Phila

Philadelphia's Top 50 Baseball Players By Rich Westcott University of Nebraska Press. 272 pp. $24.95 Reviewed by Larry Eichel   According to local baseball historian Rich Westcott, someone named Bob Johnson is one of the top 50 baseball players in Philadelphia history. Never heard of him? The man known as "Indian Bob" (he was one-quarter Cherokee) played for the Philadelphia Athletics from 1933 through 1942, spending most of his time in left field.

The music on Kurt Vile's new album, Wakin on a Pretty Daze , is deeply relaxed and absolutely confident in its laid-back, stretched-out, fingerpicked trance vibe. So much so that it would be perfectly reasonable to assume that the Philadelphia rocker is a prototypical stoner dude. Reasonable perhaps, but incorrect. Sure, Kurt Vile - yes, that's his real name - looks the part. He's the guy with the past-his-shoulders hair to rival The Addams Family 's Cousin Itt, and who sat down to talk on a recent morning at the Rocket Cat Café in Kensington, up the street from the four-story-tall mural that provides the cover image for Wakin (Matador ***1/2)

The Rev. Kevin Johnson, senior pastor of Bright Hope Baptist Church in North Philadelphia, was disinvited from speaking at Morehouse College because he wrote a newspaper column critical of President Obama's administration, according to a group of alumni. The college denied that Friday. Efforts to reach Johnson were unsuccessful. The controversy erupted Friday afternoon when a group called Citizens for Change issued a news release that gave the following account: Johnson, a Morehouse alumnus, had been chosen as this year's baccalaureate speaker, to address the college community a day before Obama's graduation visit and commencement speech May 19. On April 15, it said, Morehouse president John Silvanus Wilson Jr. phoned Johnson to rescind the invitation, saying he was concerned about Johnson's recent column in the Philadelphia Tribune that said there was a scarcity of African American appointees in Obama's cabinet and a lack of policies to reduce poverty.

Federal officials handed over control of the Philadelphia Housing Authority to a new local board Friday, ending Washington's two-year receivership of the beleaguered agency. In a public meeting at PHA headquarters in Center City, the Department of Housing and Urban Development transferred power to a new nine-member board of commissioners selected by Mayor Nutter and approved by City Council. "The reestablishment of local control with a new governance structure means real accountability," Nutter said in a statement.

A Philadelphia judge has affirmed the guilty verdict - and her own handling - of last year's landmark trial of the first Catholic Church official criminally charged for his role supervising priests accused of child sexual abuse. The opinion, filed April 12 by Common Pleas Court Judge M. Teresa Sarmina, was required by Superior Court in its review of Msgr. William J. Lynn's appeal of his child endangerment conviction. Sarmina's response was anything but routine: a 235-page opinion bristling with quotations, citations, and footnotes, and an eight-page index.

Citing a $304 million shortfall, the Philadelphia School District announced Thursday that it would recommend against expanding any charter schools in 2013-14. "Given our dire financial prospects, we must ask for shared sacrifices from our partners," Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. said in a statement Thursday evening. "It would be irresponsible for the district to endorse charter expansion while asking our principals to do the impossible with school budgets. " Twenty-one of the district's 84 charter schools requested expansions in the next academic year that would have added a total of 15,000 seats.

The daughter of Cuban President Raul Castro cannot visit Philadelphia to receive an award for gay-rights activism because the U.S. State Department has denied her permission to travel there, officials said Thursday. Mariela Castro had been expected to attend a conference next week on civil rights for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities sponsored by the Equality Forum, according to Malcolm Lazin, the advocacy group's executive director. "We find it shocking that our State Department would deny freedom of speech, particularly at an international civil rights summit, to anyone, let alone the Cuban president's daughter," Lazin said.

A month after it began, the second Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts ends Saturday with a festive street fair on South Broad Street replete with food, tunesmiths, and animatronic dinos. And, beginning Friday evening, street closures and traffic headaches. Broad Street will close at 7 p.m. Friday from Chestnut Street to South Street. Cross streets will remain open but vehicles will not be able to turn onto Broad Street. The cross streets that will close at 5 a.m. Saturday are Sansom, Moravian, Chancellor, Locust, Bach, and Spruce Streets from 13th to 15th Streets.

Three progressive Philadelphia public schools will expand in the fall as a result of a $6 million investment from a city nonprofit with growing clout, officials announced Wednesday. Money from the Philadelphia School Partnership (PSP) will expand the Hill-Freeman middle school in East Germantown into the high school grades; add a second campus of the Science Leadership Academy; and turn the Sustainability Workshop, now an alternative senior-year program, into its own high school.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. - US Airways Group reiterated Wednesday the importance of Philadelphia as a hub airport in the coming merger with American Airlines. Speaking at its 13th annual media day, where executives mingled with reporters to talk about the merger and put a best foot forward on what will be the world's biggest airline, US Airways president Scott Kirby said New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, from which American does a lot of international flying, "is a great point-to-point market" for local fliers traveling between New York and destinations such as London's Heathrow Airport.