Penn’s graduate student workers have reached a tentative agreement on a first union contract, averting a strike.
The two-year tentative agreement includes increases to wages among other benefits.
“I am so proud of what we were able to accomplish with this contract,” Clara Abbott, a Ph.D. candidate in literary studies and member of the bargaining committee said in a statement. “We won a historic contract that enshrines gains for grad workers.”
Research and teaching assistants at the university voted to unionize in 2024. The union, which represents about 3,400 graduate student workers, is known as Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania (GET-UP) and is part of the United Auto Workers (UAW). The union has been negotiating with the university since October 2024 for a first contract.
In November, the union’s bargaining members voted to authorize a strike, if called for by the union. In January, they set a strike deadline, announcing that they would walk off the job on Feb. 17 if they had not reached a deal.
A deal was announced in the early morning hours Tuesday.
While tentative agreements had been reached on a number of issues, some remained without consensus ahead of the final bargaining session on Monday before the strike deadline. Those sticking points included wages, healthcare, and discounts on SEPTA passes.
“We are pleased to announce that a tentative agreement has been reached between Penn and GETUP-UAW,” a university spokesperson said in a statement. “Penn has a long-standing commitment to its graduate students and value their contributions to Penn’s important missions. We are grateful to all the members of the Penn community who helped us achieve this tentative agreement.”
A date to vote on the ratification of the tentative agreement has not yet been announced.
The deal comes as earlier this month Pennsylvania state senators and representatives and Philadelphia City Council members addressed letters to the university’s president and provost, urging them to come to an agreement with the student workers and avoid a strike.
“A strike at the University of Pennsylvania would seriously disrupt life for the tens of thousands of Philadelphians who are students, employees, and patients at Penn,” the letter signed by City Council members reads. “As such, we strongly urge the Penn administration to avert a strike by coming to a fair agreement that meets the needs of graduate student employees prior to February 17th.”
Monday’s bargaining session brought tentative agreements on sticking points that included wages and healthcare coverage.
If ratified, the tentative deal would provide graduate student workers with an annual minimum wage of $49,000, which the union has said is a 22% increase over the previous standard. For those paid on an hourly basis, the minimum hourly rate would be $25. Those rates would go into effect in April and a 3% increase would be provided in July 2027.
The deal would also create a fund with $200,000 annually from which graduate student workers could seek reimbursements to cover up to 50% of their dependent’s health insurance premiums.
Ahead of the Monday bargaining session, other tentative agreements had come together around leave. The university agreed to give six weeks of paid medical leave, as well as eight weeks of paid parental leave.
The university and the union had also recently reached a tentative agreement that would create an annual $50,000 fund to help international graduate student workers with expenses associated with reinstating or extending visas.
What would have happened in the event of a strike?
Graduate student workers in the bargaining group teach and conduct research at the university.
Classes, research, and other academic activities would have continued during a strike, according to the university spokesperson. Penn published guidance on how to continue this work in the event of a work stoppage or other disruption.
Striking graduate student workers would not have been paid throughout a work stoppage, but would have continued to be covered by their health insurance for the time being, according to a university statement.
If others employed at the university who are not in the bargaining group chose to join the work stoppage, they would not have been paid and could have faced consequences “up to and including separation from that position, depending on the circumstances of the refusal to work,” according to a university statement.
Ahead of the tentative agreement on Monday, hundreds signed a pledge indicating that they are employed at Penn and would not do the work of those on strike or assign it to others in the event of a work stoppage.
Time may be a flat circle, but that doesn’t stop us from wondering why. A reader asked through Curious Philly, The Inquirer’s forum for answering questions, why there are so many chicken bones on the sidewalks and streets of Philadelphia.
Two architects appear to bebehind Philadelphia’s chicken-bone temple.
First are animals, who forage through trash looking for the final scraps left on discarded bones. Whether they discover drumsticks by ripping through trash bags on the street or from dumpster diving, these animals likely drop the bones wherever they finish with them.
Theculprits most likely to blame are rats, followed by raccoons and opossums, said Rich Foreman, the owner of Dynamite Pest Control in West Philly.
While it’s unclear if rats have a particular taste for fried chicken, the animals are among the least-picky eaters around and will take advantage of any food source, from human scraps to cannibalism. And Philadelphia is seemingly a good place to be a rat, being declared the eighth-rattiest city in the United States in 2025 by the pest-control company Orkin, measured by tracking its new residential rodent treatments.
Adrian Jordan, Vector Control Crew Chief, works keeping the rat population under control, in Philadelphia, Friday, March 7, 2025.
Foreman sees the chicken-bone problem all over the city, as with some restaurants in Port Richmond that called Dynamite when they saw their trash all over the street. He is confident animals were behind the mess, and said he has “never seen” humans do anything of the sort.
Foreman said the city’s twice-weekly trash pickup initiative has not helped, since it means an additional day of easily accessible trash on the street for animals.
He said the best way for people to prevent critters from going into their garbage for bones is to get large, durable trash cans.
