Assertions

ATLANTA -- A Memphis Criminal Court judge ruled yesterday that James Earl Ray, the confessed assassin of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., will be allowed to subpoena witnesses in support of his assertions of innocence and his request for a new trial.In what one prosecutor termed a "bizarre" situation, Judge Joseph Brown said he was constrained by Tennessee law to deny the new trial being sought by Ray because the time limit allowed for such appeals had long since expired.Judge Brown is hearing Ray's ninth appeal since he pleaded guilty in 1968.

SARASOTA, Fla. -- In his first public move in an Orioles uniform, infielder Danny Valencia stepped in front of a podium on Wednesday and vehemently denied ever using any performance-enhancing drugs. Valencia's name was listed on records obtained by Yahoo Sports from a now-defunct clinic named Biogenesis, which the Miami New Times previously reported had provided PEDs to several major leaguers, including New York Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez. Major League Baseball has been investigating Biogenesis and its owner, Anthony Bosch.

CITY SCHOOLS Superintendent Walter G. Amprey Jr. says "we are doing everything we can and should do" in his management of a school system in which too many students are simply not learning. If he really believes that, then there seems little likelihood he can satisfy state officials -- or Maryland taxpayers -- who are increasingly impatient with under-performing schools.From the state schools chief, Dr. Nancy S. Grasmick, to city-based legislators like Del. Howard P. Rawlings and Sen. Barbara Hoffman, state officials are looking for concrete results, not assertions that small changes in test scores prove the system is headed in the right direction.

The financial disclosure forms filled out by about 1,900 city employees will be entered into an online searchable database, the city's new Chief Information Officer told the city's ethics board Tuesday. "It's a really easy project," said Chris Tonjes, who heads the Mayor's Information Technology Office. Tonjes told board members he planned to appoint a project manager, who will create an online filing system likely for the next round of ethics forms. The deadline for elected officials and many city employees to fill out the form is April 30. At the ethics board's monthly meeting Wednesday, Tonjes asked Avery Aisenstark, the executive director of the ethics board, how many employees are required to fill out the forms.

Maryland's U.S. senators have joined Virginia Sen. John W. Warner in calling for an investigation of the government-funded Chesapeake Bay Program to see whether it has been "significantly overstating" how much it has been cleaning up the bay. In a letter sent Friday to the head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which audits federal programs, Warner, a Republican, and Democratic Sens. Barbara A. Mikulski and Paul S. Sarbanes wrote that they were concerned that the program might be inflating results by using computer estimates rather than water quality reports.

JERUSALEM -- Israel's Supreme Court will hear new evidence in a few days asserting that John Demjanjuk, convicted and sentenced to death here as the monstrous "Ivan the Terrible" of the Treblinka death camp, is the wrong man and the victim of "a complete frame-up" by U.S. and Israeli authorities.At the same time, the U.S. Justice Department has acknowledged that it is reviewing the Demjanjuk case.Demjanjuk's Israeli lawyer says that copies of diplomatic cables, official letters and other documents that he recently obtained show that the U.S. Justice Department knew as far back as 1978 that Ivan the Terrible was not Demjanjuk, a 71-year-old retired auto worker from Cleveland.

Howard Wimer is a guy who believes in following a hunch to happiness.Seventeen years ago he turned his back on a promising Los Angeles career as a producer of educational and promotional films, and as a one-time personal assistant to comedian Steve Allen, and followed his hunch into the Inner Peace Movement.He's been there ever since, traveling the world teaching people how to get in touch with their four "spiritual" or psychic "gifts" -- intuition, prophecy, vision and healing -- which he says can lead them to greater personal contentment and success.

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court's ruling in the Guantanamo Bay case is a setback to President Bush's aggressive pursuit of broad wartime powers, a trademark of his presidency, legal analysts and historians said yesterday. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush has asserted expansive and virtually unconstrained presidential authority in advancing his national security and counterterrorism policies. The latest court ruling, which rejected his bid to use military tribunals for terrorism suspects, challenged the administration's theory and amounted to a rare reining-in of a president who recently dubbed himself the "Decider."

THE state Board of Regents has proposed to eliminate many programs in the University of Maryland System, including chemistry and physics at Towson State University, chemistry at Salisbury State College and theater at UMBC.The proposals are said to save money and improve the quality of education in the system. These assertions are demonstrably false. If the Board of Regents takes its responsibility seriously, these ill-considered cuts will not be implemented.First, consider the assertion that the moves will save money.

It is more than unfortunate that Anne Arundel County Executive John Leopold continues to imply that funding our school system is like throwing money into a bottomless abyss with absolutely no return on investment ("School funding mandate hurts counties," Jan. 19). There are certainly flaws with the state's maintenance of effort law, but the bigger problem in our county is Mr. Leopold's ongoing disparaging comments and his desire to control our school system in a dictatorial fashion.

