The Trump administration said Tuesday that it still wanted to defend President Donald Trump’s executive orders sanctioning several law firms, abruptly reversing course from its position a day earlier.
Judges last year blocked Trump’s orders aimed at the firms, which had hired his perceived foes or took on cases he disliked. The Justice Department was appealing those rulings and trying to restore the orders, which demanded that the firms lose access to government contracts and buildings.
On Monday evening, the agency said in a filing that it wanted to abandon the appeals, essentially admitting defeat. The law firms hailed that decision, with one saying the administration “capitulated.”
But in a startling turnaround less than 24 hours later, the administration wrote in a brief filing in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that it was seeking to withdraw its motion from a day earlier.
The Justice Department did not explain in the filing why it was backpedaling, stating only that it was its prerogative to keep appealing and adding that the court had not yet granted its request to dismiss the case. The White House declined to comment, referring questions to the Justice Department. A spokeswoman for the agency also declined to comment.
The four law firms involved — WilmerHale, Jenner & Block, Perkins Coie and Susman Godfrey — had all filed lawsuits challenging Trump’s sanctions, saying they could devastate their businesses.
Judges sided with all four firms last year, issuing often scathing rulings that rebuked the president’s orders as retaliatory and unconstitutional.
“The order shouts through a bullhorn: If you take on causes disfavored by President Trump, you will be punished!” U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, wrote while blocking sanctions for WilmerHale.
The administration has repeatedly defended the orders as lawful and criticized judges who ruled against them. In court papers and during hearings, the Justice Department has said the orders were not meant as punishment and suggested that the firms’ lawsuits infringed on Trump’s speech.
The government’s contradictory filings this week came ahead of a looming deadline in its appeals. The Justice Department’s opening brief in the case is due Friday, while the firms have briefs due in late March.
The firms criticized Trump’s executive orders and his administration’s reversal alike on Tuesday. The Justice Department “offered no explanation to either the parties or the court for its reversal,” Perkins Coie said in a statement.
“Yesterday evening, the Administration told the Court that it gave up and wouldn’t even try to defend its unconstitutional executive orders,” Susman Godfrey said in a statement. “Today, it reversed course. Regardless, Susman Godfrey will defend itself and the rule of law — without equivocation.”
In its filing on Tuesday, the Justice Department said the administration contacted attorneys for the firms and that they all opposed the move.
The filing included a statement attributed to the firms that said they “oppose the government’s unexplained request to withdraw yesterday’s voluntary dismissal, to which all parties had agreed. Under no circumstances should the government’s unexplained about-face provide a basis for an extension of its brief.”
The New York Times first reported Tuesday that the government would try to continue defending the executive orders.
While the firms involved in the appeals had fought Trump’s orders, other legal practices instead sought to avoid such battles. Nine firms struck deals with him to lift or avoid similar penalties, leading to intense upheaval and outrage across the legal industry.
The first firm to strike an agreement, Paul Weiss, pledged $40 million in pro bono work on issues that included assisting veterans. Eight more firms, including some of the country’s wealthiest, struck deals for increasingly large amounts as well, with combined pledges of pro bono work reaching nearly $1 billion.
These deals sent shock waves across the legal industry. The firms that reached the agreements defended them as needed to keep their businesses afloat, and their leaders vowed that the deals would not change their work.
But many attorneys were deeply skeptical of these pledges, expressing outrage internally as well as publicly. Lawyers at some firms resigned in protest following deals with Trump, while others left places that made deals and joined offices that were fighting his executive orders.
Philip C. Ricci, 90, formerly of Conshohocken, retired Catholic monsignor, founding pastor emeritus at Mary, Mother of the Redeemer Parish in North Wales, talented pianist, singer, artist, and mentor, died Saturday, Feb. 14, of complications after a fall at Villa St. Joseph senior living community in Darby.
Ordained in 1965 by Cardinal John Krol, Msgr. Ricci was named founding pastor of Mary, Mother of the Redeemer Parish in 1987. Over the next 23 years, until his retirement in 2010, Msgr. Ricci worked many 16-hour days, made spiritual house calls on bicycle, spurred significant fundraising, and helped grow the Montgomery County parish from 600 founding families to 3,500.
The Inquirer wrote about his house calls in 1987 and opened the story with: “His charge is to spread the word of God, and the Rev. Philip C. Ricci does so in a most unconventional fashion — on a 20-year-old bicycle from Sears.”
His niece, Christine, said: “He could talk to anybody about anything.”
Msgr. Ricci lived and held services in a 200-year-old farmhouse from 1987 until the new church building was completed. Pope John Paul II elevated him to monsignor in 2003.
