The U.S. Senate passeda bill late Friday to fund the federal government, but a short-term shutdown still went into effect Saturday.
Senate Democratic leadership struck a deal earlier this week with President Donald Trump to separate Department of Homeland Security funding from the budget for other federal agencies after a national backlash to the ongoing ICE operation in Minnesota.
The agreement with the White House emerged late Thursday after every Democrat, including Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, and several Republicans voted down the original package.
Fetterman was among 23 Democrats to cross the aisle to vote for the compromise bill. With their support, the bill passed 71-29, despite five GOP defections.
Here’s how the senators from the Philadelphia area voted:
Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.): Yes.
Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.): Yes.
Sen. Andy Kim (D., N.J.): No.
Sen. Cory Booker (D., N.J.): No.
Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.): Yes.
Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester: (D., Del.): No.
Even with the Senate passage, a partial government shutdown took effect Saturday because the bill still needs to pass the House, which is not expected to take up the legislation until Monday.
It’s the second shutdown to begin since October when the federal government entered a 43-day shutdown, the longest in its history.
Democrats took issue with funding in the earlier bill for DHS, the department that oversees the two agencies involved in fatal shootings of civilians this month in Minnesota.
The Senate worked late Fridayas some Republicans objected to the deal. McCormick, the lone Republican senator in the region, voted for the measure as expected.
“I’m just not in favor of shutting down the government or stopping funding the government, and that’s the position that I’ve had through the last shutdown,” McCormick said Tuesday.
The affected departments include the Departments of Defense, State, Transportation, Education, Labor, Treasury, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development, in addition to DHS.
The deal struck with the White House would provide two weeks of funding for DHS, but funds the rest of the departments through September.
Democrats on Thursday halted the original package that would have provided long-term funding for DHS, which oversees ICE and the Border Patrol.
Fetterman had called for the DHS funding to be separated from the other departments as a compromise, which is ultimately what happened.
The DHS funding dispute came after the national furor over the killings of Renee Good, a poet and mother, and Alex Pretti, a nurse who worked at a VA hospital, both of whom protested the ongoing operation in Minnesota and were fatally shot by federal agents.
Democrats pushed for provisions to curb ICE’s immigration enforcement operations in order to fund DHS. Their demands include increased training for ICE agents, requiring warrants for immigration arrests and for agents to identify themselves, and for the Border Patrol to stay on the border instead of helping ICE elsewhere.
A 4-week-old baby girl came into the emergency room because she’d been fussy for a full day, and wouldn’t drink from her bottle. On further questioning, the parents said that she had not pooped for 3 days, had been drooling more, had a weaker cry, and seemed very floppy.
In the ER, she was very weak with low muscle tone, droopy eyelids, and a significant amount of drool. The ER physicians could not elicit her normal newborn reflexes. Due to her severe weakness and concern for her ability to keep breathing on her own, the decision was made to insert a breathing tube into her airway to help her breathe.
Low muscle tone and weakness in a newborn baby can have many different causes. Some of these causes include infection, low blood sugar, thyroid problems, neuromuscular diseases, brain bleeds, drug exposure, and genetic or metabolic disorders.
All babies are screened 48 hours after birth for a variety of genetic and metabolic conditions. This baby had a normal newborn screen, so metabolic disorders were unlikely, though. The ER also collected thyroid studies which were normal. This baby had been healthy with normal muscle tone prior to this event, probably eliminating other genetic disorders such as trisomy 21.
Infections, such as sepsis (blood infection), meningitis (brain infection), pneumonia (lung infection), and urinary tract infections can also present with low muscle tone in newborns. In this patient a lumbar puncture, or spinal tap, proved negative for meningitis. Urine and blood cultures were negative for infection. A chest X-ray did not show pneumonia, and a nasal swab was negative for any respiratory viruses.
Drug ingestions or exposures can also present with altered mental status or low muscle tone, but neither turned up in a urine drug screen.
Problems within the brain, such as a tumor or bleed, can also cause low muscle tone. But a head CT scan on our patient was normal.
Finally, low muscle tone can be a feature of some disorders of the neuromuscular system, which is the pathway between the brain and muscles that make muscles work properly. Some examples of these disorders are spinal muscular atrophy, myasthenia gravis, Guillan-Barre syndrome, or infant botulism.
The solution
Given this patient’s age and symptoms, and after eliminating other possibilities, a test for botulism in the baby’s stool was performed. While awaiting the results, this outcome appeared so likely that the baby was treated for presumed botulism.
Botulism is caused by the bacteria Clostridium botulinum, which causes a neuromuscular paralysis that starts with symptoms at the head and descends to the toes. It can occur when infants ingest spores of these bacteria, which sometimes appear in dirt and honey, among other sources. It predominantly affects babies younger than 12 months. Because of the immaturity of a baby’s gut microbiome, the spores can stay in their intestines longer than they would in an older child or adult, and release the botulism toxin.
Pennsylvania has one of the highest rates in the country of these spores, accounting for 17% of all cases in the United States in 2018. It is most commonly reported in infants who live near construction zones. This infant’s father was a construction worker and had a project going on in their backyard.
Fortunately, a treatment exists. It is called botulism immunoglobulin, otherwise known as BabyBig. This treatment provides antibodies to the bacteria, which bind to and neutralize the toxin. Even with this therapy, recovery is a slow process that can take several months. However, patients who are hospitalized and treated quickly should expect a full recovery.
This patient is doing well, and no longer needed the breathing tube after receiving BabyBig. She still has some trouble with feeding and required a feeding tube for some time.
Her treatment was started immediately because test results take so long, and the treatment would not have harmed her if she hadn’t tested positive. In her case, we got the results after she went home from the hospital and it confirmed the botulinum toxin.
Our advice
Do not give honey to any baby under the age of 12 months. If a family member works in construction, especially in high-risk states, make sure to bathe and change into clean clothes before touching a young baby..
BriarRose Edwins is a second-year pediatric resident and Hayley Goldner is a pediatrician in the adolescent medicine department at Nemours Children’s Hospital, Delaware.
Manuel Contreras, the head of the secret police during Chile’s dictatorship, which reigned from 1973 to 1989, once explained why so many seeming innocents — students, union leaders, local activists — were murdered by the state: “The guerrilla tries to act like a normal citizen, honest and good, and lies even to his family. When discovered, he will always deny the facts.”
The regime does not make mistakes.
“The lack of specific information … demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”
I am a scholar of authoritarian politics at the University of Pennsylvania. I research and teach about repression and censorship. The Trump administration is engaged in state terror. And, in a page ripped from the autocrat’s playbook, they are trying to convince us that the victims deserve it.
On Jan. 7, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem claimedRenee Good — shot in the head by an ICE agent while observing a raid — engaged in an “act of domestic terrorism.” Noem said that Good “weaponized” her car (the same car with a glove compartment overflowing with her child’s stuffed animals and a friendly dog in the back).
