This week’s biggest Winners & Losers

It ain’t easy being cheesy – just ask the staff at Caliente Pizza and Draft House in the Pittsburgh region. Matt Hickey of West Mifflin turned his spinning skills into a title, taking home first place in “Pizza Acrobatics” at the International Pizza Expo in Las Vegas. On top of that, Perry Bogacz – son of Nick, owner of Caliente and its eight locations – finished first in the “Pizza Triathlon,” which includes folding a box and stretching two doughs.

We hear an awful lot these days about colleges’ balance sheets, but have you considered their hydrangeas? Amid a climate of increasing financial uncertainty, denizens of Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr and Lehigh can take solace in knowing their historic stone buildings and well-tended greens scored them each a place on Condé Nast Traveler's 2025 list of America's 54 most beautiful college campuses.

Gov. Josh Shapiro joined a multistate fight against the Trump administration’s push to cancel billions of dollars in public health grants. The Shapiro administration announced this week that it is joining 22 other states suing Trump over the funding, and said the lack of funds will impact efforts to “identify, track and respond to the spread of infectious diseases” – like the highly pathogenic avian influenza.

This week’s Dauphin County Commissioners meeting started off with a bang – or crash, rather. PennLive is reporting that Democratic Commissioner George Hartwick scraped his county-owned car against a pillar in the county garage, and later appeared to slur his words at a public meeting on Wednesday. The crash is at least the fourth time Hartwick has crashed a county-owned vehicle since 2014, and Dauphin officials are asking for “thoughts and prayers” for Hartwick.

This week, Rosemont became the latest in a series of Philadelphia-area colleges to announce closure due to financial difficulties – and the second local Catholic institution to do so within the past year. The other was Cabrini University, which shuttered last May and sold its campus to Villanova University, the Augustinian institution that is now acquiring Rosemont. The three-year transition into Villanova University, Rosemont Campus, will be particularly hard on the two-thirds of Rosemont undergraduates who are athletes, given that the college will end Division III competition next year.

It’s a tumultuous time for federal workers – including the roughly 300 employees recently laid off from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention research facility in Pleasant Hills. Amid ongoing federal cuts, the employees’ work – which included research on the safety of underground miners, mine disasters and respirators – will likely fall victim to the ongoing chaos of indiscriminate workforce reduction by the current administration.