December 10, 2005

It began this spring without explanation: fire hydrants, street signs and bicycles all over Park Slope and Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn were suddenly standing watch over their own distorted chalk outlines, as if anticipating some violent demise. Whoever did this left no clue other than an ambiguous signature: ''$; Ellis G. 2007,'' scrawled next to the chalk etchings. During daylight, the outlines did not make much sense. Shopkeepers and bar owners had little information. Deliverymen muttered to themselves as they moved their outlined bicycles indoors. Parents were just as confused as their young children.

Some Democrats are saying Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut is more of a wayward son than a favorite son.

Prom night, that all-American rite of passage that fell out of favor during the anti-establishment 1960's and then made a comeback in the conservative tilt of the Reagan era, probably always inhabited terrain destined to become a battleground in the so-called culture wars. It is about social manners, class, gender roles; and to a more or less open degree, it is about sex.

A former New York police officer was sentenced to probation yesterday for fatally shooting an unarmed African immigrant in a Manhattan warehouse. The judge placed the blame for the killing primarily on the Police Department's training and supervision of the officer and the way the operation that resulted in the killing was carried out. The judge, Justice Robert H. Straus of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, said that while the officer, Bryan A. Conroy, would have to live with the consequences of killing the immigrant, Ousmane Zongo, he believed the Police Department also needed to be held accountable.

A decade ago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art embarked on a vastly ambitious project: the transformation of its dark and crowded Greek and Roman galleries into one of the premier spaces for antiquities in the Western Hemisphere. In 2007, the project will culminate in the opening of a huge colonnaded Roman court that Philippe de Montebello, the Met's director, has described as ''a grand orchestral coda'' to years of work reinstalling the museum's classical collections. But as the project nears completion, it also threatens to become one of the Met's biggest headaches, forcing the museum to address difficult questions about the ethics of collecting practices.