notwithstanding, she was anything but the “dumb blonde” invoked in the title of her 1966 single.

    “I’ve created this and played it up — the makeup, the whole persona,” Ms. Parton said, alluding to her plastic surgeries as well as her colloquial “Dollyisms” in a 2002 interview with the Times.

    “But this isn’t all I am,” she added. “It’s not even most of what I am. Hopefully people can see beneath the hair to know there’s a brain, beneath the boobs to know there’s a heart and behind all the other stuff to know there’s some talent.”

    Inducted into both the country music and rock ’n’ roll halls of fame, Ms. Parton was the top-ranking female singer on country radio from 1967 to 1993, and had a total of 25 No. 1 country singles.

    Her early breakthrough came in 1967 when she was hired as the “girl singer” on The Porter Wagoner Show, a syndicated country music television variety program. Several years later, she had No. 1 country hits with records including “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You.”

    Both songs were among about 3,000 titles she published in her lifetime, hundreds of which have been recorded by other artists, including Tina Turner, Norah Jones, the White Stripes, Merle Haggard, RuPaul, and Whitney Houston.

    Featured in the 1992 movie The Bodyguard, Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You” spent 14 weeks at the top of the pop chart. The song had previously been a No. 1 country single twice, in versions released by Ms. Parton in 1974 and 1982.

    With Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette, Ms. Parton blazed a trail for women in country music, inspiring such contemporaries as Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, as well as latter-day hitmakers including Carrie Underwood, Kacey Musgraves, and Taylor Swift. She recorded a pair of albums, Trio and Trio II, with Ronstadt and Harris.

    “I can’t imagine anybody, especially in country, who doesn’t try to emulate Dolly in some way,” Harris said on the occasion of Ms. Parton’s Kennedy Center Honors award in 2006.

    Ms. Parton was one of country music’s greatest ambassadors, but she also collaborated widely with artists outside traditional Nashville circles, including Mavis Staples, Queen Latifah, Julio Iglesias, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. “Islands in the Stream,” a triple platinum-selling duet Ms. Parton recorded with Kenny Rogers, topped both the country and pop charts in 1983. (The song was written by Barry, Maurice, and Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees.)

    Stylistically, Ms. Parton’s music ran the gamut: mountain bluegrass and soul-inflected countrypolitan, disco-era pop and covers of classic rock touchstones written by Neil Young and Led Zeppelin — all of it rendered indelible by her irrepressible spirit and alternately keening and gossamer soprano drawl.

    She wrote unabashedly, in simple Southern vernacular, about growing up as the daughter of an illiterate sharecropper.

    “I’ve seen Daddy’s hands break open and bleed / And I’ve seen him work ’til he’s stiff as a board,” she sang over wistful harmonica and acoustic guitar in “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad).” “I’ve seen Mama layin’ in sufferin’ and sickness / In need of a doctor we couldn’t afford. / Anything at all was more than we had / In the good old days when times were bad.”

    In “Coat of Many Colors,” maybe her most beloved original, Ms. Parton plumbed childhood feelings of pride and humiliation. In this case, the coat in question — quilted from rags and originally a source of delight and the expression of a mother’s love — becomes an object of ridicule when Dolly’s classmates poke fun at her for wearing it to school.

    So with patches on my britches

    And holes in both my shoes,

    In my coat of many colors

    I hurried off to school

    Just to find the others laughing

    And making fun of me

    In my coat of many colors

    My Mama made for me

    “That little song is like a world of things,” Ms. Parton said of “Coat of Many Colors” in Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics (2020), written with Robert K. Oermann. “It teaches about bullying, about love, about acceptance, about good parents. That little story has even been written into a schoolbook to teach children about being different.”

    Empathy was a hallmark of Ms. Parton’s songwriting, perhaps nowhere so much as in “Down From Dover” and “Daddy Come Get Me,” harrowing Southern gothic ballads about teen pregnancy and how patriarchy blames and victimizes young women.

    Assertive women populated Ms. Parton’s songs, whether through her protofeminist rewrite of Jimmie Rodgers’ “Mule Skinner Blues (Blue Yodel No. 8)” or by advocating parity in the bedroom (“Touch Your Woman”) and in the workplace (“9 to 5”).

    “It’s a rich man’s game / No matter what they call it / And you spend your life / Putting money in his wallet,” Ms. Parton sang, with a mixture of fury and resolve, in the 1980 pink-collar comedy 9 to 5. Besides writing and performing the movie’s theme song, a No. 1 pop and country hit, she also starred in the film as a beleaguered secretary drudging for a sexist boss, alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin.

