Philadelphia

PHILADELPHIA — Florida Gulf Coast went from shocking the college basketball world to downright impressing it. And the Eagles were smiling the whole time.

PHILADELPHIA — A lawyer for ousted Penn State President Graham Spanier attacked the university-sanctioned report on the Jerry Sandusky sex-abuse scandal Wednesday, calling it a “blundering and indefensible indictment” of the long-time school leader.

Defense lawyer Timothy Lewis called Louis Freeh, who had served as both FBI director and a federal judge before leading the investigation that produced the report, a “biased investigator” who piled speculation on top of innuendo to reach pre-formed conclusions.

Lewis’s remarks come at a press conference in downtown Philadelphia designed to address Freeh’s accusations that Spanier helped Penn State cover up complaints about Sandusky in 1998 and 2001. Sandusky was convicted this year of sexually assaulting 10 boys and awaits sentencing.

PHILADELPHIA — They were 12 hairy years in Sherman Barton’s life. The Burlington County, N.J., resident worked in military intelligence for the U.S. Army in Germany and Italy from 1972 to 1984, getting shot three separate times while hunting terrorists, he said.

The personal toll was vast, including the loss of two ribs, a part of his lower intestines and some hearing, along with three broken neck vertebrae, ankle stiffness and instability, muscle weakness and depression.

Those injuries earned Barton an honorable discharge and classification by the Department of Veterans Affairs as having “a 100 percent permanent and total service-connected disability.”

PHILADELPHIA — Two firefighters battling a massive blaze at a vacant warehouse on Monday were killed when an adjacent furniture store they were inspecting collapsed, burying them in a pile of debris, authorities said.

Boxing's already exclusive club of unforgettable characters became a bit more so on Sunday with the death of Bert Randolph Sugar, 75, the raconteur/historian known as much for his one-liners and ever-present fedora and cigar as for the 80 books he authored.

PHILADELPHIA -- Andy Reid threatened to quit?

PHILADELPHIA -- With the 50th anniversary of Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game on March 2, 1962 almost here, that long-ago night in Hershey, Pa., has been dissected more thoroughly than a crime-show corpse.