Inertia

Public housing projects across the United States were recently awarded millions of dollars for major repair grants. Philadelphia was in line for $26.9 million. But the Philadelphia Housing Authority didn't get a dime. PHA is missing out on money that could repair dangerous elevators and improve deplorable living conditions. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is withholding the grant because a task force that Mayor Goode promised eight months ago has never been formed.

Question: I know you say to save living together for when you're committed to spending the rest of your life with someone, but what about when you're 95 percent sure, it makes total financial sense, and the other person really wants it? I guess I'm just saying, would it be a mistake to move in at less than 100 percent certainty? Answer: Yes. And I say this as a skeptic of the whole idea of 100 percent certainty. People opposed to the shacking-up trend often trot out a statistic that marriages preceded by cohabitation are more likely to end in divorce than other marriages.

Is Washington asleep? OK, there's a lot of kicking and screaming going on - about tax bills, disaster relief, kids health care. Some of these fights matter. But so much of what's happening, especially the dragged out battle over getting aid to flood victims, amounts to what the French call politicians' politics. It's combat that means more to feuding pols than to their constituents. Among the top 10 words in Washington are inertia and caution. What's wrong with that? A frenetic Washington is not always a wise Washington.

In New York that damp evening, April 6, U.N. diplomats were trailing off to dinner after a long day's debates. At Washington's Kennedy Center, the Clintons - Bill, Hillary, Chelsea - were settling in for an evening of ballet, a production of Sleeping Beauty. Good, once more, would conquer evil. But halfway around the world that night, in the early morning darkness of central Africa, evil looked unbeatable. In the flash of machetes, the thud of nail-spiked clubs, a genocidal slaughter of innocents had begun in an obscure land called Rwanda, a blood bath that would soon shock and sicken the world with its grisly efficiency.

Question: I'm a gainfully employed graduate in my early 20s, and my parents and I have a pretty open and trusting relationship - almost daily contact, despite the 3,000-mile gap between us. I'm hoping to soon move into a new place with my boyfriend of four months, and I'm not sure how to tell them. Mostly because romantic relationships are the one aspect of my life I don't discuss with them. How do I bring this up? I guess I should just live with the resulting awkwardness?

The media has failed to help clarify the complex picture of race relations in America - one where racism persists today alongside significant, sometimes dramatic, racial progress. To some people, this anomaly is both confusing and mesmerizing. It can be misleading and more often than not, it encourages inertia, preventing or diluting efforts to achieve further social change. - Eddie N. Williams, president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, speech to the Western Regional Conference of the National Association of Black Journalists in Sacramento, Calif.

Once she steps into her toe shoes, ballerina Amy Koehler seems unfettered by such physical constraints as inertia and gravity. She pirouettes into whirling spins, performs leaps that appear to suspend her in midair, and lofts skyward with just the slightest lift from a partner. Now, after working with a physicist, she has mastered the laws of nature she appears to defy, and she uses her knowledge of forces, work, velocities and angular momentum to enhance the illusion. Her teacher in the physics of dance is Ken Laws, a professor at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. Recently, he joined Koehler to demonstrate this merging of art and science for the annual meeting of the American Physical Society in Atlanta.

RUBY IS in limbo. She's fine with it, until it dawns on her that she's not fine at all. Directed by Ava DuVernay, "Middle of Nowhere" follows Ruby (Emayatzy Corinealdi) as she wallows in her own inertia, eventually allowing her to break free. Once a promising medical student, Ruby drops out of school so she can be at the beck and call of her incarcerated husband, Derek ("Dark Blue's" Omari Hardwick, who starred in DuVernay's directorial debut "I Will Follow"). She takes the night shift at her nursing job so she can be home for Derek's phone calls, willingly goes into debt to fund Derek's defense, and rides the bus two hours every weekend for the short time she can visit him. Ruby is constantly in motion - on public transportation in several scenes - but she never goes anywhere.

Rio: Who'll Throw the First Stone? Downstage center stands Uncle Sam, the Villain, with the sinister shadow of General Motors lurking in the background. Next to him stands Europe, the Great Lady of Virtue, attired in righteous indignation. . . . From the very opening of the second Earth Summit in New York this June, the United States was portrayed as the biggest poisoner on the planet - one American pollutes three times as much as a European and 30 times as much as an Indian. At the same time, the United States is the smallest contributor of development assistance - with 0.1 percent of gross domestic product, while the average of the 15 richest countries is 0.27 percent.

Bob Mullen, athletic director at La Salle since 1986, has resigned his position, it has been learned. An e-mail circulated around the university yesterday said Mullen was "retiring. " The university has yet to release any information. What prompted the resignation is unclear. Neither Mullen nor any other athletic department staff members could be reached for comment last night. It is well known around campus some members of the administration and the board of trustees were not always pleased with some of the decisions made by the athletic department in recent years.