“And make sure you put the lid on it,” he said.
Residents with trash arriving at garbage dump site at Caldera Road and Red Lion Road in northeast Philadelphia. AFSCME District Council 33 workers enter their second week on strike, Tuesday, July 8, 2025.
Scavenging animals was the conclusion that the Search Engine podcast reached in a 2024 episode investigating the cause of the chicken bones littering the streets of New York City. Other cities have reported the same problem, including Chicago, Miami, and Washington.
And yet, anecdotal evidence from residents demonstrates that human activity clearly contributes to the problem.
Jessica Griffith has become the David Attenborough of abandoned chicken bones, documenting and appreciating the beauty of what she encounters in the wild. More than 10 years ago, when she lived in South Philly, Griffith, 46, would notice the chicken bones frequently on walks with her dog. She started photographing them and posting the pictures to Facebook, finding the bones everywhere, including a pile on a SEPTA train.
“It was just bizarre to me. Just a phenomenon,” she said.
Jessica Griffith snapped this picture of some discarded chicken bones on the Broad Street Line in 2013.
Her documentation gathered a following, and people started to send their own submissions. Griffith received pictures from all over the globe — people in Seattle, Las Vegas, South Korea, Sweden, and the Dominican Republic all had their own pictures of discarded chicken bones to share.
When Brian Love, 53, walks his miniature pinscher, Ziggy, through the Gayborhood, he often sees other people smiling at his dog. But then he realizes it’s because Ziggy is carrying a chicken bone in his mouth.
Love has complained to his friends about constantly needing to tussle with Ziggy over what the dog sees as a treasure. He has watched people toss chicken bones on the ground, and recently came across a pile of four bones on a mound of snow. Love wishes his neighbors would just use trash bins.
“It’s your food that you’ve literally just had in your mouth. Throw it in the trash,” he said.
Stephanie Harmelin, 43, has the same problem with her dog in West Philly, and she said she accepts the bony sidewalks as part of living in a city. She has seen aggressive squirrels rifling through trash, but also has come across bones at street corners and under park benches that appear to have been dropped by humans.
She said part of the problem is educational. Once, Harmelin pulled her dog away from a bone on the street, and two fellow walkers asked her why.
Harmelin explained how chicken bones are unsafe for most dogs to consume. Cooked bones splinter when a dog chews on them, and the sharp fragments may cause life-threatening damage as they pass through the dog’s digestive track.
One woman was shocked, and said she had not realized chicken bones were potentially dangerous to dogs when she had tossed them to the ground before.
Theo Caraway of Philadelphia walking his dog Cooper, 6 months, Shitzu/Poodle wearing his Eagles jersey along Kensington at Ontario Street on Philadelphia, Friday, September 5, 2025.
Harmelin has had similar conversations with others who were not aware of the hazards bones create. Now, she is less likely to be frustrated at whomever has dropped the chicken bone on her street corner.
“We’re trying to assume what other people know and intend, but we can’t,” she said.
Even if more people get the message, though, it appears you will still be as likely to find a chicken bone on the street as a fallen leaf.
Although they’re a gross nuisance of a sidewalk adornment, Griffith doesn’t really mind them. She said they are more of a curiosity that make Philly what it is, in a small way.
One night in early December, the phones of Radnor High School students started buzzing. Some freshmen girls were getting disturbing messages: A male classmate, they were told, had made pornographic videos of them.
When one of the girls walked into school the next morning, “she said everyone was staring at her,” said her mother, who requested anonymity to protect her daughter’s identity. “All the kids knew. It spread like wildfire.”
So-called AI deepfakes — pictures of a real person manipulated with artificial intelligence,sometimes with “nudify” features that can convert clothed photos into naked ones — have become the talk of school hallways and Snapchat conversations in some area schools.
As Pennsylvania lawmakers have pushed new restrictions cracking down on deepfakes — defining explicit images as child sexual abuse material, and advancing another measure that would require schools to immediately alert law enforcement about AI incidents — schools say they have no role in criminal investigations, and are limited in their ability to police students off campus.
But some parents say schools should be taking a more proactive stance to prepare for AI abuse — and are failing to protect victims when it happens, further harming students who have been violated by their peers.
In the Council Rock School District, where AI-generated deepfakes were reported last March, parents of targeted girls said administrators waited five days to contact the police about the allegations and never notified the community, even after two boys were charged with crimes.
“They denied everything and kind of shoved it under the rug and failed to acknowledge it,” said a mother in Council Rock, who also requested anonymity to protect her daughter’s identity. “Everybody thought it was a rumor,” rather than real damage done to girls, the mother said.
Council Rock spokesperson Andrea Mangoldsaid that the district “recognizes and understands the deep frustration and concern expressed by parents,” and that a police investigation “began promptly upon the district’s notification.”
Mangold said that current laws were “insufficient to fully prevent or deter these incidents,” and that the district was “limited in what we know and what we can legally share publicly” due to student privacy laws.
