Yo, Philly in the News

• Here's a very horrifying and surreal story for you: Tuesday night a 10-year-old boy was playing outside near his home on Lindley Avenue near 5th Street in Olney when a 25-year-old man walked up, grabbed the boy, and sliced his throat with a knife. The man was held by the family until police arrived, but he offered no resistance and didn't try to get away. Why he did it is still a mystery. The child is in stable condition and is expected to recover.
• The Veterans Center at Fourth and Florist Streets in Old City is in trouble due to federal funding cuts. It seems pretty odd to be cutting funding to veterans services during wartime, but what do we know?
• For more bad news, we turn to Philly's schools. The faculty at Community College of Philadelphia voted 206 to 33 to issue a statement of no confidence in college president Stephen M. Curtis. Although the statement has no formal impact, it's a symbol of their dissatisfaction with how the recent strike negotiations went. Meanwhile, A.S. Jenks Elementary School at 13th and Porter in South Philly is hurting because over the weekend someone stole the $9,000 raised during the school's annual Raffle Night last Friday. That's just cold.
• Ready for another bunch of articles on the failed attack on Fort Dix? Today you can read about the "pizza loophole" that allows pizza delivery men to skip a lot of the base's security restrictions (a loophole we assume will soon be tied up thanks to this whole thing), or about some of the suspects' family back home in Debar (a remote town on Macedonia's border with Kosovo) who can't believe their relatives in America could have been plotting such things, or you can read more about the clerk at Circuit City who saw the training tape and alerted authorities, or more about how the guys were eventually captured thanks to a sting operation.
• In a ruling that may be the first of its kind, a PA appeals court has said that a sperm donor who helped a lesbian couple conceive two children is liable for child support. The man, Carl L. Frampton Jr., was more involved in the raising of the children than perhaps your typical sperm donor would be, so this isn't as odd a ruling as it might sound. Frampton died of a stroke in March, so the money might have to come out of his Social Security survivor benefits.
• The Philly mayoral primary's getting pretty darn close now, folks, but more than a fifth of the respondents in a recent poll are still undecided. Meanwhile, in an amusing turn of events, the Inquirer reveals that Mayor Street tried to raise money for One Step Closer, the group that's putting out those anti-Nutter ads. We know who he's not voting for!

Image Credit: Flickr user rijones99