    Ms. Parton would go on to star in other films, among them The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982), with Burt Reynolds; Steel Magnolias (1989), with Julia Roberts and Shirley MacLaine; and Straight Talk (1992), with James Woods.

    In 1976, she became the first woman in country music to host her own syndicated TV series; a decade later, she had an hourlong variety show on ABC. But for all her reach and command as an entertainer — including her ubiquitous appearances on TV talk shows and specials — Ms. Parton viewed herself, first and foremost, as a songwriter.

    “Writing’s just as natural to me as getting up and cooking breakfast,” she told the Times in 2002. “I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder. I write every day, even when I’m on a plane, in the tub or on the bus. It burns in me.”

    She continued: “Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out. Not everything I write is good, but it’s all good for me — like therapy.”

    Dolly Rebecca Parton was born Jan. 19, 1946, the fourth of 12 children of Robert Lee and Avie Lee (Owens) Parton, in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in Sevier County, Tenn. Her father was a tenant farmer, and her mother was a homemaker who sang old Anglo-Celtic ballads and hymns while doing housework.

    The Partons were so poor that Dolly’s father had to pay the doctor who attended her birth with a sack of cornmeal. Ms. Parton may have grown up without plumbing, heat, electricity, and other modern conveniences, but she always insisted that she also grew up happy, and that music offered her a refuge from want.

    “Most of us in the household learned to play early on,” she said in Dolly Parton, Songteller. “Every time anybody showed up, any uncle or aunt who knew how to play an instrument, I’d have them show me how to play a little bit on the banjo, the guitar, the autoharp or whatever instrument was around.”

    When she was 5 or so, she wrote her first song, a ditty about a corncob doll with corn-silk hair called “Little Tiny Tasseltop.” She started singing on radio and on TV at 10, on the Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour in Knoxville, Tenn., securing bookings with the help of her uncle Bill Owens, who also bought her her first guitar. The two would go on to write many songs together.

    Ms. Parton made her recording debut in 1959, the same year she made her first appearance at the Grand Ole Opry. In 1962, she signed a songwriting deal with Tree International Publishing (now part of Sony Music Publishing). Two years later, she became the first person in her family to graduate from high school.

    In 1966, Ms. Parton married Carl Dean, an asphalt contractor who shunned the limelight. The couple had met two years earlier, at a laundromat in Nashville, when Ms. Parton was 18. Dean died in 2025.

    Ms. Parton is survived by six of her siblings: Willadeene Parton, Robert Lee Parton Jr., Stella Parton, Cassie Parton, Freida Parton, and Rachel Ann Parton George.

    In 1965, Ms. Parton signed a recording contract with Monument Records, not long before she and her uncle wrote two Top 10 country songs for singer Bill Phillips. She released the first of her roughly 90 Top 40 country hits — “Dumb Blonde,” a plucky denunciation of female stereotypes — in 1966.

    In 1967, she began her seven-year tenure with The Porter Wagoner Show. She and Wagoner would go on to release 21 hit duets together, including “Holding On to Nothin’” (1968) and “Just Someone I Used to Know” (1969).

    But with the arrival of the 1970s — and in no small part because of the national exposure she received on Wagoner’s show — Ms. Parton started to eclipse her employer in popularity.

    The tension that resulted was further aggravated when she began steadily producing No. 1 country singles such as “Joshua” and “Jolene.” Ms. Parton parted ways with Wagoner in 1974 to concentrate on her solo career, but not before writing “I Will Always Love You” as an expression of gratitude and farewell.

    The separation initially proved difficult for Ms. Parton, both emotionally and financially, but it also opened doors to new opportunities like the chance to host her own TV show. She was named female artist of the year by the Country Music Association in each of the two years (1975 and 1976) after her break with Wagoner.

    Embracing a more pop approach than she had earlier in her career, Ms. Parton continued her ascendance on the charts in the late ’70s with blockbuster hits including “Here You Come Again” and “Heartbreaker.” Both were No. 1 country singles that crossed over to the pop Top 40. The Country Music Association awarded her its top honor, entertainer of the year, in 1978.

    After her 1980 recording of “9 to 5” earned her two Grammy Awards and an Oscar nomination, Ms. Parton turned her attention to movies, TV appearances, and the development, in the mid-1980s, of Dollywood, her Smoky Mountain theme park, among other business ventures.