In Radnor, parents also said the district minimized the December incident. A district message last month said a student had created images of classmates that “move and dance,” and reported that police had not found evidence of “anything inappropriate” — even though police later saidthey had charged a student with harassment after an investigation into alleged sexualized images of multiple girls.
A Radnor spokesperson said the alleged images were never discovered and the district’s message was cowritten by Radnor police, who declined to comment.
The district “approaches all student-related matters with care and sensitivity for those involved,” said the spokesperson, Theji Brennan. She said the district was limited in what it could share about minors.
In both Radnor and Council Rock, parents said their daughters were offered little support — and were told that if they were uncomfortable, they could go to quiet rooms or leave classes early to avoid crossing paths with boys involved in the incidents.
“She just felt like no one believed her,” the Radnor mother said of her daughter.
How an investigation unfolded in Radnor
In Radnor, five freshman girls first heard they were victims of deepfakes on Dec. 2, according to parents of two of the victims who requested anonymity to protect their daughters’ identities. They said boys told their daughters that a male classmate had made videosdepicting them sexually.
In a Snapchat conversation that night, one boy said, “‘Nobody tell their parents,’” a mother of one of the victims recalled. Reading her daughter’s texts, “it quickly went from high school drama to ‘Wow, this is serious.’”
The girls and their parents never saw the videos. In an email to school officials the next morning, parents asked for an investigation, discipline for the students involved, and efforts to stop any sharing of videos. They also asked for support for their daughters.
Schooladministrators began interviewing students. The mother of one of the victims said her daughter was interviewed alone by the male assistant principal — an uncomfortable dynamic, given the subject matter, she said.
One mother said the principal told her daughter that it was the boys’ word against hers, and that he was “so glad nothing was shared” on social media — even though no one knew at that point where videos had been shared, the mother said.
The principal said the school had no authority over kids’ phones, so the girl and her family would need to call the police if they wanted phones searched, the mother said.
Brennan, the Radnor spokesperson, said that administrators contacted Radnor police and child welfare authorities the same day they spoke with families. “The district’s and the police department’s investigations have found no evidence that the images remain or were shared, posted, or otherwise circulated,” she said.
The male classmate acknowledged making videos of the girls dancing in thong bikinis, the parents said police told them. But the app he used was deleted from his phone, and the videos were not on it, the police told them.
The parents didn’t believe the admission.
“I don’t think a 14-year-boy would report a TikTok video of girls in bikinis,” said one of the mothers, who said her daughter was told she was naked and touching herself in videos.
The police told parents they did not subpoena the app or any social media companies, making it impossible to know what was created.
Radnor Police Chief Chris Flanagan declined to comment, as did the Delaware County District Attorney’s Office.
In a message sent to the district community Jan. 16 announcing the end of the police investigation, officials said a student, outside of school hours, had taken “publicly available” photos of other students and “used an app that animates images, making them appear to move and dance.”
“No evidence shared with law enforcement depicted anything inappropriate or any other related crime,” the message said.
A week later, the police released a statement saying a juvenile was charged with harassment after an investigation into “the possible use of AI to generate non-consensual sexualized imagery of numerous juveniles.”
Asked why the district’s statement had omitted the criminal charge or mention of sexualized imagery, Brennan said the statement was also signed by Flanagan, who declined to comment on the discrepancy.
Brennan said the district had provided ongoing support to students, including access to a counselor and social worker.
Parents said the district had erred in failing to initiate a Title IX sexual harassment investigation, instead telling parents they needed to file their own complaints.
“They kept saying, ‘This is off campus,’” the mother said. But “my daughter could not walk around without crying and feeling ashamed.”
Parents say girls were ‘not supported’ in Council Rock
In Council Rock, a girl came home from Newtown Middle School on March 17 and told her mother a classmate had created naked images of her.
“I’m like, ‘Excuse me? Nobody contacted me,’” said the mother, who requested anonymity to protect her daughter’s identity. She called the school’s principal, who she said told her: “‘Oh, my God, I meant to reach out to you. I have a list of parents, I just have not gotten to it’ — you know, really downplaying it.”
The mother and other victims’parents later learned that administrators were alerted to the images on March 14, when boys reported them to the principal. But instead of calling the police, the principal met with the accused boy and his father, according to parents. Police told parents they were contacted by the school five days later. The Newtown police did not respond to a request for comment.
Mangold, the Council Rock spokesperson, declined to comment on the specific timing of the school’s contact with police.
Police ultimately obtained images after issuing a subpoena to Snapchat; in total, there were 11 victims, the parents said.
Through the Snapchat data, police learned that a second boy was involved, the parents said, which made them question what was created and how far it spread.
Parents said they believe there are more pictures and videos than police saw, based on what their daughters were told — and because the delayed reporting to police could have given boys an opportunity to delete evidence.
“That’s kind of what the fear of our daughters is — like, what was actually out there?” said one mother, who also requested anonymity to protect her child’s identity.