These are the same lies Augusto Pinochet told in Chile, where the regime frequently falsified reports that blamed the victims for their own deaths. Rather than executions, victims died in “shootouts.” The official government account of the death of one 28-year-old activist was that he was a “subversive” killed while attacking a barracks. But witnesses saw him being arrested two days earlier. A miner with no known political affiliation, the press claimed, “tried to seize a policeman’s weapon … and so he was shot.” Two victims executed by army troops were accused of “criminal or subversive activities.”
A boy lies weeping by his mother after his father was arrested by soldiers in Santiago, Chile, during the Pinochet reign in 1986.
Like Pinochet, the Trump administration wants you to believe the people they are terrorizing and killing deserve it. They want us to accept, or even celebrate, their crimes. Because if a victim deserves what happened to them, if there is a reason for it, then perhaps it can be stomached, or excused away, or ignored.
During Argentina’s brutal 1970s dictatorship, civilians often justified repression using the phrase “Por algo será” — roughly, “There must be a reason for it.”
Victimization implied that the victims were guilty of something. People are thrown out of planes while drugged. Por algo será. They are taken from their families in the middle of the night. Por algo será. Bodies are dumped in mass graves. Por algo será.
And if there is a reason for it, then anyone can avoid being a victim by staying home. By not fighting. By letting the administration do whatever it wants, with no pushback.
Good was a 37-year-old white mother from Colorado, her death filmed at multiple angles, all of which make the government’s lies harder to swallow for an American audience. But who the victim is should not matter: The government is violating fundamental human rights.
It is our responsibility to refuse to accept these lies. To demand — and to pressure our representatives to demand — accountability for these crimes.
Jane Esberg is an assistant professor of political science focused on authoritarian repression and censorship, particularly in Latin America, at the University of Pennsylvania.
What’s changed for chef Nicholas Bazik in the weeks since his Society Hill restaurant, Provenance, earned a coveted star from the Michelin Guide?
Everything.
And nothing.
“There’s this strange duality to it,” says Bazik. “It’s like a complete life-changing event. … But at the same time, the day-to-day is exactly the same. It’s just a little more amplified and there’s more things to do.”
Bazik’s Provenance was one of three local restaurants to be awarded a Michelin star in November, and already, the accolade has brought lots of things: National acclaim, a rush on reservations, and a plaque (yet to be delivered) that will be displayed inside the restaurant, which opened in 2024.
Then there’s the pressure that comes with earning the culinary world’s highest honor.
“The restaurant industry in and of itself is unique, because at every step, every milestone that you get, it just means that there’s more work to do — and more pressure,” Bazik says. “Having a Michelin star means that everyone coming through the door is seeing you as that thing, so there’s no time to let [up].”
The one exception might be Sundays, when the restaurant is closed and Bazik can finally take a breath. It’s a day that, for him, revolves almost entirely around family — though food, not surprisingly, also plays a supporting role.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
7:30 a.m.
I normally wake up around 7:30, which is around the time my 4-year-old son wakes up.
In my previous job, prior to me going on paternity leave, the owner gave me a gift certificate to a coffee company, saying, “You should get yourself an espresso machine because you’re going to need it.” That was one of the best, most thoughtful gifts I’ve received from an employer. It’s a Jura espresso/coffee machine, and I use that everyday.
Then we’re going to Sulimay’s. It’s as close to a perfect diner as it gets. The food is great, the service is great, the space is unique to Philadelphia. Any breakfast spot, I always get the same thing which is two eggs over easy, bacon, hash browns, and rye toast.
10 a.m.
I’ll spend some time at the farmers market at Headhouse Square, which is largely how I like to shape my menus and figure out exactly what’s seasonal, what’s on offer, what’s relevant, what’s good. My family’s with me, and I’ll do shopping there for the restaurant and I’ll also do some shopping for home.
My son and my wife will go to Three Bears Park, which is around the corner from us, and I’ll go meet up with them there, and we’ll play and then go back home for a light lunch with some of the things that we got at the market.
1 p.m.
After lunch, we’ll go to Adventure Aquarium in Camden. My son is just obsessed with everything aquatic. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of sharks and fish and whales. We love going there — it doesn’t matter if we’re looking at the same fish every single time, he loves it. So we’ll go there for an hour, and make our next move, which is somewhere outdoors.
2-4 p.m.
Ideally, we’d make two stops. We’d go to Lemon Hill, which is where my wife and I got married, and then go to Wissahickon Park — so essentially try to spend the whole afternoon in a green space.
To be able to travel from Center City and 15 minutes later be in a green, open space with trees and wildlife, it’s incredible.
5 p.m.
Because our son is 4 now, he has the full capability of selecting what he wants to eat for dinner, so we leave it up to him. And we essentially go to one of two places: Kim’s Restaurant in North Philly, which is the oldest charcoal grilled Korean barbecue spot. The other one is Mr. Joe’s restaurant, which is my son’s name for Picnic in Fishtown.
For our purposes, Picnic is the perfect restaurant. It has chicken, french fries (my son’s favorite food group), oysters, and green salad. We get the same thing every single time, and we go enough that we should have a designated table.
6 p.m.
It’s time to go home and start the bedtime routine. We do shampoo time, and it’s the only time that my son watches any sort of TV. We’ll watch 20 or 30 minutes of something — normally a deep-sea documentary or a solar system documentary.
Then from 9-10 p.m., my wife and I get to talk about what’s happening that week — what’s happening with him at school, what events are coming up that week, giving her a proper heads up on what’s happening at work, because everything happens so fast that it’s sometimes hard to keep up.
And ideally, it’s in bed by 10 p.m., and then it’s start the week the next day.
We hear often that it’s good to run things in life like a business. It’s said especially loudly about women’s sports, in Philadelphia and elsewhere.
So let’s do that.
The 21,490 fans who packed Xfinity Mobile Arena for Friday’s Unrivaled basketball showcase clearly had business on their minds. It was the largest announced attendance in arena history, helped by Unrivaled’s three-on-three court being smaller than regulation, and it was full of wallets.
They were opened often, to buy T-shirts, hats, hoodies, hot dogs, and all the fancier food and drinks on offer these days.
The crowd roared for hometown heroes Natasha Cloud and Kahleah Copper, but not just for them. Paige Bueckers, Kelsey Plum, Chelsea Gray, and Marina Mabrey also drew big cheers.
Kahleah Copper during player introductions before the Rose game against the Lunar Owls in Game 2 of the Philly is Unrivaled doubleheader on Friday.
“I think it was awesome to see them come out and support us like that,” Mabrey said after scoring an Unrivaled game record 47 points in the Lunar Owls’ 85-75 win over Rose. “I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t realize it was going to be so much hype around it and so much support.”
There was celebrity wattage from Wanda Sykes, Leslie Jones, Freeway, and Jason and Kylie Kelce. Dawn Staley was in the front row, of course. The 76ers’ Tyrese Maxey, Kyle Lowry, Andre Drummond, Trendon Watford, and Dominick Barlow had courtside seats too.