He was active with school activities, and his homilies were often about mercy and compassion. In 2010, he told members of his congregation at a retirement celebration: “We must always accept people where they are and then allow God’s grace to work in patient understanding.”
In an online tribute, colleagues at St. Matthew Parish in Conshohocken said his “kindness, wisdom, and steady presence touched countless lives.” Others called him “the perfect priest” and “the epitome of what a Catholic priest should be.” One friend said: “He was without a doubt the nicest person I have ever met.”
In a tribute, his family said: “His priesthood was not simply a role. It was the core of who he was.”
Msgr. Ricci first served in the 1960s as a chaplain at the old Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia and pastor at the Riverview Home for the Aged and St. Margaret’s Home for Girls. He went on to be assistant pastor at St. Joseph Parish in Ambler, St. Stanislaus Parish in Lansdale, St. Anastasia Parish in Newtown Square, and St. Margaret Parish in Narberth.
In 1974, he became spiritual director of the college division at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary. He also earned a master’s degree in spirituality from Creighton University in Nebraska.
Ministering to people, no matter where he was, he told the Main Line Times in 2010, was personal. “You don’t go out forming community,” he said. “You go out and form one-on-one. I can’t separate who I am as a man, as a Christian, and as a priest.”
The Inquirer published a story about Monsignor Ricci making spiritual house calls on his bicycle in 1987.
Msgr. Ricci played piano and sang before church services and after Communion. He directed choirs, and friends presented him with his own piano at his retirement.
He returned to his family home in Conshohocken after leaving Mary, Mother of the Redeemer but continued to assist others at nearby parishes and visit those in hospitals and nursing homes. “Father was a Renaissance man, an artist, musician, writer, deep thinker,” a former colleague said on Facebook. “He could speak about the liturgy or the Eagles, the football team or the band. He related well to everyone regardless of age, religion, or background.”
Philip Cosmo Ricci was born Sept. 26, 1935, in Conshohocken. He graduated from the old Conshohocken High School, took night classes at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and, inspired by his parents, entered St. Charles Borromeo Seminary to study the priesthood.
“When the Lord wants you, he gets you,” he told the Main Line Times. “I couldn’t fight it. It was always there.”
Monsignor Ricci’s house calls were featured in this 1987 Inquirer article.
He played piano in a dance band when he was young and enjoyed gardening. He was good at drawing and cooking. He followed the Eagles, Phillies, and 76ers, and invented a beanbag toss game the family played at gatherings.
It was fitting, his niece said, that he died on Valentine’s Day because he embraced love and service to others. “Faith for Uncle Phil was never theoretical,” she said. “It was lived. It was action. It was presence.”
In addition to his niece, Msgr. Ricci is survived by his brothers, John and Francis, and other relatives. A sister died earlier.
Last April, Raymond Bautista donned a ski mask and black clothing and waited for the mother of his unborn baby to leave her Hatboro apartment to head to work.
Around 4:30 a.m., Bautista, 37, of Allentown, attacked the woman. He hit her from behind, and kicked her in the back and stomach. While she was on the ground, he got on top of her and punched her face. And when she began to scream, he ran.
The woman, a coworker of Bautista’s who was 15 weeks pregnant with his child and had recently told him she planned to keep the baby, suffered nasal fractures and abrasions, according to police.
On Tuesday, Bautista pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and no contest to aggravated assault of an unborn child.
He was sentenced to four to six years in prison.
The woman said in a statement read aloud by prosecutors the assault scars her to this day.
“I lost my peace of leaving home every morning,” she said. “… No woman deserves to be treated this way.”
After the assault, while the woman’s clothing was still soiled with blood, police asked whether she could think of anyone who would want to hurt her. The only person who came to mind, she said, was Bautista, a coworker at a Hatfield-based food processing company.
According to the affidavit of probable cause for Bautista’s arrest, the woman said that after he learned that she was pregnant with his child, he told her to take an emergency contraceptive. He also said he “did not want any involvement with the child’s life,” the document said
Bautista initially denied leaving his Allentown residence that morning and told police he had been sleeping.
Investigators later recovered footage of Bautista’s vehicle being driven from Allentown to Hatboro that morning, as well as clothing resembling the attire worn by the woman’s assailant when he was captured in Ring doorbell camera footage of the assault.
Presented with that evidence, police said, Bautista admitted to the crime. He told investigators he attacked the woman because she had been “talking [expletive]” about him at work.
Montgomery County Court Judge Steven T. O’Neill accepted Bautista’s guilty plea and, in addition to sentencing him to years in prison, ordered him to have no contact with the woman and to attend domestic violence counseling.
O’Neill commended the victim for facing Bautista in court and said that in her statement, he had “heard her courage.”