Manuel Gamiz, a spokesperson for the Bucks County district attorney, said Newtown Township police had charged two juveniles with unlawful dissemination of sexually explicit material by a minor. Gamiz said the office could not provide further information because the case involved juveniles.
Juvenile cases are not public, but victims’ parents said both boys were adjudicated delinquent. While the boys had been attending Council Rock North High School with their daughters, the district agreed to transfer both after their cases were resolved, according to a lawyer representing four of the parents, Matthew Faranda-Diedrich.
“How can you let this person be roaming the halls?” said Faranda-Diedrich, who said it took formal demand letters in order for the district to transfer the boys.
He accused the district of mishandling the incident and “protecting the institution” rather than the victimized girls.
“They’re putting themselves above these students,” Faranda-Diedrich said.
Parents said school leaders warned their daughters against spreading rumors, and never sent a districtwide message about the incident.
“These girls were victims,” one of the mothers said, “and they were not supported.”
She and the other mothers who spoke to The Inquirer said the incident has deeply affected their daughters, from anxiety around what images may have been created — and how many people saw them — to a loss of trust in school leaders.
Some of the girls are considering switching schools, one mother said.
State law changes and a debate around education about deepfakes
Those changes came in 2024 and 2025, after a scandal over deepfakes of nearly 50 girls at a Lancaster private school.
Another bill that passed the state Senate unanimously in November would require school staff and other mandated reporters to report AI-generated explicit images of minors as child abuse — closing what prosecutors had cited as a loophole when they declined to bring charges against Lancaster Country Day School for failing to report AI images to the police. That legislation is now pending in the House.
Schools can also do more, said Faranda-Diedrich, who also represented parents of victims in the Lancaster Country Day School incident. He has pressed schools to conduct mandated reporter training for staff. “By and large they refuse,” he said.
In Radnor, parents urged the school board at last week’s committee meeting to make changes.
Parent Luciana Librandi walks back to her seat after speaking during a Radnor school board committee meeting last week.
Luciana Librandi, a parent of a freshman who said she had been “directly impacted by the misuse of generative AI,” called for timelines for contacting police following an AI incident, safeguards during student questioning, and annual education for students and parents on AI.
Others called for the district to communicate the criminal charge to families, to enforce existing policies against harassment, and to independently review its response to the recent incident.
Radnor officials said they are planning educational programming on the dangers of making AI images without a person’s consent.
There is somedebate on whether to teach children about “nudify” apps and their dangers, said Riana Pfefferkorn, policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, who has researched the prevalence of AI-generated child sexual abuse material. Alerting kids to the apps’ existence could cause them “to make a beeline for it,” Pfefferkorn said.
While “this isn’t something that is epidemic levels in schools just yet,” Pfefferkorn said, “is this a secret we can keep from children?”
One of the victims’ parents in Radnor said education on the topic is overdue.
“It’s clearly in school,” the mother said. “The fact there’s no video being shown on the big screen in your cafeteria — we don’t live in that world anymore.”
The city’s teachers union has significant concerns with the Philadelphia School District’s sweeping facilities plan, and it has taken them to a City Council committee.
Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr.’s $2.8 billion proposal “does not provide sufficient detail or data to inform binding decisions about school closures, co-location, re-purposing, or widespread impact and disruption that will be incurred,” Philadelphia Federation of Teachers president Arthur Steinberg wrote in a letter to Council’s education committee obtained by The Inquirer.
The appeal, sent late last week, comes as the district prepares for a Tuesday Council hearing on the school blueprint, which currently calls for 20 school closings, six colocations, and 159 modernization projects.
Council members are not the decision-makers — Philadelphia’s school board will ultimately vote on the plan sometime this winter — but as one of the district’s main funders, “you hold powerful levers that may be used to encourage the district to craft a more equitable [plan] that achieves our shared goals of improving student learning conditions and educators’ working conditions,” Steinberg wrote.
About 40% of the district’s nearly $2 billion budget comes from local revenue and city funding, which City Council and Mayor Cherelle L. Parker must approve in the annual city budget by the end of June.
What does the PFT letter say?
Before any decisions are made about what to do with the district’s buildings, the PFT wants system officials to do better by “showing their work and providing all data used to reach their determinations and recommendations for school improvement,” Steinberg wrote.
The teachers union also flagged compliance inconsistencies with the district’s own standards, implementation questions, and “substantial problems with data interpretation and application.”
The conclusions came after Jerry Roseman, the PFT’s longtime director of environmental science, scrutinized the plan. Roseman has decades of experience working with district officials on environmental issues.
The PFT and Roseman want access to all data. The district has released some details officials used to make their calls, but some remain opaque.
“How is the district ensuring that decisions regarding closing and receiving schools are based on comprehensive, up-to-date, and easily verifiable facility data (e.g., lead, asbestos, ventilation, overall condition)?” Steinberg wrote.
The PFT also wants to “definitively show that the facility condition of receiving schools is not, in fact, worse than the facilities thatare slated to close. If students are moving to a facility with worse current conditions, what will happen at the facility to improve it prior to students being moved there?”
