The Latest Breaking News from The Philadelphia Inquirer

PHILADELPHIA — Rasheem Hall was handcuffed in a holding cell wedged behind a Philadelphia courtroom, awaiting trial for murder, when he heard someone call from another cell, “Yo! ‘Sheem!”

A quick reminder before everyone starts making their travel reservations for next year’s Bucks-Celtics Eastern Conference finals: the two biggest improvements the Sixers can make this offseason will not pop up on the transaction wire.

PHILADELPHIA -- Forget red states and blue states.

PHILADELPHIA -- In the middle of our third lap around the parking deck of a North Philly storage facility one night in June, as I stood with eight strangers in the back of a flatbed trailer being pulled by a Jeep Wrangler, I began to wonder “How did I get…

PHILADELPHIA — Two police officers were shot and injured in front of the Philadelphia Art Museum while on duty at the city’s Independence Day celebrations on Monday night. The incident caused stampedes of people watching fireworks on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to flee what they believed was an active shooting.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said Monday that he will sign a package of seven gun safety bills Tuesday that will, among other things, regulate ammunition sales, expand requirements for gun owners relocating to New Jersey and empower the state's attorney general to prosecute gun manufacturers and retailers.

SALT LAKE CITY – Trevelin Queen’s basketball journey is an example of relentlessness and perseverance.

It was July 3, too soon by any reasonable measure for scoreboard watching. But it was also Sunday Night Baseball, the last game of the day, so the opportunity facing the Phillies was hard to miss.

James Reingold doesn’t want to snuff out anyone’s flame, but after too many summers treating emergency department patients at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children, he has a special Independence Day message: For the love of whatever you hold dear, don’t give your kids sparklers.

PHILADELPHIA — Since September, the Perseverance rover has been picking along an ancient river delta on Mars, its robotic arms reaching out with whirling steel drill bits to core rocks, scoop soil and suck small amounts of the red planet's atmosphere into titanium tubes.

PHILADELPHIA — NASA's Mars Sample Return Mission aims to bring 30 samples of rock, soil and atmosphere now being collected by the Perseverance rover back to Earth sometime in the early 2030s. The goal is to look for signs of past life and also to find out more about the…