They all helped answer a question that’s been simmering in town for a while.
At any business school, they’ll teach you that the most fundamental rule of economics is supply and demand. But how can you prove there’s demand when there’s no supply in the first place?
One way, for sure, is to not try in the first place. That was the case with women’s basketball in Philadelphia for 28 years, the time between the end of the Philadelphia Rage in 1998 and now. It’s mostly been the case with women’s soccer since the Independence folded in 2011, though at least the U.S. national team visits every few years.
Yet Philadelphia has now set two women’s sports attendance records in recent years. In 2019, Lincoln Financial Field hosted 49,504 fans for a U.S. women’s soccer game, and that’s still the largest crowd for a standalone home friendly. On Friday, the arena across 11th Street hosted the largest crowd to watch a regular-season professional women’s basketball game.
Another path to travel invokes another rule of economics. In a free market, shouldn’t someone be able try something? If they fail, so be it, and if they succeed, they profit.
The people who brought Unrivaled here, and those who will bring a WNBA team here in 2030, chose the second road.
‘It wasn’t a charity event’
On the day in October when Unrivaled announced it would come here, Comcast Spectacor chief financial officer Blair Listino watched her phone light up with notifications of ticket sales.
A Phantom fan cheers the team during its game against Breeze.
“While we were sitting there waiting for the [announcement] event to happen,” she told The Inquirer, “7,000 tickets were sold within the first few hours of the event being on sale. So right then and there, I knew, ‘OK, there is demand.’”
Listino also is an alternate governor of the Flyers. She was the team’s CFO from 2019 to 2023 and has worked for Comcast in a range of finance-related capacities since 2011. So she has plenty of experience with measuring what Philadelphia sports fans want — and with making hard business deals.
“We worked with Unrivaled management, and we treated it like any other event,” she said. “It wasn’t a charity event; we didn’t give them a sweetheart deal. It was a true rental agreement where we said, ‘We believe in you, we think that you’ll be able to sell out this building, and we’ll all be profitable from it.’”
That made it, she said, “good business sense for both us and Unrivaled.”
Philadelphia welcomes Paige Bueckers to the floor:
It was not just based on Jen Leary, the founder of Watch Party PHL, holding events and selling out of “Philly Is A Women’s Sports Town” T-shirts for over a year. Or Chivonn Anderson opening Marsha’s, a women’s sports bar on South Street. Or any number of people on social media, or in this reporter’s inbox, or so on.
No, this was Philadelphia’s biggest company believing that women’s sports can be profitable in its city. And now there’s proof.
Along with that, an Unrivaled spokesperson told The Inquirer on Saturday that the night delivered $2 million in revenue to the league, including over $1 million in ticket sales and $400,000 in merchandise sales at the arena.
“I think when choosing a market that doesn’t necessarily have a team, but there’s demand, you take a leap of faith into your decision,” said Cloud, whose Phantom beat Breeze, 71-68. “And Unrivaled chose the right city, the right sports town, and the right fan base.”
The crowd returned the favor many times over Friday, bringing the Broomall native to tears in a postgame interview on court.
“You just give us the opportunity to actually do it,” North Philadelphia’s Copper said. She recalled playing a WNBA preseason game in Toronto with the Chicago Sky in 2023 in front of a sellout crowd at the city’s NBA arena. That moment lit a spark that led to the Toronto Tempo, an expansion team that will tip off this year.
“How they were able to kind of lead up and have that build up, I think it’s kind of the same,” she said. “And I think the city has been wanting it. So this is a good introduction, and we’ll give them something to look forward to.”
It’s not just the local products who’ve felt that. Players from elsewhere who are used to big crowds at their games were excited to be part of a first here.
“Kudos to Alex [Bazzell], our president, and the whole league having ‘Tash’ and ‘Kah’ be spokespersons for this amazing city,” said Breeze’s Cameron Brink, who played collegiately for Stanford and is now with the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks. “Kah has done so much for women’s basketball in this city and the resources that are now available. I’m just proud that we saw that this is a city that wants to cheer on women’s basketball — so hopefully there’s more of it in the future.”
Cameron Brink leaps past Natasha Cloud (right) during the first quarter of the Breeze-Phantom game.
Brink grew up in Princeton, N.J., and her parents played college basketball at Virginia Tech. She moved to the Portland, Ore., suburbs at age 8, but heard plenty of stories from her mother, Michelle, about the East Coast.
“I was talking with her the other day — she’s like, ‘I honestly can’t believe women’s basketball has gotten to this point,’” Brink said. “I mean, we’ve always believed, but it’s really special that we get to soak in this moment. So I just think back to the women before me, and I’m just thankful for how they paved the way.”
Kate Martin of Unrivaled’s Breeze has played for Iowa and the WNBA’s Golden State Valkyries, both of which draw huge crowds to every game. She knew Philadelphia doesn’t have that track record, so she was excited to be part of a first.
“I think it’s really important for young girls to be able to see people that they want to be like,” Martin said. “I think it’s important for them to be able to see if they want to be a women’s basketball player, to see that in their city, and be able to have access to going to a game.”
Kate Martin in action Friday.
Friday’s spectacle undoubtedly will push Unrivaled to take more of its games on the road next season, and they may well come back here. There might not be another full house with the novelty factor gone, and one night in 2026 doesn’t mean the future WNBA team will sell out all of its games years later.
Nor does it mean that what’s true today was true in past years, when Cloud and Copper weren’t yet big names.
But it does mean there’s demand for a product right now, and that it can make money right now. Philadelphia finally got an opportunity, and took it.
I invited two other Inquirer fathers to discuss this submitted question, which is haunting the slight slopes of our region as the snow sticks around.
Have a question of your own? Or an opinion? Email me.
Evan Weiss, Deputy Features Editor
OK, the question is…
Every time we go sledding, my kids somehow inevitably lose a sled. And every time, there seem to be extra, unclaimed sleds lying around. Is taking one of those stealing (from a child!), or just part of the karmic redistribution of sleds?
Mike Newall, Life & Culture Reporter
Nark is a woodsman. He probably whittles sleds while eating tins of premade forest food.
Jason Nark, Life & Culture Reporter
Ha. When I think of sledding, as a child, it was rough business. No parents around. There were fights. Blood. Nothing worse than an older kid asking to “borrow” your sled.
I sled at the same place for years, so I never would have thought of taking a sled.
Mike Newall
Same. I’m pretty sure the old wooden sled in my house growing up first appeared in It’s a Wonderful Life. Ancient. Wooden. Rusted. We did the garbage can lid thing too. We sled in an enclosed grassy area adjacent to a belt parkway off-ramp. No parents. Chaos.
Jason Nark
Later I moved to a golf-course community (I didn’t want to) that was also one of South Jersey’s biggest sledding destinations. There were lots of sleds left behind after a few days but most were broken.
