Court Order

Robert Raymond Rambo, a mechanic who works nights at a trucking company outside San Francisco, was awakened about a week ago by pounding on his front door. Outside was a person from his South Jersey past: Washington Township Detective Sgt. James Fanelli. Lawrence Magid, a Gloucester County prosecutor, was with him. They wanted to talk about a murder. According to court records obtained yesterday, it was Rambo who led authorities to suspect Robert F. Brown in the August 1981 kidnapping and slaying of Karen Sewekow, the only daughter of a Medford Lakes insurance executive.

The Casey administration is appealing a federal court order that it pay $7.5 million for programs for mentally retarded Philadelphians. At the same time, the administration is talking to city officials to determine whether it can fund the programs with money allocated to the city for other mental retardation services, said Vicki Smink, spokeswoman for the Department of Public Welfare. Smink and John A. Kane, chief counsel to the department, said yesterday that the administration hoped to settle the case out of court.

The feud between four Gloucester City officials and the city administrator intensified yesterday when the four Democrats won a court order barring the Republican administrator from copying or taking home city financial and personnel records. "I've gotten served with this thing and it's a waste of taxpayers' dollars. It's totally ridiculous, without merit and an attempt to discredit me," Gloucester City Administrator Gary Ruggierio said after the restraining order was signed by Camden County Superior Court Judge Paul A. Lowengrub.

Attorneys for the patients at Philadelphia State Hospital are seeking a federal court order that would force the state to resume discharging patients and developing programs for them in the community. The attorneys have also requested a court order requiring the state Department of Public Welfare to locate and provide care for 93 patients released from the hospital between April and November of 1988. The motions were filed Wednesday in a class-action suit on behalf of the patients before U.S. District Court Judge Edmund Ludwig.

On the day that Police Commissioner Willie L. Williams announced he had obeyed a court order and demoted 14 of his commanders, the department's teletype sent out a directive from one of the officers that still identified him as a chief inspector. The order, dated April 30, was sent to all police division inspectors, requiring them to contribute manpower to Mayor Goode's Youth Summit, an event planned for May 14 at the Civic Center. The directive was sent by Richard Neal, who was identified as "chief inspector of the patrol bureau.

At 11:15 yesterday morning, Julieta Scannone, a visitor from Caracas, Venezuela, stood with her husband and two children in front of the tall iron gates of the Barnes Foundation. Instead of holding four entrance tickets, though, she clutched a copy of a court order a guard had handed her. "You know what this means," she said after scanning the two-page document. "It means you have to be lucky to get into the Barnes. " Yesterday, Scannone and her family were not among the lucky.

A woman who said she had an 18-year affair with Kirby Puckett obtained a court order barring him from having contact with her. Laura Nygren, of St. Louis Park, Minn., has accused the Hall of Famer who played for the Minnesota Twins of shoving her in his Bloomington condominium and threatening her. A judge is to decide at a hearing tomorrow if the temporary order will be made permanent. Puckett's lawyer, Beth Bryant, declined to comment. Dave St. Peter, Twins senior vice president for business affairs, said he does not comment on such matters.

In a major rebuke to Philadelphia's prison administration, a Common Pleas Court panel yesterday quadrupled fines against the city to $20,000 a day for what it called a continuing failure to comply with court orders to improve conditions in the city jails. The three judges also ordered the forfeiture of more than $1 million of fine money already collected and being held in escrow. They said the funds should be spent on inmate needs ranging from drug-abuse treatment to recreation.

The father of Mary Beth Whitehead testified yesterday that she had told him of a court order requiring her to surrender Baby M shortly after she fled with the child for 87 days last year. The statement from Joseph Messer, 67, called into question Whitehead's testimony that she had not understood the events of May 5, when police attempted to enforce the order. It required Whitehead to give the baby girl temporarily to the baby's biological father, William Stern. During a hysterical scene at her home in Bricktown, Ocean County, Whitehead had managed to slip the baby through a bedroom window to her husband, Richard, who then escaped.

In what they see as the only way to get heat for residents of the troubled Highland Park Apartments, Gloucester City officials yesterday got a court order enabling them to repair the heating system, which has been broken since April. "There's not a lot else we could have done," said Jim Maley, the city's solicitor. "We haven't gotten any explanation for why there's no heat. " The order was granted by U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Newark. The owner of the apartments, Ruth Abromowitz of Short Hills, declared bankruptcy on June 6. At the time, the city had been trying to have the 340-unit complex placed in receivership.