District officials outlined some modernization and renovation plans ahead of Tuesday’s Council hearing, but some remain a mystery to the public. Watlington has promised all projects will be detailed before Feb. 26, when he’s scheduled to formally present the plan to the school board.
Don’t close schools or displace students based on incomplete data, PFT says
The school system’s own data contains some inconsistencies, Steinberg said — including some schools judged to be in “good” or “fair” building condition by the district’s metrics that have “severely inadequate” critical systems, such as roofing, windows, or electrical and plumbing systems.
And though the district said it could modernize all 85 school buildings currently in poor or unsatisfactory condition for $2.8 billion, the PFT questioned that price tag as overly optimistic. (City and district officials had previously put the system’s total deferred maintenance cost at $7 billion or more.)
“The cost to fully repair poor-inadequate buildings and systems could actually exceed $3.5 billion,” the PFT said.
The teachers union also highlighted the inequitable distribution of adverse conditions, noting that “Black and brown children and children from economically disadvantaged families are more vulnerable — to health risks, learning disruptions, and the long-term effects of instability and displacement.”
While the information the district has made public is “useful and has value as a ‘baseline,’ it is insufficient for its use in supporting the proposed conclusions, recommendations and other plan details released,” Steinberg said.
Frederick Wiseman, 96, the renowned documentarian who chronicled life at Northeast Philadelphia High School in a 1968 film that caused a yearslong controversy in the city, has died.
Known for his direct cinema style, Mr. Wiseman started his career as a law professor at the Boston University Institute of Law and Medicine before turning to film. His lengthy filmography stretches back to 1967 with the release of Titicut Follies, a controversial exposé focused on the treatment of the patient-inmates of Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Massachusetts.
His follow-up, 1968’s High School, a foundational cinema verite documentary filmed at Northeast High School in Philly between the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, was similarly controversial. In fact, Northeast High leaders found it so incendiary that it did not receive a local premiere until 2001 — 32 years after its initial release — for Mr. Wiseman’s fear of legal action.
At 75 minutes, High School depicted what viewers at the time saw as a bleak vision of life at Northeast High. Contemporary reviews agreed, with Variety writing that it showed the school taught “little but the dreary values of conformity, [and] blind respect for authority.” Newsweek noted that the film showed “high schools are prisons where the old beat down the young.”
In one scene, a guidance counselor tells a student they may not be college material. In another, a teacher tells a girl her legs are too fat for a dress she sewed. Another shows a dean shutting down a student who was complaining about unfairly receiving detention.
As early as mid-1969, Mr. Wiseman refused to make a copy of the film available locally, citing “legal repercussions,” according to Inquirer reports from the time. The Philadelphia Board of Education, meanwhile, declared the documentary “biased” and demanded it be shown to students and faculty.
High School, however, would not receive its first official local public showing until August 2001, at the Prince Music Theater. About 400 people attended, The Inquirer reported, most of whom were faculty or alumni of Northeast High.
Five days later, it aired on the PBS series POV Classic.
“I took him to the annual press tour the year we aired High School and never had a funnier, more incisive companion to compare notes with on the state of cinema,” said Cara Mertes, who was then the executive producer of POV Classic. “He was perpetually young, incredibly smart, and did not suffer fools, and still he was always generous with his time and immense talent as one of America’s greatest chroniclers, in any medium.”
Ten years before, in 1991, High School was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.
“It is everything you need to know about 1968 middle-class America in microcosm,” Mertes said. “So many scenes and characters have taken on iconic status. It captures the tectonic social shifts happening in the most ordinary of exchanges in the day-to-day of a touchstone of American life: the high school experience.”
“Wiseman pulled a fast one on Northeast,” said English department head Irene Reiter after seeing the film. “It was a setup to attack the educational system.”
Former students, however, largely seemed to disagree. Andrea Korman Shapiro, a student featured in a scene in which a vice principal admonishes her for wearing a minidress to prom, called it “accurate.”
“[It’s] a chronicle of the inner life of people not permitted to speak,” she said.
Even others who had more positive experiences at the school argued the film’s strengths outweighed its shortcomings. As Marilyn Kleinberg, a 1978 graduate, put it: “It felt real to me, even though I had an excellent experience.”
Shapiro, meanwhile, said it would be wise to view High School as a “trauma model.”
“A trauma, if it doesn’t get resolved, gets replayed and reenacted,” she said. “There needs to be some kind of learning to let it go.”
The year High School debuted in Philadelphia, Mr. Wiseman told Current, a nonprofit news organization associated with American University’s School of Communication, that his concerns about legal action over the film were perhaps overblown.
“This was soon after the Titicut Follies case, and I didn’t want another lawsuit on my hands,” he said. Possible legal threats, he added, were merely the “vague talk of no one particular individual.”
In 2016, Mr. Wiseman received an honorary Oscar at the 89th Academy Awards for his “masterful and distinctive documentaries” that “examine the familiar and reveal the unexpected.” Making films, he said in his acceptance speech, presented opportunities to “learn something about a new subject.”