RUBY IS in limbo. She's fine with it, until it dawns on her that she's not fine at all. Directed by Ava DuVernay, "Middle of Nowhere" follows Ruby (Emayatzy Corinealdi) as she wallows in her own inertia, eventually allowing her to break free. Once a promising medical student, Ruby drops out of school so she can be at the beck and call of her incarcerated husband, Derek ("Dark Blue's" Omari Hardwick, who starred in DuVernay's directorial debut "I Will Follow"). She takes the night shift at her nursing job so she can be home for Derek's phone calls, willingly goes into debt to fund Derek's defense, and rides the bus two hours every weekend for the short time she can visit him. Ruby is constantly in motion - on public transportation in several scenes - but she never goes anywhere.

Question: I know you say to save living together for when you're committed to spending the rest of your life with someone, but what about when you're 95 percent sure, it makes total financial sense, and the other person really wants it? I guess I'm just saying, would it be a mistake to move in at less than 100 percent certainty? Answer: Yes. And I say this as a skeptic of the whole idea of 100 percent certainty. People opposed to the shacking-up trend often trot out a statistic that marriages preceded by cohabitation are more likely to end in divorce than other marriages.

Question: I'm a gainfully employed graduate in my early 20s, and my parents and I have a pretty open and trusting relationship - almost daily contact, despite the 3,000-mile gap between us. I'm hoping to soon move into a new place with my boyfriend of four months, and I'm not sure how to tell them. Mostly because romantic relationships are the one aspect of my life I don't discuss with them. How do I bring this up? I guess I should just live with the resulting awkwardness?

This is not the column I really want to write. The column I want to write will be written with church bells pealing and the lead will be an announcement that cancer is over, the cure has been found and henceforth, no more mothers, brothers, sisters, and sons will be stolen by that killer. That column will be a celebration. This column will be a report to my investors, written not with church bells pealing, but with feet up, callused, blistered, and tender to the touch. As some of you know, I recently walked in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day For The Cure, a 60-mile hike to raise money against breast cancer.

The Flyers had been beaten soundly, 4-1, by the New Jersey Devils and looked like anything but a strong playoff contender. Someone suggested to coach Ken Hitchcock that as bad as things were, the Flyers still could catch the New York Rangers. "Right now, I need to worry about us and not the Rangers," Hitchcock replied. A lot of people are worried about the Flyers. Not about their physical state, but their mental state. The concern is what it will take for them to develop a "sense of urgency," as Hitchcock continually says, in games before falling behind.

People fleeing the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001, for the most part did not run. They took, on average, six minutes to decide to leave. Some even retrieved personal items before evacuating. For some, taking their time proved fatal. Those findings, announced in a recent federal government report on the towers' collapse, have renewed focus on a poorly understood aspect of emergencies: human behavior. Despite millennia of fires, floods and other disasters, engineers and other safety scientists know relatively little about the workings of the human brain in times of peril.

As House and Senate conferees argue over how best to screen airline passengers and baggage, it pays to look back a few years. In 1996, Congress directed the Federal Aviation Administration to create minimum standards to train and test workers who screen passengers and bags at airports. Five years later, the agency is still working on those rules. Twice since 1990, White House panels urged more efforts to keep explosives off planes. President Bill Clinton asked for "an action plan.

The more memorable films that have been inspired by Stephen King's tireless pen have used frontline talent and concentrated on matters of the heart and human demons rather than monsters. Scott Hicks' Hearts in Atlantis - like Rob Reiner's Stand by Me and Frank Darabont's The Shawshank Redemption - is in this category. But, despite the atmospheric contribution from Hicks, the presence of Anthony Hopkins, the use of a talented young newcomer of real promise (Anton Yelchin), and a screenplay from William Goldman, it is not in their class.

"There's nothing to do. " "I'm bored. " "I'm hungry. " "We've got nothing to eat. " "Can I have some money?" Ah, the sounds of summertime. Einstein's theory that time is relative is rarely more evident to parents of school-age children than during summertime. What seems like a flashing nanosecond to one feels like nothing short of an eternity to another. During school months, it's relatively simple to keep children on a schedule; however, summer breaks down that schedule, and - if you're not careful - complete chaos follows.

Once she steps into her toe shoes, ballerina Amy Koehler seems unfettered by such physical constraints as inertia and gravity. She pirouettes into whirling spins, performs leaps that appear to suspend her in midair, and lofts skyward with just the slightest lift from a partner. Now, after working with a physicist, she has mastered the laws of nature she appears to defy, and she uses her knowledge of forces, work, velocities and angular momentum to enhance the illusion. Her teacher in the physics of dance is Ken Laws, a professor at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. Recently, he joined Koehler to demonstrate this merging of art and science for the annual meeting of the American Physical Society in Atlanta.