The remaining children of the Northeast Philadelphia faith-healing couple who chose prayer over medicine in two child deaths are receiving court-ordered medical care, defense attorneys said Monday. Herbert and Catherine Schaible's seven children were placed in temporary foster care after the couple told police they did not bring their 8-month-old, Brandon, to a doctor when he showed serious signs of illness last month. The Schaibles - members of a church that shuns medical care - are on probation for the 2009 death of their 2-year-old son, Kent.

ROME - Italy's highest criminal court ordered a whole new trial for Amanda Knox and her former Italian boyfriend on Tuesday, overturning their acquittals in the gruesome slaying of her British roommate. The move extended a prolonged legal battle that has become a cause celebre in the United States and raised a host of questions about how the next phase of Italian justice would play out. Knox, now a 25-year-old University of Washington student in Seattle, called the decision by the Rome-based Court of Cassation "painful" but said she was confident she would be exonerated.

CAIRO - A Cairo court on Saturday ordered the government to block access to the video-sharing website YouTube for 30 days for carrying an anti-Islam film that caused deadly riots across the world. Judge Hassouna Tawfiq ordered YouTube blocked for carrying the film, which he described as "offensive to Islam and the Prophet [Muhammad]. " He made the ruling in the Egyptian capital, where the first protests against the film erupted last September before spreading to more than 20 countries, killing more than 50 people.

WASHINGTON - The Senate gave final congressional approval Friday to a bill renewing the government's authority to monitor overseas phone calls and e-mails of suspected foreign spies and terrorists - but not Americans - without obtaining a court order for each intercept. The classified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act program was on the brink of expiring by year's end. The 73-23 vote sent the bill to a supportive President Obama, whose signature would keep the warrantless intercept program in operation for another five years.

Polling locations are supposed to be nonpartisan. But at one Northeast Philadelphia school, where a large Barack Obama mural stands in the midst of where voters cast their ballots, members of the state's Republican party quickly cried foul today. At the Benjamin Franklin Elementary school on Rising Sun Avenue, in the city's Crescentville section, a large Barack Obama mural is painted on a wall that stands behind two voting booths. The 2008 Obama campaign symbol and the words "change and hope" are prominently featured, along with a quote from Obama.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to Traffic Court Judge Robert Mulgrew's association with the Electrician's union. He is a former member.   Philadelphia Traffic Court Judge Robert Mulgrew suspension from his job while facing a federal charges of misusing hundreds of thousands of dollars in state grants will be without pay, the state Supreme Court ordered today. Mulgrew had been suspended with pay by the Court of Judicial Discipline on Friday, a day after he was indicted by a federal grand jury.

Signaling that it will tolerate "no voter disenfranchisement," a divided state Supreme Court is sending the dispute over Pennsylvania's new voting law back to a lower court to decide whether the state is doing enough to get photo ID cards to voters who need them. In a 4-2 ruling issued Tuesday, the high court ordered Commonwealth Court Judge Robert E. Simpson Jr., who upheld the law in August, to file a supplemental opinion on whether the alternate-ID programs set up by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and state election officials are providing the "liberal access" to ID cards that the legislature intended.

CHICAGO - Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said that he will seek a court order to end a teachers strike set to enter its second week. Emanuel said the strike is illegal under state law. The Chicago teachers union decided Sunday to continue its weeklong strike, extending an acrimonious standoff with Emanuel and the city schools. The walkout, the first in Chicago in 25 years, is the first for a major American city in at least six years. - Associated Press

FOR PORT RICHMOND neighbors on Mercer Street near Allegheny, warmer weather means facing the prospect of opening their windows to a breeze heavy with the stench of garbage and cat urine.   The culprit, neighbors said, is an epic trash heap festering in a privately owned lot that stretches for nearly a block behind a house on the corner. The woman who lives there has been hoarding trash for years, neighbors said. Help might be on the way, says Tom Conway, city deputy managing director — and all it took was a year of complaints from angry neighbors, code violation notices from the Community Life Improvement Program and Licenses & Inspections, and a municipal court hearing.

In defiance of all political logic, the city's long-awaited and much-feared Actual Value Initiative appears destined to clear City Council this month. In the long run, this is unquestionably good news. A fair and equitable tax system is the foundation of good government, and new, accurate property assessments are the only way to get there. Even so, I'm stunned that Council is willing to approve an unpopular and hastily assembled reform that is all but certain to create mass confusion and populist outrage, and could even cost a few members their jobs.