This week’s biggest Winners & Losers

There haven’t been many entries in the Sixers’ win column this year, but the team scored a major victory in City Hall Thursday as City Council gave initial approval for the 76 Place arena development set for Market East. Council’s Committee of the Whole voted 11-4 to move the arena’s legislative package forward, setting the stage for the project to receive final approval by Dec. 19 – a deadline the team told the city it must meet for development to begin on schedule for the 2031 season.

Haverford Township School District social studies teacher Leon Smith was named the 2025 Pennsylvania Teacher of the Year at the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s annual professional development conference this week. Interim Acting Education Secretary Angela Fitterer said Smith, who also serves as an African American Cultural Enrichment Advisor and freshmen boys’ basketball coach, “perfectly exemplifies what it means to be an excellent educator.”

Philadelphia’s deputy health commissioner got a promotion to the top spot this week when Mayor Cherelle Parker promoted Palak Raval-Nelson to commissioner of the city Department of Public Health. Raval-Nelson, who began her career with the department in 1996 as a public health inspector, will assume her new role on Dec. 23 – just in time to help facilitate Philadelphians’ health-related New Year’s resolutions.

The University of Pennsylvania’s reputation took yet another indirect hit when it was revealed that Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees from the school, which already lost its president this year to a campus antisemitism scandal. Police nabbed him in Altoona for the murder – and the Altoona McDonald’s lost out as well, as its online reviews were flooded with criticism from Mangione sympathizers.

Pennsylvania earned an accolade this week that no state wants: the title of the nation’s worst “Judicial Hellhole,” according to The American Tort Reform Foundation. In its most recent annual report, the organization points to nine-figure damage awards issued in the state, arguing that “lawsuit abuse in the City of Brotherly Love has reached a fever pitch with nuclear verdicts becoming the norm and novel theories of liability flourishing.”

The treasurer of a Franklin County swim club went freestyle with club funds, stealing more than $150,000 to help pay off her mortgage and credit cards. Krista D. Murr, a Selbyville, Delaware resident, took advantage of her treasurer role from 2017 until July 2024, when she used swim club funds on “personal credit card bills, utility bills, insurance policies, mortgage payments, home repairs and more.”