I don’t think I would have ever considered taking one, unless it was very nice… then I’d probably post it in a Facebook group to try to find the owner.
Mike Newall
I’m a city parent myself now. Every big storm, I inevitably wake up in a panic and think, “Oh no, we don’t have a sled. Where and how shall my boy sled?” So I run to five stores, buy the only sled available, rush him to some grassy lot with an incline, and push him down. Boom. My boy sleds. If the sled makes it home, it’s a bonus.
Those sleds were left for a reason. Either the kid was crying and hated it. Or the parents left it. Either way, look at it like one of those free library stands, except for sleds.
Evan Weiss
But I can’t imagine taking one home. What if, as you’re walking away, a little kid yells, “Hey, that’s my sled!”
Mike Newall
I just mean, if there are a few clearly discarded sleds, then use away. Like if there’s an old ball at the playground. Use it!
We live in a tiny rowhouse. Who wants a $14 plastic sled eating up valuable basement space? I’m not naturally wasteful. But no problem group-sharing sleds. Just use it and leave it.
Evan Weiss
So leave it? Don’t take it?
Jason Nark
I think so, yeah.
Mike Newall
Yeah, that would be plain-old sled-stealing.
Evan Weiss
Borrow for the hill, not for the home.
Mike Newall
(Unless, it’s a really nice sled that you just have to have. Kidding. Maybe.)
However, Mannion did serve as the offensive coordinator for the West team during the East-West Shrine Bowl game earlier this week. While the play-calling and offensive structure was largely simplistic due to the environment of college players trying to showcase their skills for NFL scouts, the game film provides some clues on what Mannion’s vision for an offense may look like.
Here’s a look at some of the influences Mannion may draw from ahead of his first NFL play-calling opportunity next season, and where Grizzard’s concepts could have an impact:
Under-center runs and play-action
The Mannion-led offense in the Shrine Bowl moved up and down the field in a 21-17 win over the East team, with the majority of the 72 offensive snaps coming from under-center. One frequent play call was play-action, specifically bootlegs where the quarterback would roll to the left or right after faking the handoff, effectively moving the pocket.
The play-action bootlegs are staples for Matt LaFleur, Kyle Shanahan, and Sean McVay-led offenses. They typically give the quarterback two or three options, with a flat route from the front or backside tight end and a crossing route from the backside receiver. The tight wide receiver alignments Mannion had his Shrine Bowl receivers in are a direct comparison to LaFleur’s offense, which utilizes a lot of tight wide receiver splits. Packers quarterback Jordan Love had the fifth-highest play-action rate in the NFL in 2025.
New #Eagles OC Sean Mannion has never called plays in an NFL game, but was the OC for the West team at the Shrine Bowl earlier this week. While most of the offensive install were fairly simple, there's some Matt LaFleur and Kyle Shanahan influences in the small sample size.… pic.twitter.com/At7YvzPNkI
Beyond play-action bootlegs, Mannion also dialed up more traditional play-action passes, and incorporated a concept similar to dagger, where a deep crossing vertical route occupies the safety and allows for a deep intermediate middle-of-the-field route to be run right behind it.
Several teams run the passing concept, but the 49ers and Vikings run it from under-center and on play-action throws more frequently than the Rams or Packers. Mannion spent two seasons of his playing career being coached by McVay and his final year playing quarterback was with the Vikings in 2023, under Kevin O’Connell.
Would like to see Sean Mannion bring some of this playcalling to the #Eagles as well. Big play-action here in 12 personnel during the Shrine Bowl and Mark Gronowski hits the deep dig route with the slot receiver clearing out on a crosser.
From a running game perspective, in the limited plays from the Shrine Bowl, Mannion seemed to draw on Shanahan’s run game philosophy. The first example was the inside toss play, which allows a running back to get downhill quickly. It’s also a play Mike McDaniel took with him to Miami and will likely now implement with Chargers.
Again, this is only observations from Sean Mannion's playcalling at the East-West Shrine Bowl since he doesn't have NFL playcalling experience, but the new #Eagles OC used a run scheme staple from Kyle Shanahan, utilizing the inside run toss a few times on Tuesday night. pic.twitter.com/cge0yBr1Sj
The other example was under-center power scheme runs, which pull the backside guard across the formation with the fullback kicking out the playside edge defender. Kyle Juszczyk had the most run blocking snaps among fullbacks in 2025, according to Pro Football Focus.
The Eagles tried to do more fullback runs last season, so Cameron Latu could be an option to fill a similar role as Juszczyk should Mannion decide to utilize more fullback run-blocking schemes.
Saw more run-game influence from Kyle Shanahan when new #Eagles OC Sean Mannion called plays for the West team during the Shrine Bowl. 49ers use a lot of FB run elements, and Mannion used that from under-center during the Shrine Bowl, primarily running power run schemes during… pic.twitter.com/zm3SFeVan6
During the Shrine Bowl game, Mannion also mixed in some outside zone run schemes from under-center to keep the defense honest. Outside zone runs are big staples of the McVay and Shanahan offenses.
Mannion and Grizzard employ similar concepts
The Packers last season threw out routes at one of the highest rates in the NFL last season. Could that become a staple for the Eagles in 2026?
During the Shrine Bowl game, Mannion called at least three passing concepts that required the outside receivers to run out-breaking routes toward the sideline, and two of them were completed for first downs. Throwing such routes require timing and accuracy, because mislocating the football gives defensive backs a chance to break on the football.
In the limited sample size from the Shrine Bowl game on Tuesday, new #Eagles OC Sean Mannion dialed up out routes at least three times in the game, and two the passes were completed along the sideline. Would imagine this could be a part of the offense next season. https://t.co/8sCT4wGWGFpic.twitter.com/DU7vv0aclL
During the Shrine Bowl game, Mannion also called mesh concepts twice, an approach that has two receivers running shallow crossing routes across the field going opposite directions, and a route sitting over the ball behind the two receivers. It could also include the running back releasing from the backfield on a wheel route.
Grizzard ran mesh quite a bit as the Buccaneers’ offensive coordinator in 2025. The passing concept can beat both man and zone coverages and is difficult to defend if defenders end up chasing the crossing routes.
With Josh Grizzard as the new #Eagles PGC, I wonder if they run mesh passing concepts like he did as the #Bucs OC. During the Shrine Bowl game, Sean Mannion called Mesh twice, including mesh rail, which is shown on the Bucs TD attached to this. https://t.co/RyX6jsz8mVpic.twitter.com/Fop4oRsRff
Grizzard also utilized a lot of screens in the passing game in Tampa, getting the ball in the hands of Bucky Irving, Emeka Egbuka and others behind the line of scrimmage. The first offensive play that Mannion called in the Shrine Bowl was a tight end screen. The screen game is also a staple in LaFleur’s offense, though the Green Bay coach is far more creative in presenting them.
Tackling Bucky, never easy.
