Yo, Philly in the News

• The city's eighth annual "Report Card on the Well-Being of Children and Youth in Philadelphia" has been released, and the news is not good. The city got its worst rating - 5 for "problematic" and "very troubling" - in the category of child safety.
• D'oh. The city will be spending $1.3 million dollars to fix a mistake made years ago that violates the contract with the firefighters union. The contract states, reasonably enough, that diesel emissions must be vented outside firehouses, but the city installed air-filtration systems that do not do that.
• Heh. All of the sudden we kind of like Paul Vallas. The Philadelphia School Reform Commission was planning on giving him a rather phony going away party on Wednesday, with lots of false smiles and photo opportunities, but he refused to show up because, he said, "I don't want to put up with any bulls-. I just want to go and get out."
• Police are on the lookout for the killer of a 27-year-old man who was found beaten to death on the rooftop of an abandoned apartment building in West Philly early Monday morning.
• A West Philly man died at the World Trade Center on 9/11, and his estate was awarded $2.9 million by the federal 9/11 Victims Recovery Fund. Today in a court in Brooklyn, the man's absentee father, who now lives in New Jersey and saw his son only twice during the man's lifetime, will try to get half of that money.
• Yesterday, Philadelphia officially announced a new project called Quest for Freedom, which will link together 20 sites around the city that have some connection with, and tell part of the story of, the Underground Railroad. The plan is to raise awareness of the African American experience - and to boost tourism, of course.

Photo of Philadelphia Engine Company 20, Ladder 23 by Flickr user Triborough, and used with his kind permission