    In 1987, she released the first of her two albums with Ronstadt and Harris, the platinum-selling Trio. She hosted Saturday Night Live in 1989 and teamed up with Lynn and Wynette to record the album Honky Tonk Angels in 1993.

    She published her memoir, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business, a New York Times bestseller, in 1994. The next year, she established the Imagination Library, a philanthropic endeavor through which more than 200 million books have been distributed to babies and young children. A show about her life, Dolly: A True Original Musical, is scheduled to open on Broadway in early 2027.

    Endowed with a surfeit of creativity and an unflagging work ethic, Ms. Parton admitted in interviews to sleeping as few as three hours a night. She was nominated for more than 50 Grammy Awards, 10 of which she won, along with being recognized for lifetime achievement by the Recording Academy in 2011.

    Ms. Parton was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2001, and was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2005. In 2022, she was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

    But perhaps even more remarkable than the profusion of accolades and awards was Ms. Parton’s unstinting generosity of spirit — her commitment, born of deep religious convictions and an immense heart, to seeing the humanity in all people.

    Ms. Parton not only sang the traditional Southern gospel music her mother taught her; she also wrote and sang “Travelin’ Thru,” an Oscar-nominated song from Transamerica, the 2005 movie about a transgender woman seeking to connect with her son. In 2017, Parton collaborated with Miley Cyrus, her goddaughter, to record “Rainbowland,” a tribute to gay pride and liberation.

    “You have to accept everything and everybody,” she said in Songteller, talking about the lessons to be learned about open-mindedness and inclusion from “Coat of Many Colors.”

    Time and again in her career, Ms. Parton reflected on her impoverished upbringing and how she followed her dreams to escape it. “I wanted to be free,” she told Rolling Stone in 1977. “I had my songs to sing, I had an ambition, and it burned inside me.”

    She added: “It was something I knew would take me out of the mountains. I knew I could see worlds beyond the Smoky Mountains.”

  • East Side Little League falls 6-5 to Phenix City, ending its run in Williamsport

    East Side Little League falls 6-5 to Phenix City, ending its run in Williamsport

    East Side Little League, a 12-and-under baseball team from West Chester, saw its run in Williamsport, Pa., end in a heartbreaker.

    On Monday, East Side fell 6-5 to Phenix City Youth Baseball LL and was eliminated from the Little League World Series. Powered by its stellar hitting, East Side came out to an early 5-0 lead. However, a big third inning from Phenix City led the Alabama team’s comeback.

    Trailing 5-0 with two outs in the third, Phenix City left fielder Cooper Champion stepped up to the plate with the bases loaded and hit a two-run single to right field. Phenix City added two runs before the inning was capped off by an RBI single from pitcher Kinley Rasmus that tied the score.

    Rasmus is just the 25th girl to appear in a Little League World Series game.

    West Chester’s East Side Little League soaking up the Little League World Series experience despite opening loss

    The game stayed tied at 5-5 through the regulation six innings until Phenix City catcher Brooks Cameron’s single scored Urijah Berklite with the winning run in the bottom of the seventh.

    For East Side, Cole Warner scored a run in the first inning before hitting a two-run homer to center field in the third. After starting the game at center field, Warner moved to the mound in the fourth inning. He allowed just one run while collecting six strikeouts to close out the game.

    East Side outfielder Ryan Hennessey, the son of coach Bob Hennessey, scored two runs and had a two-run double before Phenix City stormed back.

    The kids from East Side Little League in West Chester made the trip to Williamsport.Courtesy of Katherine Cowperthwait

    The loss marks East Side’s second of the tournament in as many appearances. The team, which battled out of the loser’s bracket in the Pennsylvania state tournament, gained significant support from the Greater Philadelphia area after cruising through the Mid-Atlantic regionals. In West Chester, watch parties, filled with East Side alumni and fans, sprung up around the borough.

    In Williamsport, the East Side players were able to interact and befriend peers from all over the world — even bunking with Japan’s 12-and-under team. They also had the chance to meet players from the Milwaukee Brewers and Atlanta Braves before the Little League World Series MLB Classic.

    “It’s just a dream come true, to be honest,” Bob Hennessey previously told The Inquirer. “That’s every Little Leaguer’s dream. It was my dream growing up to see these boys get here and get to experience it. Nothing but amazing.”