“I hope you’ve heard the same,” the judge told Bautista.
A former Lumberton Township mayor admitted in court Mondaythat she drove drunk with her toddler in the car last St. Patrick’s Day, bringing to a close a case that prompted calls for her resignation.
Gina LaPlaca, 46, who served as mayor until December and remains a member of the township committee, pleaded guilty before Burlington County Superior Court Judge Craig Ambrose to driving under the influence and child endangerment, according to Burlington County prosecutors.
Under a plea agreement, LaPlaca will enter a three-year diversionary program for first-time offenders. She also agreed to attend regular Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and install an ignition interlock device in her vehicle. Over the last year, she has completed inpatient and outpatient treatment, prosecutors said Tuesday. LaPlaca told the judge Monday she had installed an interlock device in October.
Prosecutors said a motorist captured LaPlaca on cell phone video driving a blue 2019 BMW erratically on Route 38, swerving across the center line and nearly striking a utility pole. After the driver alerted police, officers located LaPlaca and found an open container of alcohol in the vehicle, authorities said.
LaPlaca told officers she had been drinking before picking up her 2-year-old son from daycare, prosecutors said. At the time, her blood-alcohol concentration measured 0.30% — more than three times New Jersey’s legal threshold for intoxication.
In the weeks after her arrest, the township committee formally censured LaPlaca for alleged ethical violations. Despite public outcry and calls from state lawmakers to step down, she declined to resign as mayor and remained in office until her term ended in December.
An attempt to reach LaPlaca on Tuesday was unsuccessful. After her arrest last year, her husband, Jason Carty, told The Inquirer that she was “on a path to recovery” and asked for privacy.
As an expanding Middle East war entered its fourth day, the Trump administration gave shifting rationales for its decision to attack Iran, even as U.S. officials with access to intelligence reports said they saw no sign the country had posed an imminent threat to the United States.
President Donald Trump and his top national security aides, defending a conflict that has tepid public backing and is incurring escalating risks, emphasized Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles rather than its nuclear program as the principal threat. But they provided different descriptions of the danger.
At his first public event since the attack began, Trump on Monday never mentioned a key part of his original rationale for the war: deposing Iran’s theocratic regime.
Instead, he emphasized thatIran would “soon” have missiles that could hit targets inside the United States.
What Trump had outlined over the weekend as an effort to devastate Tehran’s rulers so that the Iranian people could take over was, by Monday, “not a so-called regime change war,” in the words of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Hegseth told reporters at the Pentagon that the Islamic Republic was building sophisticated missiles and other conventional weapons to shield its plans for a nuclear bomb. “Iran had a conventional gun to our head as they tried to lie their way to a nuclear bomb,” he said.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a third line of reasoning. The United States, he said, knew Israel was going to strike Iran, which would lead to counterattacks against U.S. forces and potential casualties, and decided to strike first to minimize the risk.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks to reporters as he arrives for an intelligence briefing with top lawmakers on Iran, at the Capitol in Washington, Monday, March 2, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Iran’s voluminous missile arsenal, which was thinned by U.S.-Israeli strikes last June but still considered dangerous, consists mostly of short-range missiles threatening U.S. bases and allies in the Middle East. Over the last two years, Iran has fired those missiles in response to attacks on its territory or interests, but not preemptively.
As for an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of directly reaching the United States, the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency reported last year that Iran could have that weapon by 2035 “should Tehran decide to pursue the capability.”
Meanwhile, more than three days into the conflict and after more than a thousandairstrikes, U.S. and Israeli weapons so far have largely left Iran’s main nuclear installations untouched, suggesting those sites — significantly damaged last June — are not currently seen as a priority threat.
The White House’s shifting public goals for the war, and questions about the intelligence behind them, have contributed to a lack of clarity about when Trump might declare an end to the largest military operation since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
As the war widened across the Middle East, Trump said operations against Iran could go on for four to five weeks, or longer. In an interview with the New York Post, the president said he would not rule out sending in U.S. ground troops, but added that they are “probably” not needed.
President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in the Oval Office at the White House, Tuesday, March 3, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Republican lawmakers have largely backed Trump’s decision to strike Iran, citing its long record of terrorism against the United States and its allies, and its nuclear ambitions.
But Rubio’s decision to pin the justification for the attack on Israel angered prominent MAGA commentators and conservative pundits, who said an operation of this magnitude should be done squarely in the interests of the United States.
“My own feeling is no one should have to die for a foreign country. I don’t think those four service members died for the United States,” said Trump advocate and podcast host Megyn Kelly, referring to the first four acknowledged U.S. deaths in the war, a toll that later rose to six. “I think they died for Iran or for Israel.”