Bucs love this escort screen, having a lot of success running it for Bucky with Cade doing the dirty work pic.twitter.com/MBCbY6NgI7
While the Shrine Bowl gave a glimpse into Mannion’s influences from LaFleur, McVay, and Shanahan, how the Eagles’ offense looks in their season-opener is a mystery. Leaning into more under-center play-action and moving the pocket with Jalen Hurts seem like logical additions to an Eagles offense that struggled with their identity in 2025.
Adding in an experienced playcaller like Grizzard into the fold can help give the Eagles some formational advantages and add less predictability to the offense. More pre-snap motion seems to be in the cards too. The Packers ranked eighth in motion rate and the Buccaneers ranked ninth, according to Sharp Football Analysis.
One thing is likely: the Eagles offense will be modernized and look vastly different from the previous iterations under Nick Sirianni.
This isn’t a typical report card item, and it shouldn’t be.
This week made it impossible not to understand who Dan McQuade was — and how deeply he mattered to Philadelphia — just by reading what people shared about the journalist and Philadelphia superfan after he died of cancer this week at age 43.
Colleagues, friends, editors, and readers kept circling the same truths: how funny he was, how kind he was, how precise his understanding of the city felt. Not in a forced or caricatured way, but in the way that comes from paying close attention, loving a place, and never taking it (or yourself) too seriously.
Dan had a gift for finding meaning in the everyday. He treated Philly’s quirks, tics, and absurdities not as punchlines to exploit, but as things worth documenting, celebrating, and occasionally poking fun at with affection. He gave people permission to laugh at the city without laughing at it. That’s harder than it sounds.
His impact was everywhere this week: in stories about Rocky runs and boardwalk T-shirts, in memories of long happy hours that turned into lifelong friendships, in anecdotes about him being the go-to fact-checker for all things Philly, in the way people described him as both brilliant and generous. A writer who made others better. A friend who showed up. A presence that made rooms, and timelines, lighter.
The tributes weren’t performative or flowery. They were specific. Personal. Grounded. Which feels fitting. McQuade’s work was never about being loud or self-important. It was about noticing things, connecting dots, and reminding people that there’s joy, and humor, in paying attention to where you live.
Philadelphia lost a journalist. But it also lost one of its clearest interpreters. Someone who understood that “Philadelphianness” isn’t a brand or a gimmick, but a way of moving through the world with skepticism, warmth, and a well-timed joke.
An A+ doesn’t feel like enough. But it feels right to say this much: Philly is better for having had Dan McQuade in it. And it won’t quite be the same without him.
A man shovels snow from underneath his car after it became hung up while trying to park in the middle of South Broad Street in the early morning hours of Jan. 28, 2026. Dump trucks filled with snow from the city’s snow removal operations were zooming by as he worked to get his car free.
The snowstorm delivered. The plowing did not: F-
Let’s be clear: The snow itself did what snow is supposed to do. Nine-plus inches, pretty at first, historic enough to brag about, disruptive enough to cancel plans and spark group-chat meteorology. Fine. That’s winter.
What came after? That’s where everything fell apart.
The city promised differently. Mayor Cherelle L. Parker stood in front of cameras before the storm and said every street would get attention “as long as it takes.” That message mattered because Philadelphians have heard this story before, and expectations were deliberately raised.
Then reality hit.
Plow data show roughly a quarter of city streets got no treatment at all after the storm ended. Not plowed. Not salted. Nothing. And the longer it sat, the worse it got — snow compacting into ice, intersections blocked by frozen berms, cars effectively entombed.
This isn’t just an inconvenience. People with limited mobility are stuck. Workers can’t get out. Streets department explanations about sleet, freezing rain, and illegally parked cars may be true, but they don’t change the fact that many blocks are still uncleared a week later.
This is the part where Philly frustration kicks in hardest: The storm wasn’t unprecedented, but the response feels familiar in the worst way. The expectation has long been “don’t count on a plow,” and this week did little to change that.
New York tries to claim ‘Delco.’ Pennsylvania says absolutely not: A
Every so often, something happens that instantly unites Delco. Snowstorms. Eagles runs. Wawa shortages. And now: a county in upstate New York attempting to brand itself as “Delco.”
Absolutely not.
Stephanie Farr laid out the case perfectly: Delco isn’t just shorthand for Delaware County. It’s a culture. A personality. A way of life built on hoagie trays, Catholic school rivalries, beach flags, and a shared, deeply ingrained chip on the shoulder.
New York’s Delaware County is rural. Ours is suburban chaos packed into 184 square miles, powered by Wawa coffee, tailgating energy, and a pride so aggressive it gets tattooed on bodies and planted in Jersey Shore sand like a territorial marker.
The funniest part isn’t that there’s another Delaware County (there are several). It’s that this one thought it could simply adopt the nickname, slap it on merch, and call it authenticity. That’s not how Delco works. Delco is earned.
A Center City District worker cleaning the sidewalk on Broad Street the morning after the Philadelphia Eagles won the NFC Championship.
Center City West sidewalks are getting grimy (and it’s not your imagination): C
For nearly a decade, a lot of Center City West quietly benefited from something most people never realized existed: a privately funded sidewalk cleaning program that swooped in after city trash pickup and handled the leftover mess.
Asthe Fitler Focus reported, that program ended when the Center City Residents’ Association let its contract expire at the end of 2025. Not out of neglect, but necessity. The cost had ballooned to about 41% of CCRA’s projected 2026 budget, which is an unsustainable chunk for what was essentially backstopping city services.
The result has been immediate and visible. Trash bags torn open overnight. Litter lingering days after pickup. Sidewalks that used to reset themselves now just… don’t. CCRA deserves credit for being upfront about the trade-off and pivoting toward enforcement, even if it won’t bring immediate results.
The frustrating part is that the rules haven’t changed. Trash placement regulations exist. Containers are required. Enforcement is technically possible. But in reality, it’s complaint-driven, slow, and uneven. Meaning the difference between a clean block and a gross one often comes down to who has the time and energy to call 311 and wait on hold.
Eagles linebacker Jaelan Phillips (left) and defensive end Brandon Graham during warm-ups before the Eagles play the Los Angeles Chargers on Dec. 8, 2025 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif.
Eagles fans agree on almost everything — except the part that actually hurts: B
In this year’s Inquirer Stay or Go poll, Eagles fans were unusually aligned on who still feels like the future: young defensive studs, the offensive line pillars, the rookies who look like actual hits. Cooper DeJean and Quinyon Mitchell clearing 96% stay feels less like optimism and more like self-preservation. The message is clear: The defense isn’t the problem. Or at least, it’s not our problem.
Where things get interesting is offense. Not because fans are confused, but because they’re suddenly colder. Jalen Hurts is still trusted, but not untouchable. A.J. Brown’s dip is real and telling: not rage, not rejection, just disappointment, Philly’s least favorite emotion. Fans didn’t turn on him. They just stopped defending him reflexively, which in this city is its own warning sign.
