Morale

The impending transition from a traditional school to a charter school has left Locke High in a difficult purgatory, said students, parents, teachers and administrators, and may have contributed to tensions that boiled over into a campuswide melee involving about 600 students earlier this month.

President Bush said Wednesday that he did not believe morale of troops in Iraq had declined because of repeated deployments to the war zone, saying his commanders on the ground would have informed him if any problems existed. The issue of troop morale has bubbled up repeatedly during the debate on Capitol Hill over legislation that would criticize the administration's decision to increase troop levels in Iraq.

Brooke Pfautz knows that sales at his mortgage banking firm will probably plunge during the NCAA basketball tournament that begins Thursday. But for the second year in a row, he plans to show the March Madness games on the office big-screen TVs and give a prize to the employee who picks the winning team. "I want to have a good, fun, upbeat atmosphere," he said from his office in Hunt Valley, Md. "You spend more of your waking hours at work, so you might as well enjoy it."

In the dining hall of a U.S. Army post south of Baghdad, President Bush was on the wide-screen TV, giving a speech about the war in Iraq. The soldiers didn't look up from their chicken and mashed potatoes. As military and political leaders prepare to deliver a progress report on the conflict to Congress next month, many soldiers are increasingly disdainful of the happy talk that they say commanders on the ground and White House officials are using in their discussions about the war.

For one paramilitary soldier, the decision to desert came after his horrified parents saw a beheading video and begged him to quit the force. For another, it was the lack of food and ammunition at the front. For yet another, it was watching wounded comrades languish for days, awaiting medical attention.

New details about the depth and causes of some firefighters' dissatisfaction with the Los Angeles Fire Department emerged Tuesday, contained in voluminous supporting documents for an audit released earlier this month. The documents show that, though the department has greatly improved the ethnic diversity of its rank and file, morale among some groups is low. A generation gap at stationhouses and confusing regulations are contributing to the dissatisfaction, the documents reveal.

Shortly after being appointed last September, members of the board that guides the nation's largest municipal utility began receiving complaints about cronyism and nepotism from employees at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. What was most shocking, said H. David Nahai, the Water and Power Commission's vice president, was the discovery that the department did not formally evaluate its 8,000 workers each year.

As dusk thickened in the mainly Sunni neighborhood of Amariya, a cluster of men lined up outside a small bakery, waiting their turn to buy bread. The men grew anxious; the minutes seemed to drag. Nobody wanted to linger in the streets. An extraordinary daytime curfew intended to stifle bloody fighting between Shiite and Sunni Muslims had been lifted for a few hours, and the men had ventured out in search of food. "It's very dangerous for us, standing like this," one of them muttered.

When tales of racist behavior, hazing and harassment in the Los Angeles Fire Department are recounted, the Tennie Pierce story usually comes first. Some of Pierce's fellow firefighters at Station 5 in Westchester sneaked dog food into his spaghetti dinner and watched him eat it -- an incident that officials have called prime illustration of how harassment is entrenched within the department.

Karen Heller, a reporter and columnist at the venerable Philadelphia Inquirer for two decades, has lived through it all: the glory days of Pulitzer Prizes, the bloody budget battles with cost-cutting corporate parent Knight Ridder, the endless cycles of job losses and shrinkage. "It's like a soap opera that won't end," she said at her desk in the paper's vast, lightly populated newsroom. This week, there was another cliffhanger. Under duress from investors, Knight Ridder Inc.