This week’s biggest Winners & Losers

It’s not just the flag this year that’s catching the eye of patriotic beholders, but also one extremely red, white and blue star-spangled train. Engine 1776, a meticulously restored freight train painted with a flag motif for America’s 250th, rumbled out of a Scranton workshop this week and is blazing a patriotic trail along the Delaware-Lackawanna Railroad’s Poconos line.

Five Western Pennsylvania hospitals will get an $800 million investment from West Virginia University Health System, which is acquiring Independent Health System. The hospitals include three in Westmoreland County and one each in Butler and Clarion counties, bolstering care in the region.

Schools across Pennsylvania are one step closer to curbing student cell phone use after Pennsylvania House lawmakers this week approved legislation to institute a statewide bell-to-bell cell phone ban. The bill, sponsored by Democratic state Rep. Mandy Steele, which passed the House with a bipartisan 126-75 vote, would require schools to establish policies banning cell phone use during the school day.

Philadelphia’s mayor lost her battle to tax Uber and Airbnb transactions to raise $48 million for the School District of Philadelphia. The tech giants poured money into anti-tax lobbying efforts that ultimately defeated Parker’s proposals, which were aimed at alleviating the school district’s budget shortfall. City Council instead opted to allocate $48 million for public education from other sources.

Justin Sholly, a Montgomery County volunteer firefighter, has been charged with arson, criminal trespassing and other charges after authorities say he intentionally set three fires within a 30-hour period – one of which was set near the home of his former boss, who fired him in 2025, according to NBC News. Sholly’s period of pyromania ended after he was arrested by Pennsylvania State Police and subsequently admitted to starting the fires. 

There’s litter … and then there’s litter that just happens to have things like “The Jewish Talmud is Satanic” and “The Jews’ Plan for World Domination” written on it, which was tossed by an Ohio man onto the streets of Pittsburgh’s heavily Jewish Squirrel Hill neighborhood, site of the nation’s deadliest-ever attack on a Jewish community. Given all this, it was only reluctantly that an Allegheny County judge, Thomas Flaherty, accepted a plea that dismissed 145 littering charges against the antisemitic litterbug, Jeremy Brokaw, following an appeal of the original conviction.