WASHINGTON — Airline passengers will have to leave their knives at home after all. And their bats and golf clubs.

A policy change scheduled to go into effect this week that would have allowed passengers to carry small knives, bats and other sports equipment onto airliners will be delayed, federal officials said Monday.

The delay is necessary to accommodate feedback from an advisory committee made up of aviation industry, consumer and law enforcement officials, the Transportation Security Administration said in a brief statement. The statement said the delay is temporary, but gave no indication how long it might be.

WASHINGTON — Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes dipped in March as the supply remained tight. But the sales pace remained ahead of last year's.The National Association of Realtors said Monday that sales dipped to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.92 million, from 4.95 million in February. February's figure was revised lower.Sales in March were 10.3 percent higher than a year earlier.Sales have remained mostly unchanged in the past four months — largely, analysts say, because of a limited supply of homes.

NEW YORK — After years of striving to set a national agenda for curbing smoking, New York City may set a new bar by becoming the most populous place in America to raise the minimum age for buying cigarettes to 21.A new proposal would increase the threshold from 18, a federal minimum that is the standard in many places. Four states and some communities have raised the age to 19, and at least two towns have agreed to raise it to 21.But a change in New York would put the issue in a big-city spotlight, as the city did by helping to impose the highest cigarette taxes in the country, barring smoking at parks and on beaches and conducting sometimes graphic advertising campaigns about the hazards of smoking.