“The variety and complexity of the human behavior observed in making one of the films, and cumulatively all of the films, is staggering,” Mr. Wiseman said in the speech. “And I think it is as important to document kindness, civility, and generosity of spirit as it is to show cruelty, banality, and indifference.”
The article has been updated with quotes from Cara Mertes.
Investigators working on the disappearance of “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie’s mother are consulting with Walmart management to develop leads because a backpack the suspect was wearing is sold exclusively at the stores, the Pima County, Arizona, sheriff said Monday.
Nancy Guthrie, 84, was last seen at her Arizona home on Jan. 31 and was reported missing the following day. Authorities say her blood was found on the front porch. Purported ransom notes were sent to news outlets, but two deadlines for paying have passed.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation released surveillance videos of a masked person wearing a handgun holster outside Guthrie’s front door in Tucson the night she vanished. A porch camera recorded video of a person with a backpack who was wearing a ski mask, long pants, a jacket and gloves.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos said in a text message to The Associated Press on Monday that the 25-liter “Ozark Trail Hiker Pack” backpack was the only clothing item that has been “definitively identified.”
“This backpack is exclusive to Walmart and we are working with Walmart management to develop further leads,” Nanos said.
The suspect’s clothing “may have been purchased from Walmart but is not exclusively available at Walmart,” the Pima County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement Monday. “This remains a possibility only.”
Investigators on Sunday announced that a glove discovered near the Guthrie home has been sent for DNA testing. The FBI said that it received preliminary results Saturday and was awaiting official confirmation. The development comes as law enforcement gathers more potential evidence and as the search for Guthrie’s mother heads into its third week. Authorities previously said they had not identified a suspect.
The FBI said the suspect in the surveillance footage is a man about 5 feet, 9 inches tall with a medium build.
Nanos said on Monday that members of Guthrie’s family, including siblings and spouses, are not suspects.
“The family has been nothing but cooperative and gracious and are victims in this case,” Nanos said in a statement.
Authorities have expressed concern about Nancy Guthrie’s health because she needs vital daily medicine. She is said to have a pacemaker and have dealt with high blood pressure and heart issues, according to sheriff’s dispatcher audio on broadcastify.com.
PAWTUCKET, R.I. — Three people, including the suspect, were fatally shot during a Rhode Island youth hockey game Monday, authorities said.
Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Goncalves told reporters that three other victims were hospitalized in critical condition. The shooter died from an apparent self-inflicted gun wound, she said.
While police were not involved in the shooter’s death, authorities were still investigating, she said.
“It appears that this was a targeted event, that it may be a family dispute,” she said.
Goncalves did not provide details about the suspect or the ages of those who were killed, though she said it appeared that both victims were adults.
She said investigators were trying to piece together what happened and speak with witnesses of the shooting inside Dennis M. Lynch Arena in Pawtucket, a few miles outside Providence. They also were reviewing video taken from the hockey game. Unverified footage circulating on social media shows players diving for cover and fans fleeing their seats after popping sounds are heard.
Outside the arena, tearful families and high school hockey players still in uniform could be seen hugging before they boarded a bus to leave the area. Roads surrounding the arena were shut down as a heavy police presence remained and helicopters flew overhead.
Monday’s shooting comes nearly two months after Rhode Island was rocked by a separate gun violence tragedy at Brown University, where a gunman killed two students and wounded nine others. That shooter went on to also fatally shoot a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor. Authorities later found Claudio Neves Valente, 48, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at a New Hampshire storage facility.
“The fortunate thing is that the two incidents are not related, but it is very tragic,” said Pawtucket Mayor Don Grebien. “These are high school kids. They were doing an event, they were playing with their families watching, a fun time, and it turned into this.”
Pawtucket is nestled just north of Providence and right under the Massachusetts state border. A city of just under 80,000, Pawtucket had up until recently been known as the home to Hasbro’s headquarters.
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Israeli prosecutors said Monday that they plan to charge a settler in the killing of a Palestinian activist during a confrontation that was caught on video, opening a rare prosecution of violence by Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank.
Attacks from settlers and home demolitions by authorities have spiked dramatically over the past two years, but the death in July of Awdah Hathaleen has drawn particular attention due to his involvement in the 2025 Oscar-winning film No Other Land, which chronicled Palestinian villagers’ fight to stay on their land. The case also stands out because the confrontation between Palestinians and Yinon Levi, an internationally sanctioned settler, was captured on video from multiple vantage points.
An Israeli judge released Levi from custody six months ago, citing a lack of evidence that he fired the shots that killed Hathaleen.
Israel’s State Attorney General’s office confirmed in a statement Monday that it had initiated proceedings to indict Levi. It did not specify the charges.
Eitan Peleg, an attorney for Hathaleen’s family, said the office had informed them it planned to indict Levi for reckless homicide, triggering a process that allows Levi to contest charges before they’re formally filed.
“Enforcement of the law in cases like this involving Palestinians in the West Bank is very rare, so this is unique,” Peleg told the Associated Press on Monday.