  • Dolly Parton, music star, actor and beloved figure who spanned generations has died at 80

    Dolly Parton, music star, actor and beloved figure who spanned generations has died at 80

    Dolly Parton, the country music icon whose soaring vibrato vocals, poignant songwriting and sparkling costumes defined her rise from a log cabin in the Tennessee mountains to the height of stardom and acclaim, has died. She was 80 years old.

    Known for her curvy physique, massive blonde wigs and skin-tight outfits that served her self-deprecating wit, she was among the most beloved personalities in music and beyond — the rare celebrity whose appeal transcended generations, geography and politics.

    She wrote hundreds of songs, including classics like “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors” and “I Will Always Love You,” that totaled more than 100 million worldwide sales and more than 1 billion online streams. Parton, who plucked bejeweled banjos, guitar and dulcimers with her long fingernails during performances, was a generous philanthropist and successful businesswoman whose projects included a theme park in the Smoky Mountain foothills near her birthplace.

    Her career was forever influenced by her upbringing as one of 12 children born into what she called a “dirt poor” Tennessee family. She started her education nonprofit, Imagination Library, to send free books to children in Tennessee because her father, who quit school to work on the farm, struggled to learn to read.

    Parton’s first musical performances were in church, where her grandfather was a preacher. By age 10, she was learning guitar and singing on local television shows. At 13, she appeared on the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, where Johnny Cash introduced her as “a little girl here from up in East Tennessee.”

    With a suitcase of songs, she followed her uncle, Bill Owens, also a songwriter, to Nashville after graduating high school in 1964. Fred Foster, who produced Roy Orbison, Willie Nelson and more, saw her potential and got her songs cut by other artists, as well as recording and releasing Parton singing her own material. By the mid-1970s, Parton was a Nashville queen.

    A key collaboration with Porter Wagoner

    Parton’s partnership with Porter Wagoner, a pencil-thin pompadoured star with flashy rhinestone outfits, was key to her career. She honed her acting skills on his syndicated TV show and he advocated for her to get a record deal at RCA. Their first duet, “The Last Thing On My Mind,” was released in 1967, the same year she started her own publishing company.

    While their duets were often big radio hits, Parton’s solo singles didn’t chart as high at first. With Wagoner as a co-producer, she began to adjust her country warble to a more polished, pop-leaning style.

    She got her first No. 1 solo single with “Joshua,” and reached the Top 5 with the ballad “Coat of Many Colors,” about how her mother sewed together scraps of clothes to make a coat Parton wore “so proudly” even as her peers mocked her for being poor. The song, with its Biblical references and ode to maternal love, was later made into a children’s book and a TV movie.

    In 1973, she had the hit that made her career — “Jolene,” a country music standard with its steady, churning rhythm and Parton’s repeated delivery of the title as she pleads for the woman not to steal her man.

    The song topped the country charts, crossing over to pop and later being released internationally, opening up new audiences for Parton. “Jolene” is one of her most covered compositions, including by Miley Cyrus (Parton’s goddaughter), Olivia Newton-John and The White Stripes.

    She left Wagoner’s show in 1974, amid reports of squabbling between the two, although they continued to record together and Wagoner stayed her producer for years after that. But the relationship turned litigious when Wagoner sued her in 1979 for millions in management fees and royalties.

    A pop crossover star

    She followed “Jolene” with a huge hit in 1974, “I Will Always Love You,” an ode and farewell to Wagoner that helped her win the Country Music Association’s female vocalist of the year back-to-back in 1975 and 1976. She famously turned down Elvis Presley, who wanted to record it, because she would not share publishing rights.

    Decades later, Whitney Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You” became a smash for the soundtrack of her 1992 film “The Bodyguard,” and broke sales records. Houston won a Grammy for her performance in 1994, presented to her by Parton.

    “Here You Come Again,” a pop crossover hit and one of the few she didn’t write, further established Parton as a multi-genre entertainer and brought her first Grammy Award in 1979.

    “A lot of people thought I had totally lost my mind,” she told The Associated Press in 1979 of changing her singing style. “But I had no fear of change. I expected success, but I was braced for failure. I didn’t care if people thought I was wrong. In my own heart, I knew I was doing the right thing.”

    Parton’s other crossover hits included the title song from “9 to 5,” the 1980 comedy starring Parton, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin; and her duet with longtime friend Kenny Rogers, “Islands in the Stream,” written by brothers Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees. In 1987, she collaborated with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris on the million-selling “Trio” album.

