Revenge

The new Fairmount Park Commission has barely had time to get their seats warm. Still, the commission will now have to referee yet another messy Philadelphia political fight. This fight card features former Congressman Tom Foglietta vs. long-time rival State Sen. Vince Fumo and a group of Korean war veterans. The veterans recently unveiled a new Penn's Landing memorial in honor of those who died in the Korean conflict. One problem: They want the plaza where the memorial is located renamed from Foglietta Plaza to Korean War Memorial Plaza.

The middle-aged man still speaks fervently of the rage he felt toward the airline that delayed him, his wife and their exhausted infants on a night flight across the country. Five hours late, their plane finally landed at 3 a.m. at an airport miles from their intended city of arrival. As a final insult, the airline hadn't even bothered to arrange transportation to carry the passengers to their destination. But the man, an air-traffic controller in a large California city, said he found revenge after the airline cavalierly rejected his request for compensation.

Malik Jackson was only 15 when three guys entered his North Philadelphia home and began spraying bullets at a group of his friends. After a girl and a boy, both 14, were wounded on July 15, 1994, Jackson grabbed a gun and ran outside seeking revenge, said Assistant District Attorney Richard Sax yesterday. He wound up shooting and killing one of the teen-aged intruders, Sax said. When the gunmen fled in a pickup truck, Jackson, now 17, of Taney Street near Montgomery Avenue, ran to the corner of 26th Street and Ridge Avenue, and opened fire.

A West Philadelphia man was sentenced to a 10- to 25-year prison term yesterday for kidnapping and sexually molesting the 8-year-old daughter of his landlord in 1983. Assistant District Attorney Wendy Demchick-Alloy said Anthony Reid, who lived near 57th Street and Girard Avenue, said the attack on the girl was an act of "revenge" on the landlord who was trying to evict Reid. The prosecutor said Reid had been ordered out because he was late in his rent payments around the time of the offense on Aug. 29, 1983.

Some things are a given: the pocket protector and horn-rimmed glasses, the high-waist chinos and low-tide Oxfords. The mark of a truly imaginative portrait of a nerd is the original detail. Lewis, Booger, Lamar, Poindexter and Wormser, the title nerds of the 1984 "Revenge of the Nerds" and now of its sequel, "Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise," have quite a few. As the film opens, the nerds are packing, on their way to represent their Adams College Tri Lambda chapter at a national fraternity conference in Fort Lauderdale.

THE WINGS LOSt in sudden-death overtime, 16-15, to the West Division-leading Colorado Mammoth on Sunday at the Wells Fargo Center. The Wings could have clinched a playoff spot with a win or a Washington loss, but were denied when the Stealth earned a victory over Minnesota. Colorado clinched with the win. Mammoth rookie Adam Jones scored the winning goal in the extra session, ruining the Wings' rally. The Wings were trailing, 13-7, early in the second half, but scored six unanswered goals to climb back into the game.

When Cornelius Albert didn't show up on Valentine's Day, his girlfriend Margo Woodward sought revenge by telling police they could find his credit card counterfeiting equipment at her home. She wasn't kidding. Police and U.S. Secret Service agents found embossing machines, a magnetic card writer, a tape with real credit card numbers, counterfeit credit cards and computer files. Albert and another convicted California con artist, Lonnie C. Jackson, yesterday could appreciate the adage that, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

With two straight losses behind them and with the District 1 Class AAAA playoffs looming, Conestoga's Pioneers needed to put a good game together. And that's just what they did Friday night. Conestoga got 27 points from senior guard Chris Perillo and knocked off visiting Springfield (Delco), 69-62. The Pioneers are 12-5 in the league (14-9 overall) going into tonight's regular-season finale at Haverford High. The district playoffs open Friday. "It sure was a big win," said Conestoga coach Pete Fredrickson.

THANK GOD for Carol Towarnicky (Sept. 12). Otherwise we would have the sense that the editorial leadership of the Daily News would have us drop nuclear bombs on villages all over Afghanistan in order to feel better after last Tuesday's disaster. The is a moment for wisdom, not the senseless bellowing of wounded bulls. The rhetoric of the "Blood for Blood" editorial should be held accountable for bullets through mosque windows, or racist statements shouted out of car windows at anyone with dark skin who might be Arab.

