This week’s biggest Winners & Losers

The Super Bowl-winning Birds owner is giving back. Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie is donating $50 million to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine to support a new autism research initiative: the Lurie Autism Institute. Because of Lurie, whose brother is on the autism spectrum, the issue has been at the forefront for the team, with the Eagles Autism Foundation raising funds for the cause since at least 2018.

State Rep. Ryan Bizzarro was awarded the 2025 Pennsylvania PBS Good Neighbor Award for his work related to public media and children’s educational programming. One of eight recipients to receive the award statewide, the Erie lawmaker will now have the title of “Champion of Lifelong Learning.”

Pennsylvania’s beleaguered higher-education scene got good news this week when Philip Cavalier, a Swarthmore graduate, was tapped to succeed Kenneth Hawkinson at the helm of Kutztown University. Cavalier, a veteran of public universities who holds a doctorate in English from SUNY Buffalo, hopes to replicate his recent success at another regional public institution – the University of Tennessee, Martin – where, as provost, he helped boost enrollment and graduation rates.

Federal immigration raids on workplaces are rattling communities across the commonwealth – from Norristown in Montgomery County, where nearly two dozen people have been rounded up since the end of May, to recent raids on a Bethlehem construction site, a Luzerne County pallet shop and a Pittsburgh Thai restaurant, among others. While immigrants say the fear has taken an economic toll on their communities, fury at the raids has also inspired a groundswell of local resistance.

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night deterred two Philadelphia postal workers – Tauheed Tucker and Saahir Irby – from pilfering $80 million in U.S. Treasury checks between June 2023 and September 2024. The pair, now charged with multiple thefts, lifted the envelopes from mail-sorting machines at the USPS processing center in Philadelphia, where they worked, then cashed the checks out of town. They and two co-conspirators now face decades in prison.

Forget the price of eggs; what about the price of parking? The City of Pittsburgh announced rates for parking permits are set to go up starting July 1, with residential parking doubling from $20 to $40 per year and visitor passes going from $1 to $10 a year. It’s the first time in four years that the rates, along with some folks’ parking plans, have been adjusted.