5 things to know today

➡️ Mayor Bill Peduto still plans to run for re-election next year and says he never considered resigning, even as activists and protesters called on him to do just that. Here’s a 13-minute, wide-ranging interview with more. (90.5 WESA)

👀 What do Stephen Foster and Christopher Columbus have in common? Foster had a statue removed by Pittsburgh’s art commission, and Columbus has a statue that could be next. (Pittsburgh City Paper)

🗓 Delays in COVID-19 test results aren’t just inconvenient, they’re making contact tracing harder. (90.5 WESA)

🌱 Is Pennsylvania about to legalize recreational marijuana? Gov. Tom Wolf is certainly ready, urging lawmakers this week to consider it as a way of bankrolling COVID-19 relief here. But leaders of the Republican-controlled legislature seem less excited. (PennLive)

📈 Current COVID-19 totals: Allegheny County (10,004 cases), Pennsylvania (130,536 cases), and the United States (5.8 million cases).

5 things to make you smile

🏈 If this whole football thing doesn’t work out, the Pittsburgh Steelers may have a future in spikeball. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

💛 Designer and author Tereneh Idia on why she loves her Pittsburgh neighborhood, Central Northside. (Pittsburgh Magazine)

🖌 A 3,500-square-foot asphalt mural is coming to Downtown. (NEXTpittsburgh)

🐱 The Hello Kitty Cafe Truck says hello to Pittsburgh this Saturday. (WPXI)

📸 Meet five local photographers to know. (Made in PGH)

It goes without saying at this point, but 2020 has been a catastrophic year for the American business owner.

Researchers at Harvard estimate nearly 110,000 small businesses across the country shuttered permanently between early March and early May. In Pittsburgh, Yelp found that at least 730 local businesses have closed because of COVID-19, with 129 of those being restaurants that closed forever.

With that in mind, we hosted a webinar this week to answer questions about bankruptcy, alternatives to bankruptcy, government loans, and free resources available to struggling companies.

We were joined by Kirk Burkley, managing partner at Bernstein-Burkley, a Pittsburgh-based law firm specializing in bankruptcy and restructuring; Shawn Porter, a former Bernstein-Burkley client; and Dr. Kelly Hunt, district director of the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Pittsburgh office.

A video of the hour-long talk, which was sponsored by Bernstein-Burkley, can be found here on our Facebook page. A scannable transcript is included in the comments. We hope they help.

Well, spies … we were very excited to try something new with our I Spy this week, namely the random selection of a winner from the pool of correct answers — our attempt at leveling the playing field a bit.

But guess what? Only one person knew that this week’s clue was in fact a photo of a Millvale crosswalk, near Baby Loves Tacos, so the pool was rather shallow.

Extra-loud shoutout to Carla C. for being the only person to get it right this time.

If you didn’t know, this taco is part of a new Millvale crosswalk on North Avenue. Salsa, guac, and a pepper also grace the scene.

And the crosswalk is just one of the many cool new artistic crosswalks in Millvale. Truly fantas-taco.

Anyway, we’ll be back with another I Spy next week and another newsletter tomorrow. See you then.