Israel’s military referred questions on the indictment to police, who have not yet responded. Both bodies enforce laws in the area.
More than 3.4 million Palestinians and 700,000 Israelis live in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, territories captured by Israel in 1967 and sought by Palestinians for a future state. The international community overwhelmingly considers Israeli settlement construction in these areas to be illegal and an obstacle to peace.
Palestinians and rights groups say authorities routinely fail to prosecute settlers or hold them accountable for violence. Under National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, investigations into settler attacks have plummeted, according to the Israeli rights group Yesh Din.
Khalil Hathaleen, Awdah’s brother, said the family was glad some measure of justice was being pursued but felt the charge of “reckless homicide” was insufficient.
“It was an intentional killing in broad daylight, with prior intent and premeditation,” he said.
Levi’s attorney, Avichai Hajbi, declined Monday to comment on the coming indictment, which he said he hadn’t received. After the shooting, he told the Associated Press that Levi acted in self-defense, without elaborating. Levi did not answer phone calls Monday.
Parts of confrontation were filmed
Video released last year by B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, showed Levi firing a gun toward the person filming. At the moment that B’Tselem says Hathaleen collapsed, the visuals are jostled but moans of pain can be heard. The group said it obtained the video from the family of Hathaleen, who said he filmed it.
Additional footage obtained by the AP last year showed Levi waving a pistol during the standoff in Umm al-Khair with a group of Palestinians over an excavator that had rolled down from a nearby settlement and damaged Palestinian property earlier in the day.
Alaa Hathaleen, a cousin who filmed the encounter, told AP at the time that he had approached Levi to tell him the group was unarmed and to stop the bulldozing.
In the video, one Palestinian insults Levi and another challenges him to shoot. Levi shoves someone just out of the frame, demands to know who threw stones, and later fires a shot, seemingly away from the crowd. He then fires again and yells toward the crowd to get away from the excavator.
The footage did not show where bullets struck, though other relatives said they saw Awdah Hathaleen fall immediately after shots were fired.
Levi was detained before being released to house arrest. That condition was eventually lifted, too.
Levi was among the Israeli settlers sanctioned by the United States and other Western countries over allegations of violence toward Palestinians in 2024. U.S. President Donald Trump lifted the U.S. sanctions after taking office the following year.
Attacks spike as spotlight grows
Activists and crew members on the film No Other Land have said settler attacks have intensified on the village portrayed since the movie won the Oscar.
Hamdan Ballal, one of the film’s directors, said his family home in Umm al-Khair was subject to another attack on Sunday. Four relatives were arrested during the confrontation, he said.
Ballal said a soldier, who came to their home accompanied by another soldier and a settler-herder, grabbed his brother by the neck and tried to choke him. Neither the army nor the police responded to requests for comment on the incident.
“The year after I won the Oscar, the assaults increased significantly. On a daily basis, settlers come and destroy the fields, destroy the trees, destroy the crops around the house,” he said.
Israeli proof-of-ownership rules spark anger
As prosecutors move to indict Levi and violence persists across the West Bank, Israel is moving ahead with measures to deepen its control over land in the occupied territory.
On Sunday, it announced it would resume a land registration process across the West Bank to require anyone with a claim to land to submit documents proving ownership. Rights groups say the process could strip Palestinians of land they’ve lived on and farmed for generations and transfer vast swaths of land to Israeli state control.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry said the steps countered Palestinian Authority land registration efforts in areas where Israel maintains civil and military control.
The measures follow years of accusations by Palestinians that actions by settlers and the military — campaigns of violence, harassment and demolitions — have pushed them from their land.
The decisions have drawn widespread condemnation as violations of international law, including from countries involved in the ceasefire process in the Gaza Strip and Trump’s Board of Peace.
Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry in a statement on Monday said the measures were part of Israel’s effort to impose a “new legal and administrative reality” that undermines prospects for peace and stability. Egypt’s Foreign Ministry called the move a “flagrant violation” of international law, warning it would escalate tensions in the Palestinian territories and across the region.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres condemned Israel’s decision, calling it not only destabilizing but unlawful according to the International Court of Justice, the U.N.’s highest tribunal, his spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said.
Philadelphia police on Monday released images of a distinctive vehicle that injured a 9-year-old boy in a hit-and-run that happened over the weekend in Southwest Philadelphia.
Just after 12:20 p.m. Saturday, the boy was struck by a midsized crossover SUV on the 2200 block of South 56th Street, police said.
The boy was transported to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where he was listed in stable condition.
Police described the vehicle as a 2010 to 2013 Honda Crosstour, mostly burgundy in color, but with a green front passenger-side door, a white rear passenger-side door, and a black passenger-side fender. The Honda also had a bicycle rack on the roof.
