The Philadelphia Parking Authority will begin enforcing all parking regulations and resuming the towing and impoundment of illegally parked vehicles on Tuesday, the authority said.
PPA enforcement of meter and time-limit violations has been relaxed since the night before the Jan. 25 snow and sleet storm, when the city declared a snow emergency. Only safety violations, such as parking next to fire hydrants, were enforced.
Enforcement remained limited because the city still had piles of curbside snow throughout the city.
Full enforcement will begin at 8 a.m. Tuesday, the authority said. Towing and impoundment of illegally parked vehicles also will resume Tuesday.
The snow removal efforts are continuing, with the Streets Department announcing a temporary parking ban along a 1½-mile stretch of South Broad Street that will start at 7 a.m. Tuesday.
Two weeks after Kada Scott vanished, Philadelphia Police Detective Joseph Cremen stood over a patch of disturbed ground in a wooded stretch near an abandoned school in East Germantown.
He pushed aside a layer of loose twigs and pressed a six-foot branch into the soil. It sank only a few inches before stopping short.
That, Cremen testified Monday, was when he realized he’d found a shallow grave.
The Oct. 18 discovery ended a two-week search for Scott, 23, who disappeared on Oct. 4 after leaving the Chestnut Hill senior living center where she worked. An autopsy later determined that she had been shot in the head.
Cremen testified that the location of the grave was not discovered at random, but emerged from weeks of reviewing surveillance footage, digital data, and tips that helped authorities trace a path from the Awbury Arboretum to the wooded area where Scott was buried — and that linked her killing to Keon King, who is charged with murder, abuse of a corpse, and related crimes.
During a preliminary hearing Monday that stretched nearly five hours, prosecutors methodically laid out that evidence, replaying video after video on a courtroom TV as detectives testified about how they tracked Scott’s final movements and King’s efforts, they say, to conceal her death.
At the conclusion of the hearing, Common Pleas Court Judge Karen Simmons ruled that prosecutors had presented sufficient evidence for the case to proceed and ordered it held for court.
An attorney for Scott’s parents, Brian Fritz, called the ruling a “first step” in getting justice for their daughter.
“Kada Scott’s family is grieving,” he said. “In fact, their grief is unimaginable. But, so is their commitment for accountability and justice for Kada.”
Detectives testified that surveillance cameras at the Awbury Arboretum recorded a silver hatchback vehicle pulling into a parking lot less than an hour before Scott’s Apple Watch transmitted its final location at 1:14 a.m. on Oct. 5. Footage from the same cameras appeared to show two men removing an object from the car and walking in the direction investigators later followed to Scott’s burial site.
An anonymous tip helped lead investigators into the woods nearby the Ada H.H. Lewis Middle School in East Germantown.
Kim Matthews (second from left), mother of Kada Scott, holds a image of her daughter before a Domestic Violence Awareness walk at the Philadelphia Art Museum on Oct. 26, 2025.
Additional street cameras, prosecutors said, captured the same hatchback parked in a driveway behind homes on the 2300 block of 74th Avenue. Moments later, video showed a sudden flash of light and flames as the car was set on fire, destroying what authorities believe may have been physical evidence inside.
Investigators did not rely on any single camera, prosecutors emphasized. Instead, detectives testified that they reconstructed the timeline by stitching together footage from dozens of surveillance systems across the city. That effort, they said, led them to King, 21.
Street cameras recorded a 1999 gold Toyota Camry registered to King traveling in the vicinity of the arboretum around the same times activity was captured there, they said. Police also tracked the movements of one of Scott’s Apple devices after she left work, comparing its location data with license plate readers and surveillance video, detective Robert Daly testified.
“Everywhere this device went, Mr. King’s car went,” Daly said.
Cell phone records presented at the hearing showed that King and Scott had exchanged text messages in the hours before her disappearance, Daly testified.
The last message Scott sent asked King to call her when he arrived at the senior living center. The final incoming call on her phone, at 10:12 p.m. on Oct. 4, was from King, according to police.
Before Simmons ruled, King’s defense attorney, Robert Gamburg, argued that the prosecution’s case relied too heavily on circumstantial evidence and failed to place his client directly at the scene of the killing.
The surveillance footage, he said, did not clearly identify any faces and could not establish who was inside and around the vehicles.
He also pointed to testimony from a senior living center employee who said she saw Scott leave work that night and noticed a dark-colored Jeep parked outside the facility, not a silver hatchback.
“There is absolutely nothing connecting this young man to what happened to Ms. Scott,” Gamburg said, urging the judge to dismiss the case.
