Black

I'm confused about choosing a color to paint my kitchen. I've heard that green is the color of the year. And then I hear about gray being the new neutral. What are the best colors to paint the kitchen? A kitchen should be an inviting gathering space, so warmer or brighter tones are ideal, such as deep ivories, rich coppers, luscious reds, golden yellows and yellow-greens. Be sure to take countertops, appliances and floors into consideration when selecting your color. You'll want something that complements these accents and flows naturally into the surrounding rooms of your home.

The Inn at the Black Olive, a boutique hotel in Fells Point, was sold at auction for $3.9 million Thursday to mortgage holder 1st Mariner Bank. Bidding for the South Caroline Street hotel, restaurant and cafe-market opened at $2.5 million, said Bradd Caplan, auction agent for Alex Cooper Auctioneers Inc. One other registered bidder competed to buy the 12-suite luxury inn, he said. The two-year-old inn will remain open and continue to be run by the Spiliadis family, said Stelios Spiliadis, whose family operates the inn and separately runs the Black Olive restaurant on Bond Street nearby.

If you're a big fan, you already knew what was coming in the season finale. But it didn't make it any easier -- or less heartbreaking -- to watch. The majority of