NEWSWORKS: Just over a month ago, the chairman of the Philadelphia School Reform Commission took part in a pivotal, closed-door meeting to discuss the fate of a charter-school deal potentially worth $60 million, only hours after he publicly recused himself from voting on the matter due to a conflict of interest. SRC Chairman Robert Archie [pictured, below right, with Arlene Ackerman] confirmed his participation in the private session in an e-mail statement to NewsWorks and the Public School Notebook. The meeting was held March 16 at Philadelphia School District headquarters, and included Archie, State Rep. Dwight Evans [pictured, below left], […]

[Click image to activate] Courtesy of our friends at The Guardian, this is Pulitzer-worthy. Try it, you’ll like it.

ASSOCIATED PRESS: Gov. Tom Corbett is signing his first bill as governor. The Republican plans Monday afternoon to sign a bill repealing a requirement that fire sprinkler systems be installed in all new one- and two-family homes. The legislation was approved earlier this month by margins of nearly 2-1 in the state House and Senate. Proponents of the requirement said it would save lives by extinguishing fires before firefighters can get to the scene. Opponents, led by the Pennsylvania Builders Association, said it would unnecessarily drive up housing prices already out of reach for many people. MORE RELATED: Sometimes life-saving […]

Delaware & Springarden, 8:18 PM last night by JEFF FUSCO

THE GUARDIAN: More than 700 leaked secret files on the Guantánamo detainees lay bare the inner workings of America’s controversial prison camp in Cuba. The US military dossiers, obtained by the New York Times and the Guardian, reveal how, alongside the so-called “worst of the worst”, many prisoners were flown to the Guantánamo cages and held captive for years on the flimsiest grounds, or on the basis of lurid confessions extracted by maltreatment. The 759 Guantánamo files, classified “secret”, cover almost every inmate since the camp was opened in 2002. More than two years after President Obama ordered the closure […]

[Photo by Allauddin Khan/Associated Press] ASSOCIATED PRESS: Taliban insurgents dug a more than 1,050-foot (320-meter) tunnel underground and into the main jail in Kandahar city and whisked out more than 450 prisoners, most of whom were Taliban fighters, officials and the insurgents said Monday. The massive jailbreak overnight in Afghanistan’s second-largest city serves as a reminder of the Afghan government’s continuing weakness in the south, despite an influx of international troops, funding and advisers. Kandahar city, in particular, has been a focus of the international effort to establish a strong Afghan government presence in former Taliban strongholds. The 1,200-inmate Sarposa […]

“Tim*, man, what can I say? For the first few hours, the stories were confused enough that I could imagine maybe none of them were true, but they finally settled into one brief, brutal narrative: While covering rebel forces in the city of Misrata, Libya, you got hit by a piece of shrapnel and bled to death on the way to the clinic. You couldn’t have known this, but your fellow photographer Chris Hondros would die later that evening. I’m picturing you in the back of a pickup truck with your three wounded colleagues. There are young men with bandannas […]

13th & Locust, 12:51 PM by JONATHAN VALANIA