Ford:We who have spent careers in the news business, where the pay was adequate so long as your tastes, and your family size, were modest, often consoled ourselves with the rueful observation that nobody became a news person to make money.

You can almost hear them muttering to themselves as they stagger through the corridors and warrens of the Jones Street puzzle palace: "Be careful what you wish for." Because what you might get is a seat in the N.C.

Frank Ricci, get ready for your 15 minutes of fame. By the time the smoke clears, you'll probably be the best-known firefighter not only in New Haven, Conn., but wherever Americans debate questions of fairness and race, meaning from Caribou to Calexico.

Across a grand stage in Washington last Sunday strode the newly minted physicians -- one of them a close acquaintance of mine ever since he first drew breath in Rex Hospital -- to accept their diplomas.

Imprisoning people who have committed crimes isn't guaranteed to turn them into little angels.

So many lobbyists. So little time. Well, that's a fair guess as to the mindset of Special Agent John M. Lynch.

Ford:A pamphlet from the N.C. Division of Prisons methodically lists every single thing inmates aren't supposed to do and warns them what could happen if they break the rules.

Dick Leone would remember me only vaguely, if at all. It wouldn't help to remind him that I'd been the guy with longish hair, wearing bell-bottoms. Most every male reporter covering the New Jersey Statehouse in the mid-1970s fit that description.

Call it a jubilee. The notion stretches back to Biblical times: a special celebration that takes place every 50 years. It can mark an anniversary. Considering that 50 years ago tomorrow the U.S. Supreme Court finally unlocked the door leading to the end of legal segregation in this country, there's good reason to have worked up a celebratory lather. Even more reason, in fact, when the ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education is seen in the context of a national history that once tolerated far worse than separation by skin color in schools and other public places.

Anyone who's paid a whit of attention to what goes on inside prisons -- not just prisons in war zones, but the ones where we happily ensconce our neighborhood crooks right here in the U.S. of A. -- knows there's always a potential for mistreatment of the "guests." Those guests, of course, are none too pleased with the hospitality they've been accorded. They weren't model citizens in the first place. While it's by no means always the case, they can be stubborn, mean, violent. It takes a firm management hand to prevent escapes, fights, exploitation of the weak by the strong.

for character educators. It's a good thing to have the courage of one's convictions, right? But what about when that courage blinds you to the fact that your convictions are uninformed or downright wacky? Loyalty to your organization -- there's another fine quality. Yet if the organization is embarked on some foolish course -- propelled, perhaps, by the courage of its leaders' convictions -- true loyalty demands dissent. There's where courage really comes in handy.

For the ineffably cocksure Don Rumsfeld, it might have been as close as he's come to a full-fledged mea culpa moment. Sure, he brushed off the actual question, which had to do with whether he could identify any mistakes he had made pre-9/11 (a period now revealed as having encompassed a colossal intelligence and law-enforcement blunder-fest).