In a social media post Monday night, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi piled on. “Mr. Rubio admitted what we all knew: U.S. has entered a war of choice on behalf of Israel. There was never any so-called Iranian ‘threat,’” he wrote.
This week, the House and Senate are poised to vote on measures that would attempt to halt further military attacks in Iran without lawmakers’ approval, as Democrats frame the conflict as an “illegal war” launched without a clear rationale or an authorization from Congress.
A Washington Post flash poll found that 52% of Americans oppose the strikes “strongly” or “somewhat,” while 39% support them.
Even as the administration’s public case for war shifted, several U.S. officials with access to classified intelligence assessments said there was no information before the strikes began indicating Iran has made sudden, worrisome progress in its missile or nuclear programs.
“There was no imminent threat to the United States of America by the Iranians. There was a threat to Israel,” Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.), the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters Monday.
Others said Iran’s weakness, amid severe economic problems and protests that challenged the regime, provided an opportunity to strike.
A former U.S. intelligence official said American spy agencies were concerned by the speed with which Iran reconstituted its missile program after the 12-day war in June. “If you wait a year from now, maybe the regime will have stabilized, the missile program will be more populated and federated,” said the former official, who spoke before the strikes began and requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive subject.
With Trump a potentially lame duck president in a year’s time, “Right now is the sweet spot,” he said.
Multiple legal experts argued that none of the administration’s public explanations for the attacks appeared to constitute a legitimate rationale to enter into such a major conflict, especially without authorization from Congress.
“Having a weapons capacity is not the same thing as presenting an imminent threat of an armed attack,” said Tess Bridgeman, a former senior lawyer on the National Security Council during the Obama administration.
The first days of U.S. and Israeli airstrikes appeared focused on decapitating Iran’s leadership and blunting its ability to retaliate by destroying missile infrastructure and disrupting its military command network.
Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Monday that the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency has seen no “major military activity targeting the nuclear facilities” in Iran since the U.S.-Israeli attacks began early Saturday. That assessment, he said, is based on information from Iran as well as multiple satellite images, including those provided “by the U.S. and others.”
Grossi’s assessment came as Tehran charged there was an attack on its Natanz enrichment facility and as Israel warned civilians to evacuate areas around Isfahan, a major center of Iran’s nuclear program.
Satellite imagery of Natanz captured Monday showed damage to three buildings on the site, damage that Grossi indicated was fairly minor. Vehicle and personnel entrances to underground portions of the facility where centrifuges are kept appear to have been hit, according to the imagery.
The United States and Israel have long accused Iran of seeking to build a nuclear weapon under the cover of enriching uranium for civilian purposes. Last year’s strikes targeting Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities and other sites significantly delayed the program, U.S., Israeli, and IAEA officials said. Trump and Hegseth said Iran’s nuclear ambitions had been “obliterated.”
The Defense Intelligence Agency in a report produced before those strikes assessed that since 2019, in the wake of Trump leaving a nuclear deal with Iran that limited its nuclear program, the Islamic Republic had boosted uranium enrichment and expanded its stockpiles to the point that the time required to produce sufficient weapons-grade uranium for a first nuclear device had fallen to “probably less than one week.”
The actual time to produce a weapon ranged from two to four months, the agency estimated, according to people familiar with the assessments who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
The June strikes targeted Iran’s main enrichment plants at Natanz and Fordow. But the Iranians had been manufacturing centrifuge cascades long before the strikes and likely were storing them at other locations, the people said. “So their ability to do a breakout may or may not have been dependent at all” on the sites that were bombed, one person said.
Post-strike, the DIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies determined that the time Iran now needed to produce enough weapons-grade uranium to build a warhead in extremis — without rebuilding the damaged sites — had lengthened to between four and eight months, people familiar with the matter said.
Uncertainties about Iran’s nuclear program are heightened by the fact that IAEA inspectors left the country last July and haven’t returned.
“The return of the IAEA inspectors will be further delayed as a result of the renewed conflict, and without effective IAEA monitoring, the whereabouts and security of Iran’s highly enriched uranium will now become even more uncertain,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association think tank.
In the meantime, Kimball said, “There hasn’t been any sign that Iran is rebuilding anything.”
The Republican-led House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released videos Monday of the closed-door depositions of former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, part of its investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Bill Clinton appeared before the committee on Friday, marking the first time a former president had been compelled to testify before Congress under a subpoena. During his lengthy deposition, the former president sought to distance himself from Epstein, saying he had no knowledge of Epstein’s crimes and stopped associating with him years before his first guilty plea, in 2008.
“There was nothing that I saw when I was around him that made me realize that he was trafficking women,” Clinton told the committee. “I saw nothing, and I did nothing wrong.”
