Classic Inquirer

It's no fortune. But when you're 85 years old and trying to survive in the Big City on $247 a month from Social Security, it helps. "I call it food money. The street people who hold out their cups make more money than me. Dollar bills," he says, raising an eyebrow.

. And Tom and Steve and Mildred and Sally, big rats, little rats, fat rats and frisky ones. There are squeaking lines of newborns, feisty youngsters and fearless stud rats. There is also the occasional gray-brown old rover with a scarred snout and missing tail for whom, after a life of scratching survival out of the hard urban underground, Providence hath just smiled.

As morning spread over the pile of rubble on the tiny street in Philadelphia's Kensington section yesterday, few of the people gathered there believed that little Harry Mertz could still be alive.

They would hear from a police scientist, who testified that tests had shown gunshot residue on one of McCracken's hands hours after Johnston, a 71-year- old retired security guard, was killed by a masked gunman at Kelly's.

Posted: Wednesday, April 10, 2013, 1:05 PM Call it intuition. Call it instinct. When the city was embarrassed two weeks ago in the famous Snow Bowl in Veterans Stadium, something told me a local politician had to have had a hand in it. Think about it, folks. A nationally televised debacle.

J KYLE KEENER / Staff Photographer, file Posted: Thursday, June 2, 2011, 10:45 AM This article was originally published on Oct. 22, 1987. It has circled the globe. It has spread farther, faster than any plague in history.

What was lost in the Move fire.

Richard Ben Cramer covers the funeral of Bobby Sands

We tried to make her drink the Ensure,'' said her nephew Pat Dangillo, referring to the high-nutrient liquid. ``It took an hour to get her to drink half a cup.'' On April 18, 1997, after Aunt Lena had been examined by several doctors, Dr. Corey called Pat Dangillo and told him: If doctors didn't insert a feeding tube, Aunt Lena would probably die.

There were a pair of goalies named Bernie Parent and Doug Favell, friendly rivals from their days in the Boston Bruins system, together once again. There was a winger named Gary Dornhoefer, wondering whether he should have pursued a career in golf rather than face an uncertain future in hockey.

Before his interview, Iverson just needs to finish one more take. Live on the mike in an adjacent room, the combative 25-year-old guard spits a fierce parental warning over an ominous bass line: "This ain't for kids with action figures, this is for the hard-core niggas." * Oh, man.

KwaMakhutha was killing itself. Once more, an internecine black rivalry had drawn blood in a South African township. And once more, a sense of dread and foreboding hung over a place where blacks are forced to live and strike out at one another in their fury and frustration at apartheid.