.@Phillypolice is seeking the public’s help in identifying the driver involved in a critical injury hit & run involving a 9-year-old boy. 2200 block of S. 56th St. 2/14 at 12:22PM Vehicle: 2010–13 Honda Crosstour (burgundy w/mismatched panels) Call 911 or 215-686-TIPS w/ info pic.twitter.com/PPjW93rZbt
The driver was described as a Black man around 25 to 35 years old, with short hair and a beard.
The boy suffered a broken leg, according to 6abc, which showed video from a doorbell camera of the boy trying to cross the street and then falling before being hit by the fast-moving Honda.
Police said anyone with information about the vehicle or driver can call 215-686-TIPS or dial 911.
YAOUNDE, Cameroon — A new group of third-country nationals was deported by the United States to Cameroon on Monday, lawyers told the Associated Press, days after it came to light that the Trump administration sent nine people to the Central African nation last month as part of its secretive program to remove immigrants to countries they have no ties with.
Lawyer Alma David of the U.S.-based Novo Legal Group said that a group of migrants who were not Cameroonian citizens arrived on a deportation flight that landed in the capital, Yaounde, on Monday.
David and Cameroon-based lawyer Joseph Awah Fru said they believed there were eight third-country nationals on the plane but had not spoken to them yet. The two lawyers said they are giving legal advice to some of the nine migrants — five women and four men — from other African countries who were deported from the U.S. to Cameroon last month.
The lawyers also expected to offer counsel to the new group of deportees, they said.
“For now, my focus is handling their shock,” Fru said.
A White House official, who was not authorized to comment publicly about the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity, acknowledged the second deportation flight to Cameroon but gave no details.
The New York Times first reported Saturday on the group of nine sent secretly to Cameroon last month. Two of them have since been repatriated to their home countries, David said.
Most of the deportees had protection orders
Eight of those nine previously deported migrants had protection orders granted by a U.S. immigration judge that prevented them from being deported to their home countries for fear of persecution or torture, David said, some of them because of their sexual orientation and others because of political activity.
Deporting them to a third country like Cameroon, from where they could ultimately be sent home, was effectively a legal “loophole,” David said.
“That is why the United States did not send them directly to their countries,” Fru said. “Because there is cause for concern that they might be harmed, that their lives are threatened.”
David said none of the nine sent to Cameroon last month, which included migrants from Zimbabwe, Morocco, and Ghana, had criminal records apart from driving-related offenses. She had no details yet on the eight who arrived on Monday.
African nations are being paid millions
Cameroon, where 93-year-old President Paul Biya has ruled since 1982, is the latest of at least seven African nations to receive deported third-country nationals in a deal with the U.S. Others that have struck deals with the Trump administration include South Sudan, Rwanda, Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana, and Equatorial Guinea.
Some of them have received millions of dollars in payments to take deported migrants, according to documents released by the U.S. State Department. Details of some of the other agreements, including the one with Cameroon, have not been released by the Trump administration.
The Trump administration has spent at least $40 million to deport roughly 300 migrants to countries other than their own in Africa, Central America, and elsewhere, according to a report compiled by the Democratic staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and released last week.
According to internal administration documents reviewed by the AP, there are 47 third-country agreements at various stages of negotiation. Of those, 15 have been concluded and 10 are at or near conclusion.
Immigration policies are a ‘top priority’
The U.S. State Department said Monday in a statement to the AP on the Cameroon deportations that it had “no comment on the details of our diplomatic communications with other governments.”
“Implementing the Trump Administration’s immigration policies is a top priority for the Department of State,” it said, adding, “we remain unwavering in our commitment to end illegal and mass immigration and bolster America’s border security.”
Cameroon’s Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security confirmed there had been deportations to Cameroon in January but didn’t give specific information on third-country migrants. It did not comment on the second plane.
“We are applying the law as written. If a judge finds an illegal alien has no right to be in this country, we are going to remove them. Period,” the department said. “These third-country agreements, which ensure due process under the U.S. Constitution, are essential to the safety of our homeland and the American people.”
The Trump administration has used third-country deportation deals as a deterrent to force migrants who are in the U.S. illegally to leave on their own, saying they could end up “in any number of third countries” if deported.
It has also defended the practice as part of a crackdown to remove what it refers to as dangerous criminals and gang members.
Activists and lawyers say the U.S. should know that sending migrants to third countries with poor human rights records risks them being denied due process and exposed to abuse.
Last year, the U.S. deported five nationals from Vietnam, Jamaica, Cuba, Yemen, and Laos to the southern African nation of Eswatini. The deportees had all been convicted of serious criminal offenses, including murder, attempted murder, and rape. They had all served their criminal sentences in the U.S.
Four of them have been held at a maximum-security prison in Eswatini for more than six months without charges and have not been allowed to meet in person with a lawyer. Their detentions are the subject of two legal challenges in Eswatini.
Eswatini, which is ruled by a king as Africa’s last absolute monarchy, will be paid $5.1 million to take up to 160 third-country deportees, according to details of the deal released by the State Department. The Eswatini king, Mswati III, has long been accused of clamping down on pro-democracy protests in a country where political parties are banned while using public money to fund his lavish lifestyle.