In her hours-long deposition Thursday, Hillary Clinton said she had no recollection of ever meeting Epstein and had known Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell only “casually, as an acquaintance.” Hillary Clinton derided the deposition as “political theater” and sharply questioned why she was being deposed.
House Republicans have issued subpoenas to several people — mostly Democrats — mentioned in the millions of files related to the federal government’s Epstein investigation that have been released by the Justice Department.
They have not called in President Donald Trump, who had a long-standing friendship with Epstein. The president has said that he knew Epstein socially in Palm Beach, Fla., and that they had a falling out in the mid-2000s. Trump has maintained that he did not know about Epstein’s criminal behavior.
Here are some of the highlights of the depositions:
Bill Clinton says Larry Summers connected him with Epstein
In his deposition, Bill Clinton said his former treasury secretary Larry Summers, then the president of Harvard University, first recommended that he strike up an acquaintance with Jeffrey Epstein.
As Clinton recalled, Summers — who recently resigned his positions at Harvard because of his association with Epstein — called Clinton shortly after he left office, in late 2001 or early 2002, when Clinton was setting up a charitable foundation.
Summers told him of “a man named Jeffrey Epstein” who had made a multimillion-dollar contribution to brain research, Clinton said, and described Epstein as an “information-hungry person” who owned a “massive airplane” and “wanted to spend some time talking to me about economics and politics.”
Clinton said he saw the plane as an economical means of doing international travel for his foundation.
After taking about a half-dozen trips aboard Epstein’s jet over a couple of years, Clinton said, he quit doing so because his foundation had launched and he had offers of transportation from people he knew better.
Clinton said he considered Epstein “an interesting man, but I didn’t think he was really interested in what I was doing.”
Clinton told the committee that he first learned of Epstein’s crimes “in 2008, when he was prosecuted. There was nothing that I saw when I was around him that made me realize that he was trafficking women.”
At another point, he told the committee, “I don’t believe any law enforcement agency has ever asked me [about Epstein], and I don’t know enough to volunteer anything.”
Hillary Clinton says she ‘knew nothing about’ Epstein
Hillary Clinton repeatedly testified that she did not know Epstein. She characterized him as not being on her “radar,” but was told in preparation for the deposition that she and Epstein both attended an event at the White House that was put on by the White House Historical Association.
“I have no recollection, in any way, of ever having any conversation at the White House or in any other place or on any kind of device of any sort. I knew nothing about him,” Hillary Clinton said when asked if she had any communication with Epstein.
She testified that she knew Maxwell “casually” as someone who dated an acquaintance of hers — Ted Waitt, a software developer.
Waitt, Clinton said, brought Maxwell as a guest to the wedding of the Clintons’ daughter, Chelsea, in 2010.
Clinton said that she did not consider Maxwell a friend and that her daughter would have been “friendlier” with Maxwell, but that she “had no idea” how often they interacted.
Clinton declined to characterize the relationship between Maxwell and Bill Clinton.
“He’ll have to answer that,” she said when asked if Bill Clinton and Maxwell were friends.
Bill Clinton reacts to hot tub photo during Asia trip
Bill Clinton was shown a photo of himself in a hot tub that was among the Epstein files and that has generated much attention.
He recalled that it was taken while he was in Brunei at the end of a long leg of one of his Asia trips.
He and his party, including Epstein, were guests at a hotel owned by the sultan of Brunei, with whom Clinton had established a warm relationship while he was president, and spent time in the hot tub and pool, which were located on the same floor as some of their suites.
“I swam around. I sat in the hot tub for five minutes or whatever it was. I got up and went to bed,” Clinton said.
Bill Clinton denies having visited Epstein’s island
A Democrat on the committee, Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico, grilled Bill Clinton on reports that he had been on Epstein’s island.
Clinton repeatedly denied he had ever visited the island. He also denied a report, cited by Stansbury, that he had visited Epstein’s home while he was president.
Bill Clinton says he’s not been in touch with Maxwell for a decade
Bill Clinton said his first recollection of meeting Maxwell was on his first flight aboard Epstein’s plane, when she was working for the financier.
Clinton’s relationship with her “lasted longer and was more extensive than my relationship with Mr. Epstein,” he said, because she started “going with” Waitt, the tech billionaire, who became a major donor to the Clinton Foundation.
Clinton said that, by his recollection, he has not been in contact with her for a decade or more.
He said he did not learn about her participation in Epstein’s sexual abuse of minor girls until “the first evidence against her came out in 2019.”
Hillary Clinton’s deposition was paused after photos were shared
Nearly 80 minutes into the deposition, Hillary Clinton’s lawyer interrupted Republican questioning, saying pictures of the former secretary of state testifying had been posted online.
