Anxiety

FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA. -- The sound of a bullpen phone ringing. That's all it took for pitcher Rob Bell's heart to pound, his palms to sweat, his body to shake. One call from his team's dugout, and his baseball life felt as if it were ripping apart at the seams. Bell's only victory in 2005, at least the kind that appears in a box score, came against the Orioles, the team that signed him to a minor league contract in November, invited him to spring training and has given him a chance to make the club as a long reliever.

Wendy Nelson's two daughters, Carley and Molly, get A's and B's in school, but they do not do as well when they take tests. "When they get to taking tests, they do very poorly," Nelson said. "We just think they study the wrong things. I think they take the wrong kinds of notes." That's why the Nelson daughters are taking a series of classes called the Stressless Tests Program, designed to help them do just as well on tests as they do in the classroom. The program consists of four classes, held in the evenings at local schools.

The year 2007 begins with a vast divergence between the popular view of global risks and the risks as priced in financial markets. Commentators have been more alarmed than global markets about the state of the world for some years, but the gap increased in 2006 as markets became more serene and everyone else grew more anxious. The headlines and opinion writers focus on how the United States is bogged down in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; on an increasingly unstable Middle East and dangerous energy dependence; on nuclear proliferation that has occurred in North Korea and that is coming in Iran; on the potential weakness of lame-duck political leaders; on record global trade imbalances and rising protectionist pressures; on increased public- and private-sector borrowing combined with record-low savings in the United States; and on falling home prices and middle-class economic insecurity.

SCOTTSBORO, ALA. / / For John Marshall, president and general manager of the Unclaimed Baggage Center here, opening trailers of goods he buys sight unseen from airlines is "like Christmas every day." He never knows what he'll find. The center is a block-long discount store that resells the suitcases -- and their contents -- that U.S. carriers have been unable to reunite with passengers. As such, it represents the final failure of a system that damages, delays or loses thousands of checked bags each day. On average, fewer than 1 percent of passengers officially file mishandled-baggage reports with major U.S. airlines, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

The night of Oct. 26, the town of Frostburg threw its annual Halloween warm-up parade. School bands, cheerleaders and volunteer firefighters snaked down Main Street. Local politicians rode in pickup trucks, tossing candy into the crowd, talking sweet talk to one another. "See you at the polls November 7th!" shouted Mike Wade, a write-in candidate for the Allegany Board of County Commissioners. Frostburg State University students turned part of a municipal building into a haunted house for kids.

In an otherwise distressing account from the Abell Foundation of life inside Baltimore's once seniors-only public housing high-rises, there is a bright note: When residents work together to build a sense of community - even in the face of declining services and inadequate funding - they are better off. More than a third of the 3,440 housing units in 20 of the city's public high-rises are occupied by non-elderly low-income Baltimoreans with disabilities....

In the early weeks of the NFL season, we're all too hesitant and cautious to make definitive statements about the games we're watching. It's early still. So much can change. It's a long season. And so on. Of course it's a lot easier to reflect after Week 16 and make judgments with proper perspective - but where's the fun in that? Besides, even after two weeks of games, there are still plenty of truths we can identify about this year's Ravens. There's a lot of time left in the season, but already we know with near absolute sorta-kinda certainty that: We miss Brian.

The only thing standing between Vicki White and a new job as a bank teller was a plastic cup. Like job candidates at many companies, she was required to undergo drug screening. But she has a condition called paruresis, which can make providing a urine sample difficult, if not impossible. Paruresis (pronounced: par-YOU-ree-sis) is a type of social anxiety disorder that prevents a person from using the toilet in a public restroom. To prepare for the test, White, 19, of Wentzville, Mo., guzzled water nonstop before showing up at a testing laboratory last month.

BOSTON -- Amid new anxiety about air travel and tough new regulations about what passengers can bring on planes, at least seven U.S. flights were involved in security incidents yesterday. In one case, a stick of dynamite was found to have been aboard a flight. The rash of events, safety consultants and others said, reflected both heightened emotions and appropriately tightened security following an alleged plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners that was thwarted this month by British authorities.

In seconds, lunch turned into an investor support group. I was sitting on the sidelines between games of my daughter's lacrosse tournament when the parents of a teammate asked for help. Their problem is that they're afraid of investing right now. Quickly another parent chimed in with their big concern, and then another. And suddenly, lunch was a confession session, where the group was discussing its biggest troubles as fund investors, hoping I could play Dr. Phil and solve the problems.