From Los Angeles to Philadelphia, efforts include trying to gain police access to cameras used to monitor traffic, expanding surveillance networks in some major cities and enabling officers to get regular access to security footage at businesses.

Some in law enforcement, however, acknowledge that their plans may face an age-old obstacle: Americans' traditional reluctance to give the government more law enforcement powers out of fear that they will live in a society where there is little privacy.

"Look, we don't want an occupied state. We want to be able to walk the good balance between freedom and security," Los Angeles police Deputy Chief Michael Downing, who heads the department's counter-terrorism and special operations bureau.

"If this helps prevent, deter, but also detect and create clues to who did (a crime), I guess the question is can the American public tolerate that type of security," he said.

Continue Reading...

Lawyers for Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 72, could start presenting defense witnesses as early as Wednesday. Gosnell has been in prison since a 2011 grand jury report that described his outdated West Philadelphia clinic as "a house of horrors."

Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey Minehart had ruled Tuesday that prosecutors over the past month failed to make a case on three of the seven first-degree murder counts, involving aborted babies known as Baby B, Baby C and Baby G.

On Wednesday, Minehart clarified that he did not intend to dismiss charges related to Baby C, which former employee Lynda Williams admits killing after it was alive for 20 minutes.

Instead, Minehart has thrown out the charges involving Baby F, which allegedly jerked its leg after it was born. Another staff member says Gosnell then cut the baby's neck to "ensure fetal demise."

Continue Reading...

Herbert and Catherine Schaible belong to a fundamentalist Christian church that believes in faith-healing.

Philadelphia Judge Benjamin Lerner said at a hearing they violated the most important condition of their probation: to seek medical care for their remaining children.

Authorities have yet to file criminal charges in the death of the 8-month-old boy last week, after he suffered with diarrhea and breathing problems for days. But charges could be filed once authorities pinpoint how the baby died.

The couple is on probation after a jury convicted them of involuntary manslaughter in 2010 in the death of their 2-year-old son, Kent, from pneumonia.

Continue Reading...

Encouraging workers to get a little competitive on the elliptical by offering them cash incentives may be the best way to help them lose pounds—and to slow companies’ spiraling health care costs.

That’s what researchers from Michigan and Pennsylvania discovered when they implemented a dollars-for-dieters program among the medical staff at Philadelphia’s Children’s Hospital.

Each participant was given a monthly weight-loss goal, based on his or her body-mass index, and assigned to one of two cohorts.

Members of the “individual incentive” cohort were eligible to win 100 dollars for every month that they hit their goal; if they fell short, the hospital simply kept the money.

Continue Reading...

Following our story, Rendell's column — which called on New York officials to lift a ban on the drilling technique — was updated to disclose that he is a paid consultant to a private equity firm with natural gas investments.

Continue Reading...

Before Thursday, City Council speaker Christine Quinn (generally an ally of Mayor Michael Bloomberg) hemmed and hawed for three years over whether to put forth a paid sick leave bill, despite the fact that eight in 10 New Yorkers support it. The issue placed her in an uncomfortable bind, trapped between Bloomberg and the business community (all of whom oppose it) -- and workers and unions on the other side.

But after previously using her power to block the bill (despite the majority of the City Council supporting it), Quinn realized her situation had become  politically untenable. And on Thursday, a compromise was reached that requires companies with 15 or more workers to offer employees at least five paid sick days. As the New York Times noted, the deal represents a "raw display of political muscle by a coalition of labor unions and liberal activists.

Continue Reading...

While gay actors like Zachary Quinto, Ian McKellen and Neil Patrick Harris are compelled to play heterosexual roles as a matter of course -- that's the bulk of what's out there -- straight actors get Oscars and praise for bravery.

The latest actors to join the fraternity of the courageous are Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, who respectively play Liberace and his lover in the HBO film "Behind the Candelabra." Damon told Entertainment Weekly that the film's revealing costumes embarrassed his wife: "I really wish she didn’t see that. That’s too much." As for the sex scene between Douglas and Damon, "The scene where I’m behind him and going at him, we did that in one take," said the younger actor.