And then there’s Brandon Graham, the emotional Rorschach test of the poll. A franchise legend. A locker room heartbeat. A guy people want to want back. The split vote says everything: respect battling reality. Philly loves its icons, but it hates lying to itself more.
No one landed in the mushy middle. Fans know who they’re done with. They know who they’re attached to. There’s little patience left for “maybe.”
This wasn’t a meltdown poll. It was a sorting exercise. And the conclusion fans keep circling is uncomfortable but consistent: The Eagles don’t need vibes. They need clarity — and probably a few hard goodbyes.
The Inquirer mapped Philly’s dive bars (and proved how much the city loves them): A
When The Inquirer put out a call for Philly’s favorite dive bars, the response was immediate and overwhelming. Nearly 400 submissions poured in, which tracks for a city where dive bars aren’t just places to drink. They’re personal landmarks.
What the map really shows isn’t just where to grab a cheap beer. It’s how attached people are to the bars that feel like theirs. The ones tied to first jobs, postgame rituals, bad breakups, good Tuesdays, and nights that went exactly nowhere and somehow mattered anyway. These are rooms where nobody’s performing, the prices are low on purpose, and the atmosphere is set by regulars, not a concept.
It also surfaced one of Philly’s most reliable debates: Is being called a dive bar a compliment or an insult? Some owners bristle at the label. Others embrace it. Many bars live in the gray area: cheap, unpretentious, deeply loved, and absolutely uninterested in how they’re categorized. Very Philly.
Are there bars missing? Of course. There always will be. Philly has too many neighborhood institutions, and too many people willing to argue for them, for any list to feel definitive. But that’s not a failure of the map, it’s a feature of the city.
This isn’t a checklist. It’s a snapshot of how much Philadelphians still value places that don’t try to be anything other than what they are.
Snow savesies are back, and Philly is absolutely feral about it: C+
Every major snowstorm in Philly brings back the same question we never resolve: If you shovel out a spot, is it yours, or is public parking still public? This week’s viral Reddit thread, sparked by a wooden chair left in a shoveled space with a handwritten threat (“Move these chairs & I will destroy your car. Try me.”), confirms we are once again incapable of calm thought.
Some commenters were immediately in the respect the chair camp. One wrote, “After digging my s— out from snow past my knees I just want to one time come back to a spot,” while another argued, “Normally vehemently anti-savesies, but I feel like spending an hour digging out earns you a [savesie] or two.” This group is running on sore backs, wet boots, and pure principle.
Then there’s the other side: the chaos agents. “I’d move the chair and watch someone else park there,” one commenter said, which feels less like civic engagement and more like performance art. Another proudly added, “I take peoples cones all the time when I’m walking around. F— em.” (This explains so much.)
Somewhere in the middle were people admitting the quiet truth: Everyone dug out a spot. “The person who’s parked there dug out their car this morning, too,” one commenter noted, puncturing the idea that only one hero labored for the block.
So where does that leave us? With a very Philly stalemate. The chair is obnoxious. The threat is unhinged. The labor is real. The fear of retaliation is realer.
More than two dozen Philadelphia-area real estate professionals helped arrange $45 million worth of questionable deals around Temple University in which student rentals that had sat on the market for months abruptly sold for about double their asking prices, an Inquirer investigation has found.
In 52 settled or still-pending sales over roughly the last year, apartment buildings were listed for sale at an average price of $450,000, but found no takers. Within days of being re-listed for a higher price, the same properties sold for as much as $905,000 — at least on paper — to buyers who took out mortgages that far exceeded the original asking price.
Eight sellers or their agents now say they entered into the deals with the understanding that they would actually receive close to the original asking price — not the much higher amount that was officially listed on deeds and other public records. And an appraiser said that real estate agents on both sides of a proposed deal tried to pressure him to raise the valuation of a property.
The sales have raised concerns about possible mortgage fraud in the area around Temple, which could lead to a spate of foreclosures and affect property assessments, tax bills, and student rentals. At least one such property has gone into foreclosure over an unpaid mortgage, according to court records.
Solomon Wisenberg, a former assistant U.S. attorney in North Carolina and Texas who specialized in white-collar crime and bank fraud, said the people involved in the deals could face scrutiny from criminal investigators.
“I don’t know any fraud prosecutor who wouldn’t be interested in looking at that,” Wisenberg said. “Settlement statements have to reflect reality. If you don’t present an accurate picture to the financial institution that is financing the loan, you’ve got problems.”
Patrick C. Fay, a real estate agent in Coldwell Banker’s Old City office, was involved in every deal, representing at least seven buyers who purchased the properties through limited liability companies. One of those buyers had been convicted of an earlier mortgage fraud scheme.
Pat Fay had been one of the top real estate agents last in Coldwell Banker’s Old City office. His clients have purchased properties around Temple University — at twice the listing price.
Coldwell Banker cut ties with Fay in December, hours after The Inquirer published a story concerning 33 of his deals around Temple.
But Fay had a counterpart on the other side of every transaction. They included agents at major brokerages such as Keller Williams, Long & Foster, and eXp — as well as three agents who worked in the same Coldwell office as Fay and helped him close 13 sales.
Coldwell Banker’s national office said this month that it has launched an internal investigation into the matter.
Fay, who was one of the top agents in his Coldwell office, has denied wrongdoing. He declined to discuss specific sales.
“In my over 20 years in real estate, I have maintained an unblemished record with no ethical violations or complaints filed against me,” Fay wrote in a text message last week. “These claims are without merit.”
(function() {
var l2 = function() {
new pym.Parent(‘patfay’,
‘https://media.inquirer.com/storage/inquirer/projects/innovation/arcgis_iframe/patfay.html’);
};
if (typeof(pym) === ‘undefined’) {
var h = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)[0],
s = document.createElement(‘script’);
s.type = ‘text/javascript’;
s.src = ‘https://pym.nprapps.org/pym.v1.min.js’;
s.onload = l2;
h.appendChild(s);
} else {
l2();
}
})();
Steve Orbanek, a spokesperson for Temple University, said the university learned about the situation from The Inquirer’s previous report and is now investigating possible impacts on its student renters.
“It goes without saying that the university condemns any unlawful behavior, and we find these allegations deeply concerning, both for our students and neighbors who reside in the community,” he said.
‘Fat Pay’
Fay, of Moorestown, Burlington County, started arranging deals in December 2024 to purchase apartment buildings around Temple University that owners had been struggling to sell.
The value of those properties, which are largely marketed as student rentals, has fallen in recent years. A local landlords association said vacancy rates are up and rents down amid declining enrollment at the university, which has shed 10,000 students in under a decade.
Fay, who has used the handle “Fat Pay” on social media, had buyers willing to make a deal. However, in multiple cases identified by The Inquirer, that was true only after the sellers and their real estate agents agreed to sign a deed showing that the property had sold for much more than the original asking price.
Joelle Delprete, a former Temple grad student who works for the university, lives in an apartment unit that Fay helped purchase. Soon, unpaid water and trash collection bills started piling up.
