Rage

Firefighter Jeff Novack had already carried an unconscious 86-year-old woman out of the burning West Baltimore apartment building, cradling her like a baby and handing her to paramedics. But he had heard screams coming from the third floor and rushed back up the stairs, past flames shooting out of an apartment where, according to police, a woman had set fire to a lover's sofa in a fit of jealous rage. As dark, heavy smoke rose behind him, he struggled with a hysterical man in the stairwell.

On the day before he was charged with first-degree murder, George Huguely V walked the fairways and greens of Charlottesville's exclusive Farmington Country Club, the Blue Ridge Mountains at his back. The University of Virginia men's lacrosse team, ranked best in the nation, had just won the last regular-season game of Huguely's senior year. The 22-year-old and some teammates had gathered at the club with their fathers to celebrate the storybook ending and to look forward to the NCAA tournament.

At 2:53:42 Friday afternoon, thousands of Orioles fans committed an act of patriotic blasphemy. Or engaged in a show of loyalty to the hometown team on Opening Day. To "O" or not to "O," that has been the question since, well, when? Sometime in the 1970s, fans and Mike Gesker, author of The Orioles Encyclopedia, seem to agree. But there the agreement ends. Like the debate about the worthiness of playing "Thank God, I'm a Country Boy" during the seventh-inning stretch, the "O" argument goes round and round, getting stuck every couple of years like a phonograph needle on an old record.

I was a "Repdem," a Republican for fiscal responsibility and government intervention and a Democrat for abortion, gay rights and other social issues. The government's "Pay Czar" has now made me a raging, radical Republican. Imagine that your company establishes a pay plan where everyone earns the same salary. Everyone arrives at nine and leaves at five, takes a coffee break at 10:30 and lunch at noon. A perfect working environment with the exception of one thing -- production decreases, and the business will go bankrupt.

In the days surrounding passage of health care overhaul legislation, Republican lawmakers have been left to strike a fine balance between harnessing voter outrage and fueling it. Examples of raw anger have piled up. A call to New York Democrat Louise M. Slaughter said snipers would "kill the children of the members who voted for health care reform." Later, a brick smashed a window at her Niagara Falls district office. Hate messages jammed the lines of Michigan Rep. Bart Stupak, the anti-abortion-rights Democrat whose last-minute support helped cinch passage.

A few words on the meaning of tea. They are occasioned by a recent commentary from Keith Olbermann of MSNBC. The commentary scores the tea party movement as the outcry of people who haven't made peace with the fact their president is black. Everything else, said Mr. Olbermann, is euphemism. Taxes? Socialism? Budget deficit? No, he argued, when you strip away the pretenses and rationalizations, "it's still racism," and they hate the president only because he is black. One is reminded of the 2008 campaign in which many of Barack Obama's opponents insisted people only "supported" him because he was black.

A s usual, we know less about the victim than his killer. This is about all I could find out the other day about Vernon Hunter: He was 67, a Vietnam veteran, the father of six and the husband of a fellow IRS agent who reportedly was just steps away from him Thursday morning when Joseph Stack flew his plane into their Austin, Texas, office building. Stack has emerged in a decidedly fuller picture, from his own words in the diatribe he left behind online, and from those who knew the software engineer and musician - if not about his decades-long grudge against the government in general and the IRS specifically.

President Barack Obama's ambitious plan to begin phasing out nuclear weapons has run up against powerful resistance from officials in the Pentagon and other U.S. agencies, posing a threat to one of his most important foreign policy initiatives. Obama laid out his vision of a nuclear-free world in a speech in Prague in April, vowing the U.S. would take major steps of its own to lead the way. Eight months later, the administration is locked in internal debate over a top-secret policy blueprint for shrinking the United States' nuclear arsenal and reducing the role of such weapons in military strategy and foreign policy.