Behavior

A 200-member choir sang "Man in the Mirror" in Culver City. Musicians on the red carpet at the BET Awards in South Los Angeles spoke of their admiration for Michael Jackson. And dozens of fans continued to brave the heat on Sunday to pay tribute to the music icon at his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and outside the Jackson family compound in Encino. "I grew up with his music," said Nancy Bingham, 25, of Glendale, who was among those at the scene in Encino.

Listening to Kate Gosselin stutter and sniff her way through her recent chats with "Today's" Meredith Vieira, it was hard to keep a straight face. Kate doesn't blame the decision to participate in TLC's "Jon & Kate Plus 8" for the disintegration of her marriage; it probably would have happened anyway. Really? Your husband would have left you for a Star reporter and/or the daughter of the plastic surgeon who gave you a tummy tuck (free, because it was filmed), even if you had just remained some obscure church-going Pennsylvania family with a bunch of kids?

David Letterman has milked plenty of sex scandals for laughs. But it remains to be seen whether the CBS comic's admission Thursday that he had sexual liaisons with female employees while he was involved with his now-wife, the mother of his 5-year-old son, will fade away with a few late-night punch lines. Although Letterman focused on his role as the victim of a would-be extortionist who demanded $2 million to keep the details of his affairs secret, the episode sparked impassioned discussion Friday about sex in the workplace and hypocrisy.

Downey High School sent its homecoming queen packing, crown and all, after she was seen making sexually suggestive moves on the dance floor a few years back. Aliso Niguel High School Principal Charles Salter made good on a threat to cancel school dances in 2006 as officials there and elsewhere fretted over how to deal with freaking, grinding and other provocative dances. Their solution: Fight explicit teen dancing with an equal dose of explicitness. Downey and Aliso Niguel are among the first schools to draft "dance contracts," binding agreements that parents and students must sign before a teenager can step onto the dance floor.

Pete Stark is sitting in a gilded meeting room in the House of Representatives. It is home to the powerful Ways and Means Committee that the Northern California Democrat might never chair, precisely because of the sort of verbal exchange he is attempting to explain at the moment: "He said to me, 'Don't pee on my leg.' And in a sense I said, 'I won't.' " Stark, nearly 78, is dissecting the latest in a hit parade of outbursts, this one pertaining to the likelihood of California's longest-serving congressman relieving himself on a constituent.

The Florida Democrat who said Republicans wanted sick people to "die quickly" is apologizing for a new bout of inflammatory rhetoric, in which he used a derogatory term for women. Rep. Alan Grayson said late Tuesday that it was inappropriate for him to call Federal Reserve advisor Linda Robertson a "K Street whore" during an interview last month on the "Alex Jones Show," a syndicated talk radio program. Robertson is a former top Enron lobbyist and Clinton administration advisor who was hired by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to help with congressional relations as lawmakers are seeking more oversight of the agency.

At Hawthorne High School recently, students easily identified areas where different groups hang out: the basketball players are in a corner near the cafeteria, the rockers near the stage, ditchers and smokers near the school gates and the JV football players and cheerleaders near the field. The exercise was aimed at focusing students' attention on the many social and cultural barriers formed by cliques on campus and the stereotypes they can engender. Afterward, Hawthorne senior Naya Pierce said she hoped her classmates would begin to reach beyond their tight-knit circles but admitted it would be slow going.

You might not see them. But they're watching you. To identify dangerous people, the Transportation Security Administration stations behavior-detection officers at 161 U.S. airports, including ones in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Los Angeles. The officers can be anywhere, from the parking garage to the gate, looking for passengers who seem highly nervous or stressed. They don't focus on nationality, race, ethnicity or gender, said TSA spokeswoman Sari Koshetz. "We're not looking for a type of person, but at behaviors," she said.

Young gay people whose parents responded negatively when they revealed their sexual orientation were more than eight times as likely to attempt suicide, nearly six times as vulnerable to severe depression and more than three times at likely to use drugs as those whose families accepted the news, according to a study released Monday. Researchers at San Francisco State University also found that being forbidden to associate with gay peers was as damaging to youths as being beaten or verbally abused by their parents.

Classical music has a reputation, deserved or not, for being stuffy, fussily concerned with manners. The tuxedos don't help. And then there are the glares when some poor, unsuspecting soul claps her hands between movements. The issue of applause isn't new, but it's been raised recently by pianist Emanuel Ax on his blog (emanuelax.wordpress.com). Many of Beethoven's and Mozart's movements, he says, end with a flourish, and the composers expected audiences to respond to the fanfare. The highly regarded musician writes, rather sensibly, "I really hope we can go back to the feeling that applause should be an emotional response to the music, rather than a regulated social duty."