Cows, rather than chickens, caused the pollution for which an Eastern Shore farm couple and Perdue are being sued, contends a witness for the Salisbury-based poultry company. Charles Hagedorn, a microbiology professor from Virginia Tech , told a federal judge Monday that a small herd of cattle grazing on Alan and Kristin Hudson's farm near Berlin were the sole source of high levels of bacteria and nutrients found in drainage ditches there. "These counts - and they are high - came from the cattle," Hagedorn testified.  But a lawyer for the Waterkeeper Alliance pressed Hagedorn to acknowledge that manure blown by large ventilation fans out of the Hudsons' two poultry houses could also have reached the ditches, contributing to the pollution.

My heart goes out to the family of Jenny Olenick, who by all accounts was a talented and wonderful teen. The May 5 article detailing events surrounding the filing of a malpractice suit, "Lawyers question teen's health before death," got my attention for several reasons. To imply that pre-exiting conditions, such as stress, anxiety and heart disease would have contributed to or caused her death seem far-fetched. As reported in the article the autopsy report found "no evidence of a physical process, like cardiomyopathy having occurred," according to the state's chief medical examiner.

It is more than unfortunate that Anne Arundel County Executive John Leopold continues to imply that funding our school system is like throwing money into a bottomless abyss with absolutely no return on investment ("School funding mandate hurts counties," Jan. 19). There are certainly flaws with the state's maintenance of effort law, but the bigger problem in our county is Mr. Leopold's ongoing disparaging comments and his desire to control our school system in a dictatorial fashion.

The parents of a teenage girl from Virginia who was found dead next to a trash bin in Baltimore in 2008 are alleging that a state medical examiner threw away her heart and brain, among other organs. During a news conference Thursday in Washington, Mary Jane and Daniel McCann also continued to sharply criticize the Baltimore Police Department's investigation and conclusions by detectives that the 16-year-old committed suicide by drinking a lethal dose of Bactine. The alleged mistreatment of Annie McCann's remains is a further indignity, her parents said, adding to their continued suffering as they wage a years-long campaign to convince authorities that their daughter was murdered and that a killer remains on the loose.

Outside linebacker Terrell Suggs has played nine seasons, all of them with the Ravens. That's just a little bit more than half of Ray Lewis' tenure with the organization, and the Suggs spoke Thursday of the 13-time Pro Bowler's value to the franchise. “If you have the opportunity to play seven years in this league, you're very fortunate,” Suggs said. “What people don't see, what people don't understand is that he's in his 16th year, and he's still outplaying half the guys today - majority of the guys today, excuse me. Like I said, it's a different persona when 52's not in the middle, when 52's not making the calls, or 52's not lining us up. He's definitely the leader.

Some comments on the Laurel Leader's informative article about WSSC closing their equestrian trail ("Not so Happy Trails," Aug. 18): WSSC provided no evidence that trail use damages the water, as WSSC's general manager asserts, despite repeated requests. Yet data from WSSC's previous Environmental Advisory Committee, recently again given to WSSC officials, show this trail use causes no meaningful fraction of the reservoir's impairments (see calculation on the Facebook group "Save the WSSC horse trail")

WASHINGTON -- After weeks of furious argument and closed-door negotiations, an angrily split House launched yesterday its long-awaited debate on competing civil rights bills aimed at eliminating job discrimination against minorities and women."

Pieces of column too short to use:Sam: The Sequel . . . Last week in this space you read about Sam, the odd man who showed up in several Baltimore churches to loudly demand money. Sam interrupted services in Bolton Hill and Hampden, and churchgoers, though suspicious of Sam's assertions of need, apparently made contributions. Now the Rev. Jeffrey L. Tomlinson, pastor of Church of God at Dundalk, reports that apparently the same Sam paid his parishioners a visit last summer."He marched in just about at the close of my sermon, sat down on the second pew and, just as I was making my closing remarks, he stood and asked to speak," Rev. Tomlinson says, adding that Sam asked for exactly $80. "The reaction of people in my congregation was varied.

A lawyer for Skateworks said Thursday that there are "inconsistencies" in a 12-year-old girl's account of a gang rape she says she endured at the Woodlawn roller rink last Saturday. The attorney's implication that the girl might have been at least partly to blame for what occurred was immediately assailed by victims-rights advocates. Paul W. Gardner, who represents the rink's owners, released images from surveillance video taken in the Skateworks building that he said indicate the girl willingly accompanied two of the three males later accused of assaulting her in a small storage room.

ROCKVILLE - The Virginia couple at the center of last week's White House security breach is now accused of bouncing a nearly $24,000 check for liquor purchased in Maryland. The Montgomery County government, which conducts all the wholesale liquor sales on its territory, filed a lawsuit Thursday against Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the couple who got into a state dinner last week without an invitation. The Salahis purchased wine and beer for America's Polo Cup World Championship, a charity polo event they held in the county in May. According to documents, the couple returned more than $10,000 worth of merchandise, but they still owe more than $13,000.