Family Business

After he sold his family business in 1986 to his son, Donald B. Remmey decided to help the homeless. Working with the Philadelphia arm of the Catholic Worker Movement, his son, Donald Jr., said, Mr. Remmey in the 1990s helped rebuild houses in the Yorktown neighborhood of North Philadelphia. And for the last 15 years, his son said, Mr. Remmey, who lived in Abington Township, helped with breakfasts for the homeless on two mornings a week at the Kensington office of St. Francis Inn. On Dec. 15, during a trip to attend a sister-in-law's funeral, Mr. Remmey, 86, took ill. He died of endocarditis at San Diego Hospice in Carlsbad, Calif.

As the calendar is poised to turn to a new year, Jon Costanza, owner of Sunpower Builders in Collegeville, shares the anxiety of many Pennsylvania solar installers. It's an uneasiness born of concern that with a new administration in Harrisburg, years of financial incentives that have nurtured the fledgling, yet steadily growing, solar industry will disappear. There are 700 solar contractors now. "We're going to see three-quarters of those guys go by the wayside," Costanza said.

'Is there something wrong with you?" the young wife asks her young husband when the subject of children is brought up, and he has said no kids, "not ever. " And in All Good Things , there does appear to be something amiss with David Marx (Ryan Gosling). Son of a New York real estate magnate, David mumbles to himself, seems lost in his own world. He can be oddly charming, and when he first meets Katie (Kirsten Dunst), a Long Island girl just moved to the big city, they are clearly taken with each other.

Tom Tague backed a used Chrysler into an empty spot of a patchwork parking lot, flung the door open, and jumped out. The car salesman, a 46-year-old with a muscular build and a boyish smile, was working harder than ever. "The place is a nuthouse," he said apologetically. "We've been busy. " The place looked empty. It was all so different. Tague used to be the wizard of Weathers Dodge, but in 2009 Chrysler scotched the Delaware County franchise. A year later he was part of a shaky experiment in reinvention known as Weathers Motors, a used-car and service business.

It is a family feud of epic proportions that involves one of the city's most prominent families and has spilled into state and federal court. And last week, the legal discord that has been raging between Jeffrey E. Perelman, and his father, Ray, and older brother, Ron, got even more rancorous. According to a lawsuit filed in federal district court, Jeffrey claims that Ray improperly steered millions of dollars from a pension plan the two were involved with into the global cosmetics company that Ron controls.

A roof collapse at the Hill School in Pottstown killed a Lancaster County construction executive Monday and left a second worker pinned for more than an hour in the rubble. Kevin J. Sensenig, vice president of R.L. Sensenig Co. of Ephrata, was working without a safety harness when he fell more than 50 feet to a concrete floor and died almost instantly, Montgomery County Coroner Walter I. Hofman said. Sensenig and three other employees had begun routine maintenance on the building just after 11 a.m. when the accident occurred.

It was one of the nation's largest affirmative-action frauds - $119 million spent on 336 bridge projects, from eastern Pennsylvania interstates to SEPTA's Market-Frankford Line. The conspiracy unfolded over 15 years, unchecked by regulators, as a white-family-run concrete business in Schuylkill County used a Filipino man's minority status to win contract after contract. The sham company, operated from a Connecticut basement, became Pennsylvania's greatest recipient of the U.S. government's disadvantaged-business program.

It's a playful version of I Dare You : Name any neighborhood or town around Philadelphia, and 86-year-old Charles Kahn Jr. will show you how, over a century, his family has left its mark there. Center City: "Peco at 23d and Market. The base of that building is a three-story garage. It was built by my grandfather. " (It's just cement and concrete, he humbly adds: "Not fancy stuff. ") Roxborough: "Sixty-five hundred block of Ridge. " (It was once a Texaco, back when the Kahns were in the business of building gas stations, when gas stations were The Next Big Thing.

Richard C. Unger, 85, former head of a family-owned car dealership in Phoenixville, died of pulmonary fibrosis Monday, Aug. 30, at his home in Dunwoody Village, a retirement community in Newtown Square. He had lived there for three years. Mr. Unger, a resident of Paoli from 1957 to 2007, succeeded his father as president of Unger Chevrolet in Phoenixville in 1948. He sold the business in 1988. Mr. Unger also was a director of Fidelity Bank in Philadelphia, said a son, Richard C. Unger Jr. Mr. Unger graduated from Phoenixville High School in 1942 and was a Navy helmsman on a supply ship in the Caribbean.

In its first year, New Jersey's family-leave program has proved its critics wrong. It has cost the state less than expected, while showing a little compassion to workers when a relative needs care. New Jersey became only the third state to allow paid time off to take care of a sick relative or a newborn or newly adopted child when the Legislature adopted the plan in 2008. Business interests strongly opposed family leave, making unconvincing arguments that it would place an unfair burden on employers, especially small businesses.