Bad Blood

A man who had a run-in with an Anne Arundel County police officer last December has filed a $2.4 million negligence lawsuit in Anne Arundel Circuit Court against the county, the police department and the officer.Russell Wayne Varner of the 200 block of Grisdale Hill in the Riva area alleges that Officer Sonny M. Pentz of the Southern District grabbed him without provocation on Dec. 20, 1995, while he was standing outside his home, hit him on the back and then shoved him into a police car, causing him to injure his back.

Ozzie Guillen is no stranger to controversy, and Bryce Harper has made some headlines of his own in a three-month-old career, though he tried to lay low in his battle with the Marlins manager this weekend. On Sunday, Guillen accused the Washington Nationals outfielder of using too much pine-tar on his bat. So to apologize and make amends, Harper sent Guillen an autographed bat. The catch is, he just signed the bat and had no idea who it was intended for . It's common for players to get autographs for each other.

To hear the neighborhood tell it, what happened to Keisha Brown on Saturday night began as a fight between two families -- one involved in the drug trafficking at East Baltimore's Bonaparte Street and Garrett Avenue and another living at the rough-and-tumble intersection.The feud is not about the drugs -- drugs are business as usual there -- but about bad blood between families, neighborhood residents say. It goes back to the beginning of summer, when words were spoken and one woman took a bat to another woman's child, whose cousin then scuffled with an older boy. There has been fighting for months now, and Saturday, punches were thrown again.

LES CAYES, Haiti -- He called himself Saddam Hussein.He was the most feared of the local Haitian security forces who terrorized this rundown city by the sea.In August, he allegedly cut off Eric Vervil's left ear and made him eat it. He also carved his initials in Mr. Vervil's buttocks. All because Mr. Vervil supported exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide."I am the one who Saddam Hussein beat up," Mr. Vervil said, sitting in the darkness on a lumpy mattress.Mr. Vervil is now in an infirmary at the local military headquarters and the Haitian sergeant known as Saddam Hussein is in the custody of the American troops.

In the wee hours of March 9, 1997, Christopher Wallace -- a man known to millions of rap fans as Biggie Smalls or Notorious B.I.G. -- was shot to death while sitting in a black Chevy Suburban outside the Petersen Automotive Museum in the Wilshire district of Los Angeles.Coming barely six months after the similarly violent demise of fellow rap star Tupac Shakur, Biggie's death left the rap world reeling. There was an immediate outpouring of grief -- and a flood of rumors. Many wondered if the two deaths weren't an outgrowth of the much-hyped gangsta rap "war" between the West Coast crew of Death Row Records (of which Tupac was a part)

At last, some good news from the school beat: Anne Arundel teachers not only have accepted a new contract, but are so happy with it that they are willing to drop a lawsuit against the county seeking reimbursement for four furlough days in 1992. The contract calls for a 2 percent raise on Jan. 1, 1994 and a 4 percent increase on July 1, 1994 -- reasonable improvements considering that teachers haven't received a raise since July 1990.Everyone knows how dicey the county's financial situation has been since then.

It was a preliminary get-together, a feeling-each-other-out kind of meeting, that the Baltimore County Board of Education and the board of directors of the Teachers Association of Baltimore County (TABCO) held last Tuesday. We can't help likening it to the first session of marriage counseling for a couple that has put one another through some rough times but still wants to work things out.With the participants still warming to their task, nothing of major importance was resolved at the three-hour confab.

It's hard to escape the feeling that children have taken over the Baltimore County school administration and the teachers union, especially after the latest shenanigans featuring education leaders and their respective lawyers.Some background: Four months ago, a coalition of five families of special education students, the Teachers Association of Baltimore County and the Learning Disabilities Association of Maryland filed a lawsuit to scuttle the school system's special-education reforms. The petition was eventually dismissed by a U.S. District Court judge, who ruled the plaintiffs had not exhausted their administrative options within the school system.

IN THE ANNALS of battle strategy, it doesn't rank with Little Round Top. But Hagerstown's recent attempt to wrest a museum of Civil War medicine from nearby Frederick was the kind of incursion that can lead to bad blood between neighbors.Frederick, which already boasts a delightful downtown, was doubly proud of the fact that a dentist who is a major collector of items related to the treatment and surgery of soliders during the "War Between the States" had chosen it as a base for his artifacts.

JUST when it seemed like Carroll County had found additional water to satisfy its annual summer water shortage, politics pulled the plug. Four wells at Springfield Hospital Center that could be promptly developed and provide 1 million gallons a day, sites that have been thoroughly tested and designed, now won't be built. Because to do so might jeopardize the grand Piney Run Lake water plant that is the pet project of County Commissioners Donald Dell and Robin Frazier. They voted a year ago to build the $14 million facility to meet Carroll's needs.