"We do it. Cut. There’s a long pause. And then you just hear Steven [Soderbergh, the director] go, 'Well … I have no notes.'"

Continue Reading...

Allison June and Amelia Lee Tucker, clad in animal-striped shirts and flowered headbands, were introduced during a news conference at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Both girls still have nasal tubes but appeared rosy-cheeked and alert as they were held by their parents, Shellie and Greg Tucker, of Adams, N.Y., about 300 miles north of Philadelphia near Lake Ontario.

Allison, described by doctors and her parents as the smaller but feistier twin, was discharged from the hospital Monday. Her sister Amelia, who's larger and more reserved, needs a little more recovery time and will remain in the hospital into the new year.

"We totally expect them to have full, independent lives," said pediatric surgeon Dr. Holly Hedrick, who led a 40-person medical team in the complex seven-hour operation on Nov. 7.

The twins shared a chest wall, diaphragm, liver and pericardium, the membrane around the heart.

Continue Reading...

I'm a grad student living in Philadelphia. I graduated from undergrad a year ago and went straight into grad school because it felt right. Nothing is wrong whatsoever with my pick of grad schools. I love the program, the professors are excellent, and the facilities charming and well kept.

Thing is, I'm not used to being alone like this all the time.

In undergrad I had tons of classmates. I had a few friends. There was always someone around to talk to. I was even in a long-distance, long-term relationship all the way through up until my senior year of college. We lived together for a while until we mutually agreed that things weren't working out. After undergrad I moved in with my family short-term before I moved and attended grad school. There were always my siblings, parents and local friends to lean on when I felt crummy.

I don't even remember being the slightest bit afraid of anything.

Now it's completely different. I can't stop thinking about everyone in my life and wishing they were near. When I have others around me I'm fine, but who am I when they leave? Even if I feel like I know who I am, what is this new reality of being by myself? What does it really mean to be "alone"?

Continue Reading...

The White House said Tuesday that the president intends to hold a series of events to build support for his approach to avoid across-the-board tax increases and steep spending cuts in defense and domestic programs. Obama will meet with small business owners at the White House on Tuesday and with middle-class families on Wednesday.

The president's visit to a small business in Hatfield, Pa., that makes parts for a construction toy company will cap a week of public outreach as the White House and congressional leaders negotiate a way to avoid the tax increases and spending cuts scheduled to take effect Jan. 1. The trip will mark Obama's first public event outside the nation's capital since winning re-election.

Both sides warn the so-called "fiscal cliff" could harm the nation's economic recovery, but an agreement still appears far from assured. The White House and congressional Republicans have differed on whether to raise revenue through higher tax rates or by closing tax loopholes and deductions.

Continue Reading...

The menu one recent Thursday featured grilled chicken, scallion risotto—and a grisly five-year-old murder that happened 3,000 miles away.

Jodine Serrin, 39, was found stabbed and beaten to death in the bedroom of her Carlsbad, CA home on Valentine’s Day, 2007.  But the trail to any suspects had long since grown cold, and the Carlsbad cops working the case—Detective Bryan Hargett and Sergeant Mickey Williams—had reached only dead ends.

So on the Thursday in question, Hargett and Williams found themselves eager (and hopeful) lunch guests of the Vidocq Society, whose unique self-appointed mission is solving cases that have defied the best efforts of law enforcement—on the theory that fresh ideas from colleagues can inject new thinking to help unravel even the toughest mysteries.

Continue Reading...

He wasn’t talking about me leaving to go back home. I was home. Or rather, I was in their home, having moved back into my parents’ house about a year before. He was really asking when I planned on getting my life together. And it’s not that I didn’t agree with him, it’s just that I didn’t feel quite ready to give up my life of leisure, at least not yet.