The attorney argued that the pictures, which had been shared by Rep. Lauren Boebert (R., Colo.), violated the committee’s rules — and noted that the Clintons had repeatedly asked that the depositions be held in public.
Visibly frustrated, Hillary Clinton told Republicans that if they were going to be sharing pictures of the interview, she was “done.”
“You can hold me in contempt from now until the cows come home. This is just typical behavior,” she said. “We all are abiding by the same rules.”
The hearing was then paused. When the interview resumed, Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.), the committee’s chairman, said he advised Republicans that no pictures or videos of the deposition could be released.
The Clintons were accompanied by trusted lawyers
The Clintons were accompanied by two lawyers who for decades have been among the most trusted and protective allies in their orbit.
David Kendall is the Clintons’ longtime personal attorney, and Cheryl Mills was deputy White House counsel during Bill Clinton’s presidency and chief of staff to Hillary Clinton at the State Department. Both are known for their discretion and were part of the legal team that defended Bill Clinton in his 1999 Senate impeachment trial, in which he was acquitted.
A business that operates an industrial site in West Goshen Township that leaked hazardous discharge into a nearby creek could face fines, municipal officials said this week.
Several people spotted a “milky white” substance in Goose Creek, near Nields Street in West Chester, on Saturday. The borough received reports of it around 12:20 p.m., according to a news release from the borough on Monday.
The “illicit discharge” stemmed from a pipe at Atmos Technologies, at 216 Garfield Ave. in West Goshen Township, near Henderson High School. The leak was plugged within roughly an hour after reports were initially made, officials said.
It is not known how long the pipe had been leaking before residents reported it.
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection is investigating the spill to find out how much of it spread into the creek and what remediation efforts are needed to protect the public, officials said.
Atmos Technologies told DEP that chlorinated water was released to a containment area, Robyn Briggs, a DEP spokesperson, said in an email Tuesday. It mixed with a manufactured product known as “Long Duration Foam AC-645,” forming a foaming agent.
DEP alerted Aqua Pennsylvania, a public water provider that serves portions of Chester County. It continues to monitor the downstream flow, but said in a post online that residents’ drinking water was not affected.
People had reported fish kills — mass deaths of fish, usually prompted by environmental stress or pollution — and “noticeable pollution” of the creek over the weekend, but Briggs said no further fish kills had been reported since and the creek appeared clear, with some foaming, on Sunday and Monday.
This suburban content is produced with support from the Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Foundation and The Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Editorial content is created independently of the project donors. Gifts to support The Inquirer’s high-impact journalism can be made at inquirer.com/donate. A list of Lenfest Institute donors can be found at lenfestinstitute.org/supporters.
An 835-acre property in Burlington County once threatened by development will be sold to the New Jersey Conservation Foundation for $15 million, according to a deal announced Tuesday.
Evesham Township plans to incorporate the new property into its already popular Black Run Preserve, swelling the size of that 1,300-acre holding widely used by hikers, bird-watchers, and cyclists.
Developer Linda Samost has agreed to the sale, with the price $2.4 million less than the property’s full market value, the announcement said.
“We are eager to move forward with the project so that the community can experience and appreciate the natural beauty of this land for years to come,” Samost said in a statement.
File: A 2025 of a trail at Black Run Preserve off Kettle Run Road in Evesham, Burlington County, N.J.
Tuesday’s announcement noted, however, that while a sale contract has been signed, the foundation still needs to raise more money before taking ownership. It plans to launch a fundraising campaign with partners that will allow for public contributions.
The property has been the site of a fight over its future since 2024, when Kettle Run Investments LP, led by the Samost family, submitted plans to the New Jersey Pinelands Commission to build 250 single-family homes on a portion of the tract.
That plan drew vehement opposition from the community, the nonprofit Pinelands Alliance advocacy organization, and local officials.
At the same time, the Pinelands Commission was rezoning a large area from rural development (RD-3) to Pinelands Forest Area, which would have greatly reduced the amount of development that could have taken place on Samost’s property.
Linda Samost told The Inquirer last year that her “inclinations” were to have the land “benefit the community and the ecosystem, the environment,” rather than be developed.
But the price had to be right, and the New Jersey Conservation Foundation began negotiating with Samost.
In November, the Burlington County commissioners authorized $5 million from open-space funds to help with a purchase. The Pinelands Commission, an independent state agency, also approved a $3 million grant toward the purchase.
It was not immediately clear how much additional money the foundation needs to raise.
The Samost property is situated between Kettle Run, Tomlinson Mill, Kenilworth, and Egret Roads in Evesham.
It is part of New Jersey’s Pinelands and the source of the Black Run, a tributary that feeds Rancocas Creek. The property is habitat for numerous species, including the threatened Pinelands tree frog.
