Anger

Amid feelings of grief and despair, students in the Deptford school system expressed their anger yesterday over the killing of 12-year-old Kim Marie Anderson, who police say was stabbed to death this week by one of their classmates. Counselors at the Monongahela Junior High School - where the youth accused of the slaying, Kenneth Houseknecht, is a student - told students to purse their lips and not talk with reporters during a day marked by tension, anger and disturbing quiet. Since Tuesday, the brutal killing was the dominant subject in the buzzing hallways of three local schools - Monongahela, Deptford Township High School and the Lake Tract School, where Anderson, known to her friends as Kimberly, was a student.

These are strange times indeed, folks, in the celebrity game. The worst publicity has now become the best kind of publicity you can get. Every time this month, for instance, that TMZ sent out a new gossip bulletin on Lindsay Lohan was a red-letter day for Lifetime. It represented another quarter-million viewers for the Liz Taylor biopic Lohan is currently shooting for the channel. Or take Charlie Sheen. After one of the most depraved runs of misbehavior by a major performer ever, he returns in a new sitcom to rapt curiosity and surprising good will.

His short fuse always seems to be lit anyway, so it came as no surprise when James Toney, walking time bomb, exploded two days before his title defense tonight against "Prince" Charles Williams (HBO, 10 o'clock) at the MGM Grand. As is his custom, Toney, the International Boxing Federation's super- middleweight champion, arrived for Wednesday's final prefight press conference seething with anger over some real or imagined slight. An hour or so later, when he was asked to pose for publicity photos with Williams, Toney began screaming profanities and lunging at Williams.

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - Monday's announcement of NCAA sanctions against the Penn State football program was met with bewilderment and anger by a large cross-section of current and former players. But nothing seemed to bewilder and anger former Nittany Lions more than the disclosure that all of Joe Paterno's 111 wins over a 14-year period from 1998 through 2011 were vacated, meaning they won't count in the NCAA record book. Adam Taliaferro, the South Jersey native who was almost paralyzed after being involved in a devastating hit in a 2000 game at Ohio State but made an inspiring recovery, couldn't control his disbelief on Twitter only a few hours after the NCAA delivered its penalties for the actions of university officials in the Jerry Sandusky scandal.

In this week's Greek elections, the far-right, ultranationalist Golden Dawn party, whose members perform Nazi salutes at rallies, got 7 percent of the vote and entered Parliament for the first time. Its leader told journalists to stand upon his arrival at a news conference and ejected those who did not. A sick joke, you say. What's 7 percent? But Golden Dawn's gains are a symbol of a protest vote that fed extremes in Greece and decimated centrist parties, making it impossible to form a government in a country on the edge of economic collapse.

Fahrenheit 9/11 made me angrier than any movie I've ever seen. It was a good anger, hard, clean and righteous, and I enjoyed it so much that I went back three days later to experience it again. Took two of my sons and two of their friends so they could become angry, too. It's not that I was unaware the movie is less documentary than propaganda. It's not that I buy its conspiracy theories tying the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to Bush cronies' thirst for oil. It is, rather, that the movie brings us face to face with things essential and disturbing about the President, his people and his war. Things like human cost, as in Lila Lipscomb, an erstwhile proud military mother who is literally bent double by grief after losing her son to a war whose righteousness she had not thought to question.

TODAY'S SELF-HELP TOPIC IS: Coping With Anger. There is definitely too much anger in the world today. Pick up almost any newspaper, and the odds are you'll get ink smeared all over your hands. We use a special kind of easy-smear ink, because we know how much it irritates you. But that's not my point. My point is that if you pick up almost any newspaper, you'll see stories of anger raging out of control, of people actually shooting each other over minor traffic disputes.

DEAR ABBY: My husband died recently in a fire he started in a drunken rampage. In the aftermath I am left with feelings of extreme sadness and rage. Last night I found some old letters he had written to a woman he'd left me for 20 years ago. (We patched things up and then were married later.) I didn't want to read them, but in the first letter I caught the sentence, "You are the only woman I've ever met who truly changed me. " I immediately tore it to shreds. There were others, but I tossed everything in the box into the trash.

There were prayers and hymns. Hands clutching tissues and damp eyes. But there was little anger evident yesterday morning as about 200 friends and relatives gathered to say goodbye to Nicole M. Leps, a young woman who had appeared to be on the verge of beginning a new career. The absence of anger seemed to please the Rev. John Taxter, who asked the mourners at the 10 a.m. Mass at St. Anthony's Roman Catholic Church to keep their spirits aloft and not hold bitterness toward the man who killed Leps.

