Face To Face

The nation's four largest cell phone companies are expanding their brick-and-mortar retail operations as they fight to retain customers in the fiercely competitive wireless market. Carrier-owned retail outlets provide more opportunities to develop continuing relationships with customers and woo them into accessories, services and equipment upgrades of the latest and coolest gadgets, say wireless analysts and mobile phone executives. The retail storefront strategy has become increasingly important as the cellular market gets more saturated.

Since opening its doors seven years ago, the Community Conferencing Center, a Baltimore nonprofit, has offered an alternative way to address crimes and resolve conflicts: Those involved in a dispute are brought together to talk about what happened and agree on a way to apportion responsibility and move on. Unlike traditional mediation, the conferences bring together not just those immediately involved in a conflict but also others affected by it -...

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. - On the one hand, there's the hope of justice long-delayed. And on the other, there's a nagging knot of fear. Vickie Kilpatrick, like many others here, twisted and wrung both of those hands last week. Philadelphia has never lived down the infamy of being the town where three young civil rights activists were hunted down and killed - allegedly by Ku Klux Klan members - in 1964, and where state murder charges were so long coming. After the man long rumored to be the instigator was arrested last week, 40 years after the crime, raw emotions surfaced anew.

Educators call them "teachable moments." Parents call them "getting common sense." Cops call them "scared straight." There are plenty of terms for the moment of truth when you realize that things have got to change right here, right now. Accountants, financial advisers and credit counselors don't have a snappy label for the moments when their clients sit up in shock, but they witness these revelations all the time. Sometimes it's a five-figure credit-card bill. For others, it's the sickening realization that they owe the IRS an awful lot of money.

As the camera pans a bloody tableau of death in the wake of a suicide bus bombing, a young man is heard in voiceover saying, "There is no fear. Just before I blow myself up, I surrender to God. There is no pain. I am blown to pieces. I turn into pieces, and I feel no pain." Welcome to the mind of the suicide terrorist as explored tonight in "Suicide Bombers," which launches the third season of the Wide Angle documentary series on PBS. The mission of Wide Angle is to go behind the headlines and soundbites of international news coverage to offer the kind of context and understanding not likely to be found elsewhere on television.

AN AMTRAK conductor won my praise last Sunday as he walked the train's aisles, and, in an authoritative voice, asked that riders be considerate of their fellow passengers by turning off their cell phone ringers and, while talking, keeping their voices low. He repeated his firm request several times, perhaps infusing some guilt into the magpie chatterers who were driving me crazy with inane small talk from the minute the train eased out under the Calvert...

ST. LOUIS - Electronic mail has become the third-most popular form of communication behind meeting face-to-face and speaking on the telephone. Billions of e-mail "letters" from individuals, corporations, governments and other facilities and countries cross paths every day. So what has changed? Until the mid-1990s, when the broad embrace of e-mail became a household tool, letters were the way to communicate in writing. Many protocols regulated letters from the formal, typewritten, businesslike to very casual, handwritten and colloquial.

A Memorable Place Getting to know all about Bangkok By Peg Silloway SPECIAL TO THE SUN He loomed over me with a fiendish grin and wild eyes above vicious tusks. Immense blue hands grasped an intricately carved staff. I was face to face -- well, face to knee -- with an armored, helmeted and gilded demon. Squinting against the intense Bangkok sun, I braced myself and leaned back to take in the full impact. Until this business trip, what I knew of Thailand came from The King and I. But in Bangkok I saw a city of beauty, noise, smiles, congestion, courtesy, pollution, tradition and surging growth.

In another attempt to prevent three schools from leaving their conference, five Big East presidents sent a letter to counterparts in the Atlantic Coast Conference yesterday, looking for a "face-to-face" meeting about the ACC's plans to add Boston College, Miami and Syracuse. The letter, signed by presidents at Rutgers, Connecticut, Pittsburgh, Virginia Tech and West Virginia - and obtained by the Associated Press - was addressed to Clemson president James F. Barker, who chairs the Council of Presidents in the ACC. The stated purpose of the meeting would be to share insights these presidents felt "could not be communicated effectively by anyone else" and to hear from the ACC's presidents about the reasons for the expansion.

NEW YORK -- In a laboratory in the upper recesses of the American Museum of Natural History, away from the public galleries, Dr. Ian Tattersall, a tall Homo sapiens, stooped and came face to face with a Neanderthal man, short and robust but bearing a family resemblance -- until one looked especially closely. A paleoanthropologist who has studied and written about Neanderthals, Tattersall was getting his first look at a virtually complete skeleton from this famously extinct branch of the hominid family.