Yo, Philly in the News

• Colgate-Palmolive has a great little contest running where you vote for one of nine children's hospitals around the country, and the one with the most votes gets a Fun Center where sick kids can go to forget about their illnesses for a moment and remember how to have fun. Each Fun Center will be equipped with a flat screen monitor, DVD player and a Nintendo Wii. Sweet! The promotion has gone so well, all nine hospitals will be getting one Fun Center, and the hospital with the most votes will get a second one. The point is, one of the hospitals is St. Christopher's Hospital for Children in Philadelphia, so get on there and vote! (Via Maude)
• Officials at the Hunting Park campus of Community Education Partners discovered on Sunday that one of their teachers - Arnesx Honore, 32 - had had his picture published the previous Friday among those of the city's most violent fugitives. They suspended him and police arrested him on Tuesday. Officials knew he had been arrested for assault, but also knew that the charges had been dropped. They didn't know that the assault had involved a minor (a 14-year-old girl, whose daughter he apparently fathered), and that the charges were refiled July of last year.
• Former Penn professor and world-renowned brain researcher Tracy McIntosh was sentenced yesterday to 3 1/2 to 7 years in state prison for raping a 23-year-old woman in 2002.
• At 2:30PM today, at the Governor's Reception Room in the Capitol, Governor Rendell will sign the open-records bill, which will greatly expand public access to a wide array of government records.
• The Pennsylvania State Police have announced that an e-mail that's been circulating - which claims that state police hope to generate about $9 million in fines during a 30-day ticket-writing blitz that began Friday - is a hoax. In fact, money from speeding tickets does not directly benefit the state police. Similar hoaxes about the $9 million ticket blitz have surfaced and been debunked recently by police in Hawaii, Kentucky, Michigan and Oklahoma.

Image Credit: Flickr user monoglot