Anger

Adapted from a recent online discussion. Question: My friend's husband is obnoxious and offensive, and I'm out of serenity. I just want to leave now, but our lives are entangled. I feel like a heel waiting out mutual obligations to make my exit, but I don't see any good in telling them what's going on. My friend will just see one more person denigrating her husband. She seems happy and she's repeatedly assured me she's happy with him. Her husband generally gets defensive and is unable to admit fault.

From Germantown to Mantua and Strawberry Mansion to South Philly, parents, students, and community members responded with shock and anger to Thursday's announcement that the Philadelphia School District planned to close 37 schools in June. "It was like a punch in the gut. It was almost a betrayal, because we had asked specifically to be included in decisions like this that will affect our children," said the Rev. LeRoi Simmons, coordinator of the Germantown Clergy Initiative, who has worked to improve Germantown High School, which is targeted to close.

The day after authorities charged a South Jersey Catholic school's custodian with being a high-tech Peeping Tom, parents expressed anger as they began to find out their children were among those secretly videotaped in private areas of the school. "It's outrageous. I can't believe it. I'm really in shock," the mother of a senior at Gloucester Catholic Junior-Senior High School, in Gloucester City said Thursday after she was told her daughter was among those taped. She did not give her name in order to protect her daughter's privacy.

  Hurricane Sandy has resurrected New Jersey's perennial battle of the beach tag, with a new twist. State Sen. Michael J. Doherty (R., Somerset) said last week he planned to submit legislation requiring any Jersey Shore community accepting public funding to make storm repairs to give free beach access and provide restrooms to the public. Shore town officials, who say they depend on tag revenue to maintain beaches, called Doherty's proposal everything from "clownish" to "moronic" after the Oct. 29 storm that wiped out entire beach communities and whose damages will likely creep into the tens of billions.

JERUSALEM - The Palestinian Authority president has set off a strident debate by shattering a once-inviolable taboo, publicly suggesting his people would have to relinquish claims to ancestral homes in Israel. Mahmoud Abbas' comments on the refugee issue, made in an interview on Israeli TV over the weekend, triggered hot responses from Palestinians and Israelis alike. In Israel, it suddenly put the long-sidelined issue of peace talks back in the Israeli public's consciousness ahead of parliamentary elections.

VOTERS will find four referendum questions on Tuesday's ballot. Here are the questions and our recommendations for how to vote: *  1. Shall the Philadelphia Home Rule Charter be amended to allow for the establishment of an independent rate-making body for fixing and regulating water and sewer rates and charges ? Vote: No. Reason: Right now, the water commissioner has the power to establish water and sewer rates. While that suggests that the public or elected officials have no say in the processs, that's not entirely true: The City Council president, the mayor, and the controller appoint a hearing officer and a public advocate to review rate requests in a process that takes at least a year.

NORTH BERGEN, N.J. - Not only is Nicholas Sacco the mayor of this township on the Hudson River, he's also its state senator and assistant superintendent of schools. "Where does he find the time?" Gov. Christie asked about Sacco at a town hall meeting last month. Christie has been flaunting Sacco's resume and paychecks - he makes nearly $300,000 a year - as an example of why New Jersey needs to pass an ethics reform bill that would ban residents from holding multiple public jobs, a longstanding New Jersey tradition.

Adapted from a recent online discussion. Question: I am dating someone whom I love but who has a very short fuse, gets frustrated easily, and blames me when he cannot resolve a problem. I have asked him, while with our counselor, to get anger management or therapy on his own. He keeps avoiding going, even though he acknowledges this issue freely and willingly. I don't know how much more I can take, walking on eggshells. The reason I don't cut and run isn't just love, but also because I know his anger is pain that is unresolved (emotionally and physically abused as a child and a recent, sudden death of a parent)

  She had been fired. She was mad. She wanted revenge. And so she took the one thing that, as a cleaning lady, she was warned never to touch in a Bryn Mawr collector's home: a plaster bust of Ben Franklin worth $3 million. At a preliminary hearing Thursday for Andrea Lawton, 46, of Philadelphia, Lower Merion Township police released an interview in which she said she had an accomplice in the Aug. 24 theft of the art object - a man who broke into the house while she waited in a car. Also for the first time, she detailed Ben's untoward journey from the Main Line to Alabama and back to a bus station in Maryland, with an overnight stay in a Dumpster at 31st and Parrish Streets in the city's Mantua section.

Earlier this year, author Karen E. Quinones Miller found out that Walmart wouldn't be carrying her semiautobiographical book on its shelves. The reason? There were concerns that the book's title, An Angry-Ass Black Woman , might offend some of the retail giant's customers. Given Walmart's reach, a lot of authors would have picked a new title and maybe rejiggered things for the sake of book sales. Not Miller. Her decision wouldn't surprise anybody who knows Miller - or anybody who's actually read her work.