“At this level, with this quantum of evidence, for this type of case, it should be discharged today,” he said.
Assistant District Attorney Ashley Toczylowski countered that investigators had assembled a detailed and corroborated account of Scott’s final hours, one that showed not only King’s proximity to her disappearance, she said, but also steps taken afterward to destroy evidence.
“This isn’t coincidence,” she told the court. “It’s corroboration.”
WASHINGTON — Every Homeland Security officer on the ground in Minneapolis, including those from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, will be immediately issued body-worn cameras, Secretary Kristi Noem said Monday, in the latest fallout after the shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens at the hands of federal agents.
Noem said the body-worn camera program is being expanded nationwide as funding becomes available.
“We will rapidly acquire and deploy body cameras to DHS law enforcement across the country,” Noem said in a social media post on X.
The news of the body cameras comes as Minneapolis has been the site of intense scrutiny over the conduct of federal officers after two U.S. citizens protesting immigration enforcement activities in the city were shot and killed.
It is the latest effort by the Trump administration to alleviate tensions after the shootings and show it is responding to calls for accountability.
In the immediate hours after ICU nurse Alex Pretti’s death, Noem went on the offensive, saying several times that Pretti “came with a weapon and dozens of rounds of ammunition and attacked” officers, who took action to “defend their lives.” Other administration officials painted a similar picture.
Multiple videos that emerged of the shooting contradicted that claim, showing Pretti had only his mobile phone in his hand as officers tackled him to the ground, with one removing a handgun from the back of his pants as another officer began firing shots into his back.
Homeland Security has said that at least four Customs and Border Protection officers on the scene when Pretti was shot were wearing body cameras. The body camera footage from Pretti’s shooting has not been made public.
The department has not responded to repeated questions about whether any of the ICE officers on the scene of the killing of Renee Good earlier in January were wearing the cameras.
The shootings, and the narrative coming from some in the administration, triggered outrage and demands for accountability, including among some Republicans.
President Donald Trump sent his border czar Tom Homan to Minneapolis to take control of operations there, displacing Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, who has become a lightning rod for criticism in the various operations he’s joined in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles.
There have been increased calls by critics of Homeland Security to require all of the department’s officers who are responsible for immigration enforcement to wear body cameras.
President Joe Biden ordered in 2022 that federal law enforcement officers wear body cameras as part of an executive order that included other policing reform measures. Trump had rescinded that directive after starting his second term.
Noem’s move comes after Trump over the weekend endorsed the idea of body cameras for immigration officers.
After Noem’s announcement Monday, Trump said the decision was up to the secretary but said that he thought it was generally good for law enforcement to wear cameras.
“They generally tend to be good for law enforcement because people can’t lie about what’s happening,” he said in the Oval Office Monday, adding “If she wants to do the camera thing, that’s OK with me.”
NEW YORK — Elon Musk is joining his space exploration and artificial intelligence ventures into a single company before a massive planned initial public offering for the business later this year.
His rocket venture, SpaceX, announced on Monday that it had bought xAI in an effort to help the world’s richest man dominate the rocket and artificial intelligence businesses. The deal will combine several of his offerings, including his AI chatbot Grok, his satellite communications company Starlink, and his social media company X.
Musk has talked repeatedly about the need to speed development of technology that will allow data centers to operate in space to solve the problem of overcoming the huge costs in electricity and other resources in building and running AI systems on Earth.
It’s a goal that Musk said in his announcement of the deal could become much easier to reach with a combined company.
“In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale,” Musk wrote on SpaceX’s website Monday, then added in reference to solar power, “It’s always sunny in space!”
Musk said in SpaceX’s announcement he estimates “that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.”
It’s not a prediction shared by other many companies building data centers, including Microsoft.
“I’ll be surprised if people move from land to low-Earth-orbit,” Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, told The Associated Press last month, when asked about the alternatives to building data centers in the U.S. amid rising community opposition.
SpaceX won’t be the first to explore the idea of putting AI data centers in space. Google last year revealed a new research project called Project Suncatcher that would equip solar-powered satellites with AI computer chips.
Mississippi officials last month announced that xAI is set to spend $20 billion to build a data center near the state’s border with Tennessee.
The data center, called MACROHARDRR, a likely pun on Microsoft’s name, will be its third data center in the greater Memphis area.
Lincoln the bald eagle won’t be the only hometown favorite appearing on Philly area TV screens during Super Bowl LX.
