"Police last night charged a Yellow Cab Co. driver with vehicular homicide in an early-morning hit-and-run in Logan that left a young mother clinging to life and her 5-year-old son dead." A couple of unrelated incidents involving firearms took place early yesterday morning in Philadelphia. In the first incident, a retired Philly cop working as a pizza delivery man was accosted by three teenagers, one of whom pointed a gun at him while the......

Dear PPA: I need you to explain something to me. I've seen PPA officers hang out and wait for a meter to expire, ticket cars that stayed in a loading zone a minute too long, and ignore "meter broken" notes. So I'm curious as to why you completely ignore cars parked on the median, or in turn lanes and in clearly marked "no parking" zones on Sundays. I know it's the day of rest,......

When someone offers you the chance to watch a television show and spit out your opinions on it, they probably hope that you enjoy what they're throwing at you. Well, suffice it to say that Parking Wars: Best of Season 1 falls into the category of "fun to watch because it ain't me!" True Phillyists all over the city know the Philadelphia Parking Authority means business. The PPA raked in over $70 million last year.......

Thanks to a tip from Consumerist, we hear that the majority of parking tickets in our fair city may not be, well, fair. Or, more to the point, they’re probably fair but they’re not actually valid and enforceable. According to a CBS special investigation, parking tickets given at 85% of the parking meters in Philadelphia are invalid. Apparently, there’s a law here in PA that says inspectors have to certify each and every parking meter......

Senator Vincent Fumo was eating dinner at his Spring Garden home at 7PM last night when he started experiencing chest pains. He was taken by ambulance to Hahnemann University Hospital where it was determined that he had suffered a heart attack and that his right coronary artery was 100 percent blocked. He had emergency surgery and remains in critical condition this morning, although he was alert and speaking with his family after the procedure. Hey,......

SEPTA will announce its "Go Green Go SEPTA" initiative this afternoon at Market East Station. (We've already seen the ads up there; they're posters with real moss or grass glued to them.) The idea is to increase ridership to reduce emissions that contribute to global warming, and they've timed it for the Philadelphia Flower Show, which runs March 2-9 at the Convention Center and is typically a time of increased ridership. General manager Joseph......

Our very own state could actually be of key importance in the Democratic presidential primary, so the campaigns for both Clinton and Obama will be opening offices in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in the coming days, and expanding their staff by recruiting local pros. The Inquirer takes a look at the battle going on over a proposed state-wide ban on smoking in Pennsylvania. A woman leaped from her third-floor apartment window on South Street near 2nd......

Some of you have off today. Others, not so much. In fairness, we will restrict today's list of things you should do to convince yourself that you are engaged and in tune with your city, if not the rest of your life, to things that fall into the "after work" category. LOST BOYS OF SUDAN STORYTELLING AT THE WHITE DOG CAFE Sudan's "Lost Boys" - children forced to become soldiers in the humanitarian nightmare......

What's new and/or interesting on TV this week. BCS Championship Game: Ohio State vs. LSU (Mon, 8:15PM-11:30PM, Fox) - Woo hoo! It's the college football Super Bowl! Of course, the bittersweet thing is, this means college football is over for the season. But at least it'll go out with a bang. Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives (Mon, 10PM-10:30PM, Food Network) - This episode's theme is eateries that are open 24/7, and one of the places being......

We have a soft spot for things that are brilliantly stupid. These two sets of signs on the same block we recently stumbled upon in Chestnut Hill definitely qualify. As you can plainly see, there is an obvious conflict of parking instructions here. The No Parking signs appear to be recently installed, while the Two Hour Parking signs appear to have been there for decades. So we think that the sign installers probably should......

If you still aren't bored of stories about Jocelyn S. Kirsch and Edward K. Anderton, then by all means, read on. Meanwhile, other rather more dangerous criminals are still on the loose. Police still have little to go on in the brutal November 25th murder of John Bartram High School sophomore Antonio Q. Clarke, who was last seen alive trying to catch a trolley in Southwest Philadelphia. Call police at 215-686-3334 or -3335 with......

Dear PhillyCarShare: I love you. I do. And I extol your virtues to anyone who asks. You're socially responsible. Your customer service is second-to-none. You sponsor events throughout the city. You've got these guys. What's not to love? Perhaps some of your customers. The kind who don't really know how to drive all that well and end up banging up one of your cars but not reporting it. The kind who leave the cars......

If you have some free time this Sunday and just can't wait to hear more about Mayor-Elect Nutter's vision of "Philadelphia being the next great city," sign up as a volunteer for the The Great Expectations Citizens Convention. Volunteers are needed from 10:30AM-6PM to staff registration tables and act as guides to rooms between sessions. We're betting you'll be able to sneak a peak at some talks while you're at it too, including Michael......

The Inquirer takes another look at the troubling recent increase, both locally and nationally, in the shooting of police. Mayor Nutter, in his first speech outside the city since the election, as the keynote speaker at the Chester County Chamber of Business and Industry's annual dinner, got a standing ovation before and after, and urged Southeastern Pennsylvania to come together and work as one to achieve greatness. Police are still investigating gunshots fired shortly before......