Shaina Levin, a Coldwell agent who worked with Fay in his Old City office, represented a seller in one such deal on 15th Street. The property was initially listed for sale last July at $375,000. Records show Fay’s client bought it for $842,000 in September 2025 after securing a $673,600 mortgage.
“It’s a bonus when we can keep it in the Coldwell Banker family,” Levin posted on Facebook, referring to the sale. “Thanks Pat Fay for teaming up on this one. Congratulations to your buyer!”
In an interview, Levin said her client received an amount closer to the original listing price, not the $842,0000 sales price recorded on the deed.
She saidthe buyer contended that thehigher sales price was tied to a planned renovation. City permit records show no evidence of construction or renovation work on the building.
Levin said that Fay’s proposal was “totally unconventional,” but that her office manager at Coldwell Banker ran it by the company’s legal department, which signed off.
“Legal said, ‘Yep, all good,’” Levin said. She referred additional questions about the sale to her manager, who declined to comment.
Fay’s buyer in that deal was UrbanNest Acquisitions, a limited liability company created the same month as the sale by Tanjania Powell-Avery, a former real estate agent from Pottstown, Montgomery County. Federal prosecutors with the Eastern District of Pennsylvania indicted Powell-Avery and two others in 2010 for participating in a mortgage fraud ring in the Philadelphia area. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years’ probation and nine months’ house arrest.
Powell-Avery declined to comment.
Two other colleagues of Fay’s at his former Old City office also brokered sales with him, according to data from the Multiple Listing Service, a shared database that real estate professionals use to track and arrange deals.
Karl Klotzbach represented sellers in eight deals with Fay over five months last year — more than any other seller’s agent, records show. The eight properties had originally been listed for a total of $3.4 million before they were each re-listed and sold for a combined $7 million.
Klotzbach did not respond to requests for comment.
Matthew Greene, another Coldwell agent, brokered four sales with Fay on North 12th Street. The properties were each listed for $450,000 last April, then re-listed at $879,000 the following month. In July, each property sold at the higher amount within days of one another, with all four sales backed by a separate $703,200 mortgage.
Greene would not discuss the sales.
“I’m happy to direct you to our legal team for any comment,” he said. Greene hung up the phone without providing any contact information.
Daryl Turner, the branch vice president at Coldwell Banker’s Old City office, referred questions to the company’s legal department. Andrea Gillespie, a national spokesperson for Coldwell Banker, which operates in 49 countries and territories, would not comment on the sales.
“We immediately disaffiliated Pat Fay and are continuing to investigate the matter internally,” Gillespie said in an email. “Coldwell Banker stands for trust and integrity, and we hold our agents to the highest ethical standards.”
‘This is my livelihood’
While sellers were eager to offload their toxic real estate investments, not every deal went smoothly.
John Sexton, an independent licensed appraiser with twenty years’ experience in the Philadelphia market, said in an interview that an appraisal company working for a lender contracted him last year to evaluate a property on North Park Avenue, near Temple’s campus. The sale was being brokered by Fay and Peter Lien, an eXp real estate agent representing the seller.
It was the kind of property common around Temple: a Victorian-era rowhouse that had been converted into a three-unit, nine-bedroom student rental. And, like similar properties in the area, it sat on the market unsold for more than two months, with no takers, at its $408,000 asking price.
The property was taken off the market in October, but then reappeared as a pending sale at $879,000, according to MLS data. Fay had found another buyer ready to pay more than double.
Sexton said he quizzed Lien about why a property that had not undergone recent renovations would suddenly jump in price. Sexton said Lien responded that an earlier broker simply “hadn’t been familiar with the real estate market” around Temple.
Sexton said the implication of these conversations was that Lien “had a person who would pay $879,000, so I should just do my job and mark it at $879,000.”
The 1700 block of Arlington St. in North Philadelphia Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2025. Buyers have snapped up $48 million in student housing around Temple University, often paying more than twice what properties were originally listed for even though rents are down and vacancies are up for student housing.
Sexton said he then received an unusual email from an individual named “Jay Jay,” who indicated he was working with Fay. The email included a list of nearby properties that had all sold in the $800,000 range, establishing that the sales price was reasonable.
Sexton looked into the comparable sales and found that they had all been brokered by Fay. “Jay Jay” also sent Sexton copies of leases for apartments in the same building, purporting to show units leasing for $2,500 a month. But when Sexton dug up sales listings for the same building from a few weeks earlier, they advertised that the units had been leased for closer to half that amount.
“Jay Jay” did not respond to an e-mailed request for comment.
Sexton said he called Fay to discuss the discrepancies, and the real estate agent accused him of being inexperienced and pushed him to approve the higher value.
“It’s a tough situation,” Sexton said. “You have two brokers pressuring you and sending you signed documents saying the sale price is valid.”
Sexton said after he told Fay he would need to further substantiate the higher asking price, Fay stopped responding.
The property never sold and is now off the market.Sexton never heard from Fay again.
“It’s infuriating to me, because he’s putting my license in jeopardy,” Sexton said. “This is my livelihood.”
In a text message, Fay denied “any claim that I have ever manipulated or influenced an appraisal in any fashion.” He did not respond to questions about the sale.
Lien said he could not comment on the failed deal.
“I was instructed by my brokerage that any press would have to go through our office, and we’re not allowed to speak on it,” said Lien, who works out of eXp’s King of Prussia office.
The manager of that eXP office did not return a request for comment.
‘Really bad stuff’
Daniel Perlman, a former prosecutor in the Maryland State’s Attorney’s Office who now practices white-collar criminal defense, said anyone who signed documents they knew to be false could potentially face legal problems.
“If there are documents that have incorrect information for a mortgage, then yeah, somebody has criminal liability,” Perlman said. “You’re under penalty of perjury for signing these documents.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania said the office does not confirm or deny the existence of investigations, as did a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania State Real Estate Commission, which licenses agents.
Nick Pizzola, vice president of the Temple Area Property Association, which represents local landlords, said the COVID-19 pandemic has had a lasting negative impact on the off-campus real estate market, leaving landlords struggling to sign leases and pay their own mortgages.
Still, he said, the seller’s agents had to have known something was amiss when a buyer was offering double the asking price.
“Anyone who knows anything about real estate would have run away from those deals,” Pizzola said. “Some really bad stuff was happening.”
Most participants in Fay’s deals were reluctant to discuss their roles when contacted by The Inquirer this month. Some seller’s agents said their brokerages had instructed them to remain silent. Others claimed ignorance when it came to the details of the deals they had helped arrange.
The 1900 block of N. 18th St in North Philadelphia Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2025. Buyers have snapped up $48 million in student housing around Temple University, often paying more than twice what properties were originally listed for even though rents are down and vacancies are up for student housing.
In the March 2025 sale of an apartment building on the 2200 block of North Sydenham Street, for example, both the seller and his agent said they could not explain why the sales price did not match the amount listed on the deed.
