Partners

In 1931, in the midst of the Great Depression, a young Philadelphian named Albert M. Cohen decided to strike out on his own, leaving what was then one of the city's largest law firms - which had all of 25 lawyers. He rented a small corner suite in the PSFS Building, Center City's gleaming new landmark. By 1956, when Albert died, his firm had six lawyers, including Albert's younger brother Sylvan, who had gone into law at his brother's urging. Under Sylvan Cohen's leadership, Cohen & Cohen expanded, and the growth continued after he stepped aside; by 1993, the firm had 109 lawyers and took up five-plus floors in the PSFS Building.

One bride wore pink, the other lavender, and in the presence of witnesses and a lot of reporters, Marge O'Donnell and Connie Pennock of Collingswood yesterday became one of New Jersey's first couples to be joined in a civil union. "Marge, will you have Connie to be your life's partner?" asked Collingswood Mayor Jim Maley, officiating. "Will you love her, honor and keep her in sickness and in health, forsaking all others as long as you both shall live?" "I will," said O'Donnell.

EYEWITNESS NEWS anchor Susan Barnett is leaving CBS 3 and the CW Philly. Barnett has been at CBS since 2006, anchoring the evening newscasts since 2008. She anchored the 5, 6 and 11 p.m. broadcasts on CBS, and the 10 p.m. broadcast at the CW Philly, along with co-anchor Chris May . Her contract expired in March. "I have decided to not renew my contract with the stations at this time. I am incredibly thankful for having been a part of the CBS Philly family, but I feel that this is the right decision at this time," Barnett said in a statement yesterday.

Eating healthy is something Marian McMullan tries to do. She is used to parsing food labels loaded with calories, carbs, sugars, and serving sizes. But there's one thing McMullan has never understood: dietary fiber. When the topic came up at a Bryn Mawr Family Practice group medical appointment, McMullan jumped in to ask registered dietitian Judy Matusky to break the code. How many grams does a person need every day? McMullan asked. Matusky told the nine strangers in the room, done in soothing green tones, that a person needs 25 grams of dietary fiber daily.

Sunoco Logistics Partners L.P. on Monday announced it is moving ahead with a pipeline project to export natural gas liquids like propane and butane from its ocean terminal in Nederland, Texas, after receiving commitments from shippers. The Mariner South project would carry the fuels in an existing Sunoco Logistics pipeline to Nederland from Mont Belvieu, Texas, where Lone Star NGL L.L.C. operates a storage and processing complex. Lone Star is a joint venture involving Energy Transfer Partners L.P., which is also the general partner of Sunoco Logistics.

Whether you are a wild-eyed fanatic or a sports agnostic, you are paying a lot in your monthly bundled cable-TV bill - about 50 percent of the programming costs - for football, baseball, and other live games. And that price will continue to rise for two basic reasons: The audience for sports is vast and insatiable, and media companies are spending billions more each year for the broadcast rights to keep fans glued to their TVs. The soaring prices for sports rights are being shouldered by almost everyone who pays a TV bill but falling hard on those who don't care about sports and often don't know how much they are paying for entertainment they aren't watching.

David L. Culp has spent more than 20 years creating this magnificent garden in southern Chester County, ripping the bully-honeysuckle off a one-acre hillside by hand not just once, but three times, to avoid using chemical herbicides; hauling heavy rocks from here to there, again by hand, to build walls with indigenous stone; planting and replanting, doing and redoing, and endlessly weeding, all, naturally, by hand. You'd think his hands would be a mess, which they are not, despite the fact that he wears gloves only when removing poison ivy. And you'd think he'd want to slow down.

On paper, the proposed Soko Lofts project promises to do for its South Kensington neighborhood what the Piazza at Schmidts did for Northern Liberties. Like its paradigm-shifting predecessor two blocks south, Soko Lofts would rim its large block with a dense array of mid-rise apartment buildings, smartly broken up into manageable segments. The spaces between the buildings would become passageways, beckoning the public into a landscaped interior courtyard. It is a pretty good plan, but it is no Piazza.

ZACH FRIEDMAN remembers meeting Tony Talamo on the bus on the first day of first grade. "He asked me if I thought this girl was hot," said Friedman. "I said yes, and he screamed it to the entire bus and everyone laughed at me. Been friends ever since. " The two grew up in the same development in Voorhees, N.J., where they also became good friends with another neighborhood kid, Tyler Costantino. The three bonded over a love of music. Friedman and Talamo have long been huge hip-hop fans, while Costantino's affection for the music goes back to the Christmas when he received a keyboard as a gift.

In 2004, Sister Mary Scullion wrote a letter to the Philadelphia Housing Authority, asking for help. Could her nonprofit acquire two of the agency's boarded-up homes in the 2100 block of North 28th Street? Empty for years, the North Philadelphia houses would be part of a block-wide project to fix vacant homes for resale to low-income families. For seven years, Project HOME, which helps homeless people with services and housing, waited for a decision. And waited. "We never knew where we stood with PHA," Scullion said.