"Officers from the State Police Bureau of Liquor Control Enforcement in Philadelphia conducted a special underage drinking detail in the Lincoln Financial Field parking lot" before the Temple-Penn State football game Saturday and arrested 31 underage tailgaters, as well as one more for presenting false identification. City police were trying to break up a dispute between two rival groups of young men in Gray's Ferry Saturday night when the young men opened fire on......

What's new and/or interesting in Philly theaters this weekend. Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains - A documentary by director Jonathan Demme following Jimmy Carter on his recent book tour for his controversial book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. A great director and an interesting subject should make for a good film. Trailer Showing at: Ritz at the Bourse Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten - Another documentary opening at the Ritz at the Bourse this weekend......

Hey, it's election day! And what with the Mayor's race being a foregone conclusion and everything, the interesting stuff is happening in the fight for two seats on the state Supreme Court. The search for John Lewis, the suspect in the murder of Officer Chuck Cassidy, is over. Police apprehended him at a homeless shelter in Miami at 7AM. They tracked him down after learning that a relative had bought a bus ticket to......

75-year-old Maximo Jurado escaped from a New Jersey prison in 1979 and has been on the run ever since - until he was captured by police last night in Philadelphia at the home of an ex-girlfriend, who had known him for a over a year but had never discovered the truth about his past. The Daily News story we linked to the other day about the bloated Parking Authority pay roll has caused Ed Rendell......

Prepare to be insulted! A recent survey of visitors and residents of 25 cities ranked Philadelphia as the home of the least attractive people in the United States. Apparently we're also among the least stylish, least active, least friendly, and least worldly. Well, we don't know about all of those things, but these results certainly make us feel pretty unfriendly at the moment... (Via Jen) As another new tactic in the fight against crime and......

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Protest over national vs. regional chains, the never-ending debate over the place of cars and bicycles in our metropolises, professional sports scandals, remembering a solemn day, and being issued a search warrant - it all happened across our sites this week! Another banner week at Chicagoist started off with daily reports from food writer Lisa Shames on her attempt to eat only locally grown and raised foodstuffs all week as part of a farmers market......

We all remember the rather infamous incident earlier this year when an 18-year-old driver shot a 14-year-old on his bike supposedly because the boy didn't get out of his way fast enough. The accused attorney says his client did indeed kill the boy, but it wasn't a premeditated act; he saw the boy reach under his long T-shirt, thought he was in danger, and fired. Four young men from Mantua were arrested yesterday for......

Mayor Street and the man most likely to be our next mayor (Democratic mayoral candidate Michael Nutter) are disagreeing over the location of a new Family Court. Street wants to move "the court from its current location on Vine Street near 18th to a site at 15th and Arch streets where a parking lot now stands," while Nutter wants "the new court building as close as possible to a new Youth Study Center. He......

Police have charged Duane Jackson, 45, with attempted murder and attempted rape in the case of a woman who was stabbed and sexually assaulted in her home near Center City in July. Authorities suspect Jackson may be responsible for other attacks in the city and are looking into that now, so more charges are probably on the way. An appeals court panel has upheld the 81/2-to-17-year prison sentence given to a computer consultant for......

The shapeless dough of the internet, formed into tasty pellets and baked to perfection, just for you. Most versions of the Bible are apparently missing all the important bits where Spider-Man shows up to lend a hand. American viewers of the new Doctor Who series may be unaware that before she was the Doctor's assistant, Billie Piper was a one-woman Spice Girl! Sort of. (Via) This is absolutely brilliant: the classic "Trouble with Tribbles" episode......

We received some interesting top ten lists from Match.com, as a sort of response to Forbes' annual list of top cities for singles. Philly ranked on every one of them. Amongst "Cities where you will find singles hitting the gym," we took ninth place. On the "Cities committed to healthy diets" list we were at 52%, making us number eight. We hit number nine again on "Top cities for vegetarian lovers," and we just......

When we go to review events (or at least when this Phillyist does), we generally go into them with the presumption that we're going to really enjoy them. Unfortunately, doing so can really set us up for disappointment. And Linkin Park's Projekt Revolution was really something of a letdown. We're not quite sure who to blame for that: the bands, the day's sound engineers, or the Vans Warped Tour, where we had such a......

A little Philly celebrity news: 50 Cent was in town earlier this week. Click through for details and pictures. Earlier this spring, when the whole thing came out about the Philadelphia School District's budget problems, their chief financial officer and budget overseer resigned. But it's just now coming out that, despite the fact that she only worked for the district for two years, she left with a ridiculously good deal: she was paid for unused......

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A tall, icy glass of our favorite internet junk, just for you. Apropos of Something is celebrating the impending release of The Simpsons Movie with a list of The Top Simpsons Supporting Characters. Some of these folks actually seem to be pretty major characters to us, but apparently for the purposes of this list, anybody who is not part of the Simpsons family proper is considered a supporting character. Regardless, many lovely choices, and many......