Former Eagles players Jason Kelce and Beau Allen will star in a Super Bowl commercial for Garage Beer that will air locally on Sunday.
Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end who co-owns the beer brand with his brother, isn’t in the ad. But it won’t be lacking star power. The pair of Super Bowl champions are joined by a new partner in crime, Doug the miniature horse.
Beau Allen sips some Garage Beer while holding a carrot for Doug during shooting of the brand’s new Super Bowl commercial, which will are locally on Sunday.
The ad, which was filmed on a farm near Conshohocken and is properly titled “Brotherly Shovel,” features the Budweiser Clydesdales pulling a beer wagon to reveal Doug — and a large pile of manure.
“We make a promise to do things the right way,” the narrator says. “To respect the tradition. And to shovel what tradition leaves behind.”
This isn’t the first time Allen and Kelce have partnered on projects for Garage Beer. They also worked together on other commercials for brand, as well as longer projects like Brewmite and Thermal Buzz that pay tribute to some of Kelce’s favorite childhood movies.
You can watch the full one-minute Super Bowl spot below …
Parking restrictions along a 1½-mile stretch of South Broad Street will take effect at 7 a.m. Tuesday so the Streets Department can begin removing piles of curbside snow, the city said.
Snow removal has gone slowly since the storm more than a week ago because of the ongoing deep freeze across the region.
Parked vehicles must be moved from Broad between Washington and Oregon Avenues ahead of 7 a.m. to clear the way for a Streets Department “lifting operation” that will remove the snow, the city said.
Free off-street parking will be available at lot U near Citizens Bank Park between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesday, the city said. All vehicles must be moved from the parking lot by 6 p.m.
The operation, which will involve excavators and loaders, may temporarily disrupt traffic, the city said.
“The Streets Department urges everyone traveling near this lifting operation, and others taking place across Philadelphia, to plan extra travel time, slow down, and help keep our crews safe by giving them plenty of space to do their work,” the department said.
NEW YORK — Woodie King Jr., an actor, director, and producer who founded the New Federal Theatre to give voice and employment to Black playwrights, actors, directors, designers, and young people entering the American theater, has died. He was 88.
His off-Broadway theater company said Mr. King died Thursday at Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City of complications from emergency heart surgery.
“We have lost a giant,” said Emmy Award-winning actor and educator Erin Cherry on Instagram. “I am here because of Woodie King Jr. My very first introduction to the Black theater scene was the play ‘Knock Me a Kiss’ produced by New Federal Theatre. It changed my life. I’m forever grateful.”
The New Federal Theatre produced such key works as Black Girl by J.E. Franklin, The Taking of Miss Janie by Ed Bullins — which jumped to Lincoln Center and won the Drama Critics Circle Award — and For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shange, which landed on Broadway in 1976 and was nominated for the best new play Tony Award.
The New Federal Theatre was a springboard for many playwrights, including Charles Fuller — later to win the Pulitzer Prize for A Soldier’s Play — who premiered two plays — In My Many Names and Days and The Candidate. David Henry Hwang premiered The Dance and the Railroad at the New Federal and would later win the Tony for M. Butterfly.
Some performers who got early career boosts thanks to the company include Chadwick Boseman, Debbie Allen, Morgan Freeman, Phylicia Rashad, Denzel Washington, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Samuel L. Jackson, and Issa Rae.
Mr. King was born in Alabama, raised in Detroit, and earned his bachelor’s degree from Lehman College and later his master’s from Brooklyn College. He served as the cultural director of Mobilization for Youth for five years, before founding New Federal Theatre in 1970.
Mr. King is survived by his wife, Elizabeth Van Dyke, and his three children, Geoffrey King, Michael King, and Michelle King Huger, whom he shared with ex-wife Willie Mae Washington, as well as five grandchildren.
Tyler Fauntleroy, an actor who has toured in Hamilton, took to Instagram to recall working at the New Federal in 2019 on a show called Looking for Leroy that would change his career. “His belief in me came at a time when my own was at an all-time low. What a champion he was for Black artists. It was an honor to witness. Thank you, sir and rest easy.”
Sean Couturier hasn’t scored a goal since Dec. 7, a long, 27-game drought. He has only five goals and 21 assists this season, and just five points since the New Year, all assists.
He knows the skidding Flyers are looking for him to contribute more offensively.
“Probably gripping the stick at times when I get really good quality chances, I’m not finishing,” Couturier said. “Definitely need to be better and help out this team more offensively, producing goals. I think I’m still making plays out there. I just need more out of myself.”