    Down home charm

    For millions of fans, she was simply “Dolly,” a mixture of Southern charm, humor and glamour. But she was also considered a feminist role model for holding the reins of her own career, writing her own songs, owning her content and looking after her finances in an entertainment world dominated by men.

    Parton was open to making fun of herself; when she hosted “Saturday Night Live” in 1989 she told the writers that her only restrictions were she wouldn’t curse and she wouldn’t make fun of Jesus. She regularly joked about her breasts or her dumb blonde appearance, but with a wink that she was the one controlling the laughs. In the memoir “My Life So Far,” Fonda remembered Parton’s way with a wisecrack, “usually high raunch,” and a laugh that was “somewhere between a girl’s giggle, an explosive shriek, and a cascade of little bells.”

    After her gown split down the front when she won CMA’s entertainer of the year in 1978, Parton quipped: “My Daddy said that’s what I got for putting 50 pounds of mud in a five-pound bag.”

    Throughout her career, she embraced her glamorous style, often wearing custom curve-hugging rhinestone dresses and bodysuits even if they drew tsk-tsks from others in the industry. Her look was always a part of her larger musical business plan.

    “I knew my songs were good even if I had been ugly as sin,” she told the AP in 2014. “So I thought, ‘Well, I would have probably chose to look this way even if I had been a waitress.’ I mean, this is my look. I mean, I like a lot of makeup. I like a lot of hair. I like flashy clothes. I like to show it off. But that’s just who I am.”

    She married Carl Dean, an asphalt paving contractor, in the mid-1960s; they were together until his death in 2025 at the age of 82. Though rarely seen in public, he was an influence on her career. She told NPR that she wrote “Jolene” about a flirty bank teller who seemed to take an interest in Dean.

    ‘9 to 5’ to Hollywood and Broadway

    In her first major film role, Parton played alongside Fonda and Tomlin as office workers who rebel against their tyrannical boss in “9 to 5.” Critic Roger Ebert called her a “natural-born movie star” and the title song earned her two Grammy Awards and a ranking of 78 on the American Film Institute’s list of top 100 movie songs. Starring roles in the “The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas” and “Steel Magnolias” followed.

    “I never thought of myself as a movie star,” she told AP’s Bob Thomas in 1979. “I knew I’d be a star, but as a singer or as a writer of songs or books or poetry. I wanted to be a famous performer and wear flashy clothes, but singing in movies was not one of my ambitions. My family lived in the mountains and we didn’t see movies.”

    Her love affair with TV and film continued for decades, with appearances alongside Cyrus on “Hannah Montana” and adaptions of her music for Christmas specials, films and streaming series. She also became an author, her books ranging from the memoir “Dolly” to a bestselling novel co-authored by James Patterson, “Run, Rose, Run,”

    The stage adaptation “9 to 5: The Musical” debuted in 2009, and “DOLLY: A True Original Musical” had been set to open in December 2026.

    United States of Dolly

    Beyond her music, Parton’s most lasting legacy might be her generosity and broad appeal.

    When a deadly wildfire swept through the Smokies in 2016, she held an all-star telethon and set up a foundation that sent monthly checks to residents whose homes were damaged or destroyed.

    She opened up her Dollywood theme park in East Tennessee, a major economic driver in Appalachia that draws tourists from around the country, and established the Dollywood Foundation. She wrote books and memoirs, was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame and was given a lifetime achievement award by the Recording Academy. She was selected for the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2025.

    With 55 Grammy nominations and 10 wins, Parton is the third-most nominated woman in Grammy history, only behind Beyoncé and Taylor Swift.

    Parton spanned social and political divides, through multiple generations of fans, urban and rural and in between. In tumultuous election years, it wasn’t uncommon to see “Dolly for President” shirts. But she was strict in not voicing her own political beliefs, often turning aside questions about presidents, candidates, policies and other controversies.

    “I don’t do politics,” Parton told host Jad Abumrad on his hit podcast “Dolly Parton’s America.”

    “I have too many fans on both sides of the fence. Of course, I have my opinion about everything, but I learned years ago to keep your mouth shut about things.”

    When the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation sent out a ballot in 2022 with her name on it, though she said she felt she hadn’t earned it, the voters answered with a “Hello, Dolly.” Parton showed up to the induction ceremony, performed and then put out a rock album.