Anger

NEW ORLEANS - A surprise ruling by a federal appeals court that lets the Army Corps of Engineers off the hook for paying compensation for Hurricane Katrina's catastrophic flooding isn't going over well on the streets of New Orleans. People in southern Louisiana have long taken for granted that the flooding in the wake of the 2005 storm was a man-made disaster - one caused specifically by the corps - and they have wanted the agency to pay up for lost homes and property. On Monday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed its earlier opinion and shot down the only argument that had succeeded so far in holding the corps accountable.

Just two months into his job as interim chief of the Philadelphia Housing Authority, Kelvin Jeremiah has wasted no time changing what he calls "a culture of splurge. " But with his latest move to save money at the agency, he has kicked a hornet's nest. Jeremiah has drawn the wrath of the city's trade unions by eliminating 335 "provisional" union jobs in maintenance. PHA pays these workers - roofers, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and laborers - at a rate equal to its in-house maintenance workers.

A NETTA JOHNS bolted from a courtroom last week after a judge handed the minimum sentence to the man who shot her 2- and 8-year-old sons while firing at another man on a Southwest Philadelphia sidewalk in 2010. "I don't think it's fair. Five to 10 years for shooting kids?" Johns, 26, told the Daily News last week. She was not alone in her outrage that gunman Kevin Pickard, 26, who was on probation at the time of the shootings, got such a light sentence from Common Pleas Judge Lisette Shirdan-Harris.

Surprise, surprise. A Commonwealth Court judge rejected the challenge to Pennsylvania's voter ID law. I can't even say I'm shocked. Angry? Darned right I am. But shocked? Truth is, I didn't expect any good would come out of the well-intentioned effort by a coalition of lawyers to appeal a law ginned up to prevent fraud but that in and of itself perpetrates the worst kind of fraud. Proving, once more, that "we haven't achieved full democracy, and the struggle for the right to vote is the history of that," says Lorraine Minnite, a Rutgers-Camden professor and author of The Myth of Voter Fraud . All we have to do is look at the Corbett administration's systematic chipping away of programs that reduce working-class citizens to poor and the poor to downright destitute to figure out what's going on here.

A PHILADELPHIA JUDGE Friday stunned a courtroom when she sentenced a gun-wielding thug to the minimum sentence of five to 10 years in state prison for mistakenly shooting two brothers, 8 and 2, while firing at his intended target on a Southwest Philadelphia street in September 2010. Assistant District Attorney Bill Davis, who asked that defendant Kevin Pickard be sentenced to 32 1/2 to 65 years for his June conviction on three counts of aggravated assault, said he would file a motion asking Common Pleas Judge Lisette Shirdan-Harris to reconsider her sentence.

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.

CAIRO - Almost daily, armed Egyptians angry over poor services storm hospitals, beating up or menacing doctors. Others took over a governor's office to protest weeks without running water. Fabric workers shut down factories with strikes demanding better conditions. Lawlessness, economic troubles, and public frustration have been growing in Egypt for months under the country's uncertain leadership. Now, Egypt's first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, has taken his first step to forming his own government, but there is deep skepticism he will be able to fix anything amid a power struggle with the military.

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.

Frank Ahrenhold, who played for Joe Paterno from 1968 to 1971 and briefly coached under him while getting a graduate degree at Penn State, watched Monday morning's NCAA news conference, and barely contained his anger. "I saw a lot of sanctimonious folks up there espousing higher lofty ideals," Ahrenhold said. "I felt like asking the president of Oregon [State] . . . nobody asked him what the graduation percentage was of his football program while he spouted his lofty ideals. " Frank's son, Tyler, was in a meeting at work when he started getting e-mails and texts about the NCAA sanctions against Penn State.