The property initially went up for sale for $324,900 in December 2024 but was then re-listed and sold to Fay’s client in March 2025 for $789,000. The seller, Alvjod Dedaj, said he did not actually receive that higher amount. He referred further questions to his real estate agent at Long & Foster.
“I have no clue what’s going on,” Dedaj said. “I just cashed out a certain amount of money.”
Dedaj’s agent, Bob Kiziroglou, who works out of Long & Foster’s Devon office, said he, too, could not recall why the asking price suddenly jumped. He referred questions to Fay.
“Reach out to him, man, he’ll give you all the details,” Kiziroglou said.
A message left at Long & Foster’s Devon office was not returned.
The Broad Street office of Keller Williams Realty was another hub for deals involving Fay, with five of its agents representing sellers in eightsales. An office manager did not respond to requests for comment.
Wisenberg, who was a prosecutor in the Whitewater/Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan investigation, said he found it particularly suspicious that Fay arranged deals with mortgages that far exceeded the initial asking price, and with sellers receiving less than the stated purchase price.
“What’s he doing with the rest of the money?” Wisenberg asked.
Trouble brewing
Already, there are signs of trouble in the neighborhood around Temple.
In November, one lender, Easy Street Capital, filed to foreclose on a Park Avenue property that sold in late 2024 for $850,000 — more than double its value just two years prior.
While no buyer’s agent is listed in MLS data for the sale, Lien, the eXp agent, is listed as representing the seller. The buyer, Park Ave Enterprise LLC, is registered to an associate of Fay’s who participated in at least four other sales around Temple that he brokered.
According to court filings, the LLC defaulted on an $807,000 mortgage about four months after purchase.
The lenders that financed Fay’s purchases now bear the most risk of the overvalued and under-occupied rentals lapsing into foreclosure. A private lenders association in Novemberwarned its members of a “fraud scheme” operating around Temple University, and cities like Baltimore have seen hundreds of properties fall into foreclosure as a result of suspected mortgage fraud rings.
A spokesperson for City Councilmember Jeffery “Jay” Young, whose district encompasses the affected properties, said he was “not familiar with the situation.” He called mortgage fraud “a common and unscrupulous real estate practice that happens too often in our city.”
Orbanek, the Temple spokesperson, said the university is working to identify students who may be impacted by potential foreclosures and asked themto contact the university’s Essential Needs Hub, which connects student renters with supportive resources.
Joelle DelPrete, a former Temple grad student who works for the university, lives in an apartment unit that Fay helped purchase. He brokered a sale of the rental property to “18th Estates LLC” in December 2024 for $868,000. It had previously been listed for $385,000.
A few months later, DelPrete said, Fay texted her that he was the property manager, and he wanted her to sign a new lease so he could begin collecting rent.
“We assumed it was a totally legit company,” DelPrete said.
Soon, DelPrete said, unpaid water and trash collection bills started piling up, and maintenance issues went unanswered. In October, she found a document known as an Act 91 notice that was posted on an adjacent property in advance of foreclosure proceedings. It showed the owners — who had been represented in the purchase by Fay — had stopped paying its mortgage and owed roughly $25,000.
DelPrete and her three roommates are hoping to move out before her building goes into foreclosure.
“Especially living around Temple, you just gotta be careful and make sure everything is aboveboard,” she said. “If something feels off, it is off.”
In Philly’s bustling, pop-up-riddled bakery scene, Dead King has some of the most idiosyncratic hours out there: It’s open just twice a week, from 4 to 6 p.m. Thursdays and 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturdays. Perhaps as a result, one often needs to brave a long line that snakes through the numerous warehouse spaces inside Manayunk Timber, which houses the bakery. (If you just want sourdough or pizza dough — both excellent — and you live in parts of Northwest Philadelphia, you can subscribe for bread delivery.)
I was rewarded for my pains on an icy Thursday afternoon by a nearly empty parking lot and no line at all. There were plenty of rosemary focaccia slabs, tomato pie slices, and olive-twisted baguettes to be had, plus loaves of plain, cinnamon raisin, and jalapeño-cheddar, saucer-sized chocolate chip cookies, and cream cheese-iced spice cake squares. And that maritozzi? I polished it off in minutes, not taking nearly enough time to savor its buttery brioche cushion, tangy labneh topping, and the bright burst of lemon curd at the center. Oh well. I’ll just have to go back next week. Dead King Bread, 5100 Umbria St., deadkingbread.myshopify.com
— Jenn Ladd
A plate of Manti served at Pera Turkish Cuisine in Northern Liberties.
Manti at Pera Turkish Cuisine
Manti holds a special place in my heart. It’s the dish my family eats when I touch down in Istanbul for my annual trip to Turkey. The second the plates land on our table at Aşkana (one of my favorite restaurants in the city), the ceremony begins, signaling to everyone in the dining room, “This family has reunited!”
Manti is also the dish my mom makes best. Whenever she has guests over, this is what you’ll find on the dinner table. It’s a labor-intensive dish, generally a family affair: one person makes the dough, another prepares the filling, and several fill and fold the dumplings. It’s popular across Turkey, Armenia, and Uzbekistan, but the version served at Pera reminds me of the recipe I grew up with: small, tender dumplings filled with ground lamb — pinched to look like little stars — topped with garlicky yogurt and spiced butter. Is it better than my mom’s manti? I’m obligated to say no. However, it comes close. Pera’s manti is textbook, with each bite containing the sacred combination that makes this dish a comfort meal: lamb, yogurt, and butter. Pera Turkish Cuisine, 944 N. Second St., 215-660-9471, peraphiladelphia.com
— Esra Erol
Kapusniak at Heavy Metal Sausage
Kapusniak (or sauerkraut soup) at Heavy Metal Sausage.
This week, the balm that soothed my frozen body, attained after scaling the mountainous snow piles of South Philly, was a bowl of soup at Heavy Metal Sausage on Thursday. It was kapusniak, a sauerkraut soup with mushrooms that’s currently on their lunchtime specials menu. Tangy, hearty, and lightly smoky, it instantly transported me from the butcher shop to Poland, where I once spent the weeks sipping sour soups. Heavy Metal Sausage Co., 1527 W. Porter St., heavymetalsausage.com
— Kiki Aranita
Fried chicken curry at Gabriella’s Vietnam
Fried chicken curry at Gabriella’s Vietnam
As an antidote to the bitter cold, chef Thanh Nguyen has just put a selection of curries on the menu at Gabriella’s Vietnam, and her fried chicken curry may be the very best version of the dish found in Philly. The chicken is tender, its skin crispy, and the curry meets a Goldilocks ideal — not too thin, not too thick, balanced in creaminess and savoriness, with a touch of spice. It’s extraordinarily restorative when spooned onto steaming hot rice. Gabriella’s Vietnam, 1837 E. Passyunk Ave., 272-888-3298, gabriellasvietnam.com