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Robyn Jeney, a New Jersey Conservation Foundation regional manager, said the preservation means “water quality, critical plant and animal habitat, and the overall ecological integrity of the area will be protected for generations to come.”
“This agreement marks a historic milestone for Evesham Township and a victory for every resident who treasures our natural landscape,” said Evesham Township Mayor Jaclyn Veasy.
Jane Dean, board president of the Friends of the Black Run Preserve, said the deal means “this place will remain as it should be, unbroken, instructive, and alive.”
Susan Grogan, executive director of the Pinelands Commission, called it “the best possible outcome for this property.” She noted the property has long been a “top target” by the commission for preservation.
When Coach opened a store at the Cherry Hill Mall in November, mall executives were ecstatic — even though it’s been 85 years since the high-end retailer was founded.
Coach is as hot as ever. And its new shop in Cherry Hill is just another sign of the South Jersey mall’s success, according to leaders with Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust (PREIT), which owns the complex.
“Cherry Hill is clearly a dominant fashion property,” Paula Charles, PREIT’S first vice president of leasing, said in a recent interview.
In the competitive Philadelphia market, “the better retailers have gravitated toward the better assets,” including Cherry Hill, added Joe Aristone, PREIT’s chief revenue officer.
They noted that top-tier retailers increasingly include legacy brands — long-established companies like Coach, Zara, and Levi’s, that are making a nostalgic, social media-fueled comeback with younger consumers.
Employee Alex Costa (right) assists Alessandra Bruno as she shops for purses with husband, Luke Baur, and their 20-month-old daughter, Rosalina, at the Coach store at the Cherry Hill Mall.
In the Philadelphia area, these retailers have maintained a presence along shopping corridors in Center City and at higher-performing malls like Cherry Hill and King of Prussia, which is owned by Simon Property Group.
Prior to the Cherry Hill opening, Coach operated shops in King of Prussia and Marlton, as well as off-price locations at the Philadelphia Premium Outlets near Pottstown, the Gloucester Premium Outlets in Blackwood, and the Tanger Outlets in Atlantic City. The brand also has an outpost at the Philadelphia International Airport.
Coach spokespeople did not return requests for comment about their investment in the region.
PREIT executives declined to comment on sales so far at their new Coach store, but said brand and mall executives are pleased with how the store is doing — and what that means going forward.
“Coach has had a strategy to make sure that they capture Gen Z,” a demographic that PREIT executives also want to attract and retain as they age, Charles said.
Why Gen Z and millennials love Coach
Joe Williams, of Magnolia, N.J., buys a handbag for his daughter, Samantha Williams, at the Coach store at the Cherry Hill Mall.
About two years ago, Breana Stringer, now 26, noticed that many of her friends were going out with Coach bags. And when she’d open TikTok, she said, the platform’s algorithm showed her videos of other users’ Coach collections.
Up until that point, the Fishtown resident had been an accessory minimalist: “I was very much an ‘if it doesn’t fit in my pocket, I’m not bringing it’” type of person.
But Stringer said she was influenced by her friends and TikTok to start buying Coach bags, mostly secondhand (though she has received new Coach bags as gifts). She has come to enjoy styling them with her outfits.
To Stringer, Coach’s appeal to Gen Z consumers is simple, she said: “They’re affordable in terms of a luxury name brand, and they’re vintage styles.”
New Coach bags start at $95 for a short shoulder bag, while larger purses can cost $500 or more. At outlet stores and secondhand shops, prices are lower.
In South Philly, Stephanie Gonzalez, 33, has restored and resold dozens of vintage Coach bags, mostly to Gen Z and millennial women.
She said these women see the Coach brand as “timeless.”
For Gen Z, “what is happening is they are really into Y2K, late-’90s, early-’90s nostalgia,” Gonzalez said. “TikTok has been a big hub for people” to share their love of Coach and brands that were popular in those years.
As for other legacy brands, Stringer said some of her Gen Z friends have also started wearing Cartier rings, which have been around since the mid-1800s and can cost more than $1,000. It’s a trend Stringer has yet to get behind, she said, because she has a tendency to lose small accessories: “I’m less likely to lose a bag.”
How legacy brands are boosting Philly-area malls
Products are displayed at the Coach store at the Cherry Hill Mall.
Cherry Hill Mall isn’t the only local shopping center to have welcomed new legacy retailers recently.
In the past six months, Abercrombie & Fitch, Columbia Sportswear, Lacoste, and New Balance have opened new stores at the King of Prussia Mall, and an Adidas outpost is also set to open there soon.
At the Philadelphia Premium Outlets, Hugo Boss, Marc Jacobs, and New Balance have opened stores in the past year, while the Gloucester Premium Outlets in Blackwood have added New Balance and Columbia locations. Like the King of Prussia Mall, both outlet malls are owned by Simon Property Group.
Typically, these re-energized brands are attracted to places where other similar companies have already set up shop, say the PREIT executives who help shape the tenant mix at the Cherry Hill Mall.
And they said this cyclical effect further cements the region’s dominant retail centers as shopping destinations.
“There is so much media out there as it relates to closed malls,” said Aristone, the chief revenue officer. Many of the surviving malls, however, are thriving, he said, thanks in part to these legacy brands.
Americans could start paying more at the gas pump, following the U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran.
West Texas Intermediate crude, an oil produced in the United States, surged 6.2% on Monday to $71.19 per barrel. As of Tuesday, it has spiked another 8%, hovering at around $77. It marks the oil’s highest point in over a year. But that’s just the beginning.
Experts say those surges reflect similar spikes in natural gas and at the gas station.
Here’s what we know.
Why are gas prices going up?
Known as the “crude oil effect,” when oil prices go up, so does the price of the fuel it makes. Crude oil must be processed at refineries to be turned into gasoline.
The conflict in the Middle East, which President Donald Trump said he anticipates could take longer than a few weeks, means the global supply of oil is disrupted, and, in turn, the price of a barrel of oil goes up. This causes the price of fuel to also rise.
“Whatever the time is, it’s OK,” Trump said. “Right from the beginning, we projected four to five weeks, but we have capability to go far longer than that. We’ll do it.”
Oil prices were already on the rise, up 17% this year. Experts say the increase is a direct effect of Trump’s rhetoric against Iran, along with his administration’s recent sanctions against the country.
And, as noted by John Quigley, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, it’s not just oil and gasoline; natural gas is also seeing a price increase.
And U.S. consumers will be hit hard, he says.
“It’s disrupting global oil and gas markets,” he said. “The war is quickly widening into a regional conflict, with the production capacity of multiple oil- and gas-producing nations being attacked by Iran in retaliatory strikes. This has already disrupted global oil and natural gas shipments.”
How much have gas prices increased since the strike on Iran?
As oil prices surged Monday, the impacts already started to trickle down to gas stations. This week, the national average of gas per gallon surpassed $3 for the first time since November.
Some states, including Illinois, Michigan, and Texas have already reported increases of about 5 cents per gallon.
As of Tuesday morning, the national average hit $3.11, marking the largest single-day increase since 2022, according to GasBuddy, a gas price tracking service.
Quigley says those increases could be just the beginning.
“Prices for natural gas in European and Asian markets have already spiked 50%. U.S. natural gas exporters will rush to take advantage of that, diverting domestic supplies to exports and pushing up domestic natural gas prices,” he said. “That will raise costs for home heating, and worsen already surging electricity costs, because over 40% of electricity generation in PJM, the nation’s largest grid, is fueled by natural gas.”
Do gas prices always rise during war?
Gas prices historically surge when conflicts happen because of a mix of supply disruptions, geopolitical uncertainty, and oil infrastructure attacks.
As detailed by NPR, major price surges occurred during the Gulf War, the 2003 Iraq invasion, and the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war.
How high could gas prices get?
GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haan told multiple news outlets he believes some gas stations could charge as much as 30 cents more per gallon by the end of the week.
He estimated prices would be around $3.10 or $3.20 per gallon by the end of the week and anticipated they would hit $3.30 to $3.35 “in time.”
Based on the numbers at this moment (3/3/26, 945am ET), the average price of gasoline would likely climb to about $3.30-$3.35/gal in time. Any further changes in markets will change this, but if everything held still, that's where we'd likely be. Diesel closer to $4.25-$4.45.
What are the average gas prices in the Philadelphia region? How does that compare to the national average?
As of Tuesday morning:
The national average gas price: $3.11
The Pennsylvania average gas price: $3.21
The Philadelphia average gas price: $3.12
Which areas in the Philly region have the lowest gas prices?
The average price of gas in Philly is $3.12 per gallon as of Tuesday morning. Still, there are some spots with lower prices, according to GasBuddy.
Among the lowest appears to be an Eastcoast station in Fairmount (801 N. Broad St.) with gas going for $2.79 as of Monday evening. A Marathon in Southwest Philly (2450 Island Ave.) listed gas at $2.74 within the last 24 hours.
Among the highest appears to be a Gulf station in Kingsessing (5200 Woodland Ave.), priced at $3.29 as of Monday evening.
Who sets gas prices?
No one person sets gas prices. In reality, the price you see at pumps is the result of a combination of oil prices, supply and demand, oil refining costs, distribution, and competition.