A lot of women still remember yelling at their television sets last fall. They just couldn't believe they were watching this smug panel of middle- aged, white men grilling a young, black, female professor about a topic that led to talk of Coke cans and pubic hairs. Now, as the anger ricochets through the political system, some people are wondering how long the fury will last. "The major part of it was looking at those 14 white men dealing with an issue they know nothing about," said Carol Tracy, executive director of the Women's Law Project in Philadelphia.

Remember when you first heard the heartbeat of your first child? I do. It was a painfully faint sound emanating from my wife's tummy, indistinguishable for a long time from other raucous gurgles with which it was competing. It presented as a sort of slurp-crunch, seemingly random, until, at length, I detected its regularity. Maida and I gazed into each other's eyes and smiled simultaneously. We knew our love was monumental, but this, this slurp-crunch, was miraculous beyond all telling.

OVER THE COURSE of Tattle's lengthy tattling career, virtually every nationality, ethnic group and religious sect has been offended by something done by some celebrity, movie or TV show. Today, we bring you the Hindus, who are mad at Selena Gomez for having a sparkling bindi on her head in an Indian-themed performance of "Come & Get It" at the MTV Movie Awards. Leaders at the Universal Society of Hinduism want Selena to apologize for wearing the religious adornment. "The bindi on the forehead is an ancient tradition in Hinduism and has religious significance," Rajan Zed told World Entertainment News Network.

He is known only as "Baby Boy B," a fetus estimated to be 28 weeks old, found frozen in an altered one-gallon plastic water jug in Dr. Kermit Gosnell's West Philadelphia abortion clinic. His passing went unnoticed and undocumented, but on Monday, prosecution and defense lawyers struggled to get Philadelphia's chief medical examiner to say whether he was stillborn or killed by Gosnell after being born alive during an abortion. "Based on the totality of the evidence . . . you cannot testify to anyone that this fetus was born alive?"

BERLIN - For nearly 30 years, the Berlin Wall was the hated symbol of the division of Europe, a gray, concrete mass that snaked through neighborhoods, separating families and friends. One morning last month, it took hundreds of police to guarantee the safe removal of 15 feet of what's left of the wall. Construction crews, protected by about 250 police, hauled down part of the three-quarter-mile strip of the wall to provide access to a planned luxury apartment complex overlooking the Spree River.

The firing of Rutgers University basketball coach Mike Rice and resignation of his assistant coach Jimmy Martelli do not appear to have quieted the scandal, as a concerned chorus of voices continued to rise. While their approaches differ, most of the critics agree: More investigation is needed. More than 50 faculty members have signed a letter calling for athletic director Tim Pernetti to be fired, while 28 faculty signed a separate letter calling for president Robert L. Barchi to step down.

I DON'T KNOW which is more out of touch: a) the wife of a man who, when investigated for posting a picture of his son holding what appears to be an assault rifle on Facebook, states that her husband posted the picture because he was angry that the president was elected in 2008; or b) a newspaper article that references the man's fear that his gun would be taken away. In this post-Newtown environment, people want to make sure that laws of gun ownership are enforced. If you post a picture of what looks to be an assault weapon in a state where sale and ownership of assault weapons are banned, you should expect the government to react.

In recent weeks, City Council members have been getting waylaid by constituents bewildered by the new property assessments that are part of the mayor's property-tax reform effort. Members channeled much of that confusion and anger Tuesday during a budget hearing for the Office of Property Assessment (OPA), lobbing barbs at the citywide reassessment that is key to Mayor Nutter's Actual Value Initiative (AVI). Majority Leader Curtis Jones Jr. went so far as to label the process of assigning a market value to each of the city's 579,000 parcels a "wild-assed guess.

I AM AMAZED at the Nutter Administration, and even some of the newspapers that complain about a percentage of the city budget going to employees' wages and benefits. Government as a whole - whether it be local, state or federal - is designed to provide a service to its residents. The services that the government provides are performed by people, or people that manage technology. There is nothing else the government should be doing. I wonder if the Nutter Administration would be able to explain taxes if there were no firefighters, or social workers or trash collectors.

It seemed simple: Take the sample ballots to the post office in Bellmawr and distribute them throughout the borough, just over three square miles in area. Instead, the sample ballots for a once-defeated Bellmawr School District referendum began arriving a week later - after a trip to Newark, N.J., 80 miles north and angry phone calls from residents claiming a conspiracy. The sample ballots were for a special second-chance vote Tuesday on authorizing the district to borrow $3.1 million to repair the roofs on two elementary schools and one middle school.