No. 25 in a series of 25 SETUP: The 1966-67 Philadelphia 76ers were honored in 1980 as the NBA's greatest team. They went 68-13, setting the NBA record for wins, and won the NBA championship by beating Boston in five games in the Eastern Conference finals and the San Francisco Warriors in six games in the Finals. By the end of the 1965-66 season, the 76ers were fed up with the Boston Celtics. After losing to the men in green 2 straight years, after hearing Johnny Most's effusive fingernails-on-the-blackboard voice recounting John Havlicek's 1965, Game 7 theft countless times, and having the smell of Red Auerbach's victory cigars linger throughout the offseason, the Sixers took action.

THIS [the Boston Marathon bombing] makes me sick. Aren't we tired of these reprehensible people? Someone has hurt us again. Our country has been attacked again. Even if it proves to be a single person or a group of people attacking us in remembrance of other violent attacks, they must be dealt with and punished immediately. We are too politically correct in the way we handle these terrorists. I say they must be tortured to find out the truth of who they are, who they work for and what will come next.

DEAR ABBY: During the first year of our marriage, my husband cheated on me with women from his past as well as new encounters. When I confronted him, he promised to stop. He would then call and email these women, and tell them I was checking up on him and he'd contact them later. This has gone on for years. He swears he's no longer cheating, and we have sought counseling - which I stopped because the counselor and I agreed that my husband didn't think he had a problem. I have considered revenge cheating, but it goes against my morals.

ATTEMPTS to impart a cool European tone to an American-style revenge saga pays slim dividends in the erratic "Dead Man Down. " It's the work of Niels Arden Oplev, director of the original "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," and he seems to be going for something like Nick Refn's critically acclaimed "Drive" - becalmed lead performances, a slow-burn narrative puncuated by spasms of outrageous violence, a thwarted romance in the middle of it. ...

JVR had dreamed of his return, but his nightmare was coming true. James van Riemsdyk sat in the penalty box midway through the third period. He had held and he had hooked and he had drawn two minor penalties, and the Flyers had just cut his Maple Leafs' lead in half - into the first power play. He envisioned maybe winning the game himself; something dashing, down the left boards, late, giving the Flyers get a whiff of what they wasted. Instead, thanks to him, the Flyers whittled the lead to one. Worse, he had another 2 minutes to watch, and to wither.

ARKER" ROARS into a dull January and enlivens the movie landscape, and thank the action-movie gods because we needed a little something to wake us from our winter slumber. Based on a novel in a series by Richard Stark, the alter ego of the late, great Donald E. Westlake, the film is basically a heist-and-payback movie. But it's made with such skill and smarts that it stands above such eye-rolling blow-'em-up fare as Arnold Schwarzenegger's "The Last Stand," its main competition at the box office.

Breaking News update: ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) - Algerian official: 20 foreign hostages, including Americans, escape from their captors. More to come; the original story is below:   ALGIERS, Algeria - As Algerian army helicopters clattered overhead deep in the desert, Islamist extremists hunkered down for the night in a natural gas complex they had assaulted Wednesday morning, killing two people and taking dozens of foreigners hostage in...

STATE COLLEGE - Recruit this. Though players and coaches said all the motivation they would need to beat Illinois was that it was the Big Ten opener, Penn State (3-2, 1-0 Big Ten) came into Champaign, Ill., on Saturday and simply throttled the Fighting Illini (2-3, 0-1 Big Ten), 35-7. After the game, coach Bill O'Brien barely shook the hand of Illinois coach Tim Beckman, who sent coaches to State College in the summer to recruit Penn State players following the NCAA sanctions levied against the PSU program.

Pottsgrove made its first statement of the night when it stormed onto the football field wearing camouflage pants, in honor of Military Night. The second - and more impressive - came in the second half, when the hosts thoroughly dominated visiting Spring-Ford on both sides of the ball and, surprisingly, eased to a big victory. The Falcons, atoning for last year's high-scoring defeat in Royersford, blanked the continually frustrated Rams, 26-0, Friday night in a Pioneer Athletic Conference clash in Lower Pottsgrove.

Ayn Rand, the novelist and philosophical thinker whose books have for decades been ignored by literature and philosophy departments, had her revenge earlier this month when Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney named sometime Randian Paul Ryan as his vice presidential pick. "The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand," the Wisconsin congressman told the Randian Atlas Society in 2005. The attention has generated a swell of posthumous popularity for Rand that has boosted sales of her books Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead , which jumped 20 percent on Amazon.com in one day last week, according to Bloomberg News Service.