Couturier hasn’t been scoring much, but he has been generating chances. According to Natural Stat Trick, Couturier’s expected goals for percentage of 57.08% at five-on-five ranks second on the team, behind rookie Denver Barkey. In other words, the Flyers have been outchancing their opponents with Couturier on the ice.
Part of his issue is luck — his shooting percentage sits at just 5.9%, down from 9.7% last year and well below his career average of 10.7% entering this season. The Flyers have generated 52% of the scoring chances with Couturier on the ice, but have been outscored by 32-28. Coach Rick Tocchet also pointed to Couturier’s movement as part of the reason for his struggles.
“I think with Coots, when he gets it in the offensive zone, especially behind the net, he doesn’t move his feet,” Tocchet said. “… When you move your feet, options open, when you stand still, options close, and that’s really what it comes down to. I think he has a habit of staring his option down. He doesn’t move his feet, and that’s habits.”
Tocchet and Couturier had a long conversation on the ice before practice Monday, and Couturier spent the practice working to implement those changes.
Over the last two games, Tocchet has moved the Flyers captain back down to the fourth line in order to test out Trevor Zegras at center. Moving Couturier down ultimately helped permanently sour his relationship with former coach John Tortorella, but Couturier said his communication with Tocchet has been positive. The two have had a number of conversations about his role and how he can best help the team.
“He’ll get his minutes,” Tocchet said. “I’ve just got to move him around.”
That includes using him on the penalty kill and for key late-game faceoff situations. Against Los Angeles on Saturday, Couturier started the game with Garnet Hathaway and Nic Deslauriers, but in the third was moved up to play shifts on Owen Tippett’s line and Travis Konecny’s line. Couturier ended up with 16 minutes, 29 seconds of ice time, fourth among Flyers forwards.
Flyers center Sean Couturier has played with Garnet Hathaway and Nic Deslauriers the last two games.
For his part, Couturier has been embracing the change as an opportunity to refocus on the fundamentals and get his offensive touch back.
“Getting back to the basics, it’s not a bad thing,” Couturier said. “Playing with [Hathaway] and [Deslauriers], they’re pretty hardworking guys that are structured, and they play hard and win battles. So I try to use that to my advantage and simplify my game.”
Breakaways
Konecny and Sam Ersson were the only Flyers missing from Monday’s skate. Konecny took a maintenance day, while there’s an “outside chance” Ersson could return before the Olympic break. Tocchet said the injury was “not super serious.” … Fellow goalie Aleksei Kolosov was recalled from the AHL. … Konecny was named the NHL’s third star of the week behind Andrei Vasilevskiy and Jared McCann.
NEW YORK — X.J. Kennedy, an award-winning poet, author, translator, and educator who schooled millions of students through The Bedford Reader and other textbooks and engaged voluntary readers with his children’s stories and intricate, witty verse, died Sunday at 96.
Mr. Kennedy died of natural causes at his home in Peabody, Mass., according to his daughter, Kate Kennedy.
Born Joseph Charles Kennedy, he chose the professional name X.J. Kennedy as a young man to avoid confusion with Joseph P. Kennedy, the former ambassador to Britain and father of President John F. Kennedy. Starting in the early 1960s, he turned out dozens of poetry and children’s books, contributed to the popular Bedford Reader and collaborated with the poet and onetime National Endowment for the Arts chair Dana Gioia on anthologies of poetry, drama, and fiction.
“I write for three separate audiences: children, college students (who use textbooks), and that small band of people who still read poetry,” Mr. Kennedy once observed.
The Bedford Reader, established in the early 1980s, is a widely used composition book for college students that has included everything from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech to the classic Shirley Jackson story “The Lottery.” Mr. Kennedy edited the Reader along with his wife, Dorothy; Jane E. Aaron and Ellen Kuhl Repetto. The goal, they stated, was “to show you how good writers write” and not to feel “glum if at first you find an immense gap” between yourself, and, say, E.B. White.
Mr. Kennedy’s poems, some published in the New Yorker and the Atlantic, were rhyming vignettes on everyday and macabre matter such as bartending, aging, and the discovery of a severed arm. They were brief, often light-hearted in tone and dark and unsettling in content. In Innocent Times, Mr. Kennedy mocks the idea that the country was better off during the “Mad Man” era, looking back to when doctors “puffed their cigarettes” and “cheap thermometer and thermostat/leaked jets of mercury like poison darts.” The poem Fireflies shifts abruptly from the calm of a twilight lawn to the horrors of the war on terrorism.
Complacently we watched them glow
Like kindly lantern lights that sift
Through palm fronds in Guantánamo
On the torture squad’s night shift
His awards included a Los Angeles Times book prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement, and the Jackson prize from Poets & Writers for an “American poet of exceptional talent who deserves wider recognition.” He taught English at the University of Michigan, the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina (now UNC-Greensboro), and Tufts University, among other schools. In the 1970s, he served as the Paris Review’s poetry editor.
A native of Dover, N.J., he was an intrepid young man who wrote and published science fiction and helped found the Spectator Amateur Press Association, a leading science fiction fandom organization whose members have included Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, and Lenny Kaye. After attending Seton Hall and Columbia University, Mr. Kennedy served briefly in the Navy in the 1950s. At the University of Michigan, he worked for several years on a Ph.D. in the 1950s and 1960s and never finished his dissertation. But he did meet his future wife and professional collaborator, Dorothy Mintzlaff, who died in 2018. They had five children and six grandchildren.
His first book, Nude Descending a Staircase: Poems, Songs, a Ballad, was published in 1961. His children’s books included One Winter Night in August and Other Nonsense Jingles and the novel The Owlstone Crown, while In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus is a compilation of poems from 1955 to 2007 that ends with a bon voyage for the text itself.
Go, slothful book. Just go
Fifty years slopping around the house in your sock-feet
Founder Danielle Jowdy announced in December 2024 that she planned to end her 14-year run at the end of 2025. She called the wind-down a “grand closing” to allow customers to enjoy a final full season of scratch-made scoops and staff time to prepare for transitions. But as Jowdy considered the future, she decided to try selling the business to someone with roots in the neighborhood.
Zsa’s Ice Cream Shop, 6616 Germantown Ave.
That someone is Liz Yee, a pastry chef at the nearby Catering by Design who also creates desserts for Doho restaurant, also in Mount Airy. Yee plans to reopen Zsa’s (6616 Germantown Ave.) on Saturday, Ice Cream for Breakfast Day.
For Yee, the opportunity was both personal and professional. From the moment she saw the sale announcement over the summer, she began exploring the idea of keeping Zsa’s alive, not just as a retail store but as a community hub.
Keeping the business in Mount Airy was a major part of the appeal for Yee, who lives in Roxborough. “I work down the street, and I’ve always loved coming here,” she said. “It’s just special.”
She plans to keep it as Zsa’s — a nickname that Jowdy and her sister, Rebecca, shared since childhood — and will offer the same menu, plus twists and specials. Yee also wants to bring back the wholesale business.
For Saturday’s return, Yee will lean into her pastry background, offering fresh croissants paired with cereal-milk ice cream. She’s also bringing back favorites such as Black Magic (coffee ice cream with chocolate cake swirled in).
Erica Dixon, 38, of Mount Airy, Pa., is with her son Owen Redmond-Dixon, 4, enjoying some ice cream at Zsa’s along Germantown Avenue.
“I know when people sell a business, there are often mixed feelings, but I’m honestly over the moon right now. It feels terrific,” said Jowdy, who will work with Yee during the transition. Jowdy said she was still deliberating her next professional steps but hopes to stay involved in food and community work.
Jowdy fell into ice cream years ago. When she and her mother were packing up the family home in Connecticut for sale, they found a hand-cranked ice cream machine the parents received as a wedding gift in 1980. As kids, Jowdy and her brother, Christopher, poured in skim milk and Hershey’s syrup “and we’d have at it,” she said.
Jowdy brought the machine back to Philadelphia and, armed with a 1980s-era Ben & Jerry’s cookbook, began making ice cream to take to parties and cookouts. She was working at a stained-glass studio as her dessert hobby grew. When she was laid off 14 years ago, she went professional.
Yee’s path to Zsa’s is equally windy. Back in the 2010s, she was studying math at Drexel University when she decided to turn her baking hobby into a career. She headed the pastry department at the Rittenhouse Hotel and in 2018, she joined Walnut Street Cafe as executive pastry chef and baker before she joined Catering by Design six years ago.
Yee, whose 6-year-old son and 7-month-old daughter enjoy Zsa’s, said she would fit the business in with her personal and professional lives. “I work down the street and I run like a little 10-mile circuit around [the area],” she said.
Zsa’s, 6616 Germantown Ave., 215-848-7215, instagram.com/zsas. Winter hours starting Feb. 7: 3 to 9 p.m. Thursday and Friday, noon to 9 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, or sell-out.