It’s not like I didn’t watch my high school and college friends fall into line, one by one. As they became more stable, settling into lives that seemed plucked from the pages of an Ikea catalog, I strangely found myself regressing, exploring things that most people got out of their system when they graduated high school. As my friends hung works of art in their freshly painted foyers, I tacked up Michael J. Fox posters on my bedroom wall. As they set up savings accounts and monthly budgets in Excel spreadsheets, I dipped into my paltry funds for beer money. We looked at each other like we were different species and in a way we were: They were Homo sapiens maturus and I was Homo sapiens immaturus. If we mated, we’d probably start a whole new breed of human being.

Continue Reading...

Salon reader Robert Berkman sent in this image of bread shelves emptied in Brooklyn's Park Slope Food Coop:

Reader Andy Rothwell sent in this video of pre-hurricane Philadelphia, captured on his preparation beer run:

Continue Reading...

The financial aid award letters that colleges send to prospective students can be confusing: Many mix grants, scholarships and loans all under the heading of "Award," "Financial Assistance," or "Offered Financial Aid." Some schools also suggest loans in amounts that families can't afford.

Take Parent Plus loans, a federal program that allows families to take out as much as they need, after other aid is applied, to pay for their children's college costs. As we recently reported with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Plus loans are remarkably easy to get. With minimal underwriting and no assessment of whether parents can actually afford the loans, families can end up overburdened by debt.

Continue Reading...

Interested in noshing on crickets, worms and farm-raised python? The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia has an event for you.

It's hosting an adults-only cocktail party on Oct. 27 called "Cuisine from the Collections."

While many of the living plants and animals represented in the museum's 18 million research specimens already are food for other species, most aren't your typical kitchen staples.

Other menu items will include seaweed, buffalo and rabbit. The food is by the museum's caterer and chefs as well as students from Drexel University's Goodwin College of Professional Studies.

Tickets are $100 for nonmembers. Proceeds benefit the 200-year-old institution's mission of scientific research and exploration.

Continue Reading...

Johann "Hans" Breyer, a retired toolmaker, admits he was a guard at Auschwitz during World War II, but told the AP he was stationed outside the facility and had nothing to do with the wholesale slaughter of some 1.5 million Jews and others behind the gates.

The special German office that investigates Nazi war crimes has recommended that prosecutors charge him with accessory to murder and extradite him to Germany for trial on suspicion of involvement in the killing of at least 344,000 Jews at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in occupied Poland.

The AP also has obtained documents that raise doubts about Breyer's testimony about the timing of his departure from Auschwitz.

The case is being pursued on the same legal theory used to prosecute late Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk, who died in March while appealing his conviction in Germany on charges he served as a guard at the notorious Sobibor death camp, also in occupied Poland.

Continue Reading...

The civil lawsuits were filed by nine plaintiffs. Two spoke at a news conference, saying the abuse they suffered as children still haunts them and they wanted to go public to help other victims.

Michael McDonnell held up a photo of himself as a sixth-grader at St. Titus School in suburban East Norriton, where he said he was abused by two priests for several years beginning in 1980.

“When I look at that picture I remember what happened … I see a sad face in that photo,” said McDonnell, who was joined by his wife and 6-year-old son. He said he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, mental illness and drug addiction because of the abuse.

Andrew Druding said the abuse he suffered when he was 9 at the hands of a priest at St. Timothy School in northeast Philadelphia strained relationships with his family and friends and caused flashbacks that persist 40 years later.

Continue Reading...

The civil lawsuits were filed by a total of nine plaintiffs. Two of them spoke at a news conference, saying the abuse they suffered as children still haunts them and they wanted to go public to help other victims.

Michael McDonnell held up a photo of himself as a sixth-grader at St. Titus School in suburban East Norriton, where he said he was abused by two priests for several years beginning in 1980.

"When I look at that picture I remember what happened ... I see a sad face in that photo," said McDonnell, who was joined by his wife and 6-year-old son. He said he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, mental illness and drug addiction because of the abuse.

Andrew Druding said the abuse he suffered when he was 9 years old at the hands of a priest at St. Timothy School in northeast Philadelphia strained relationships with his family and friends and caused bad dreams and flashbacks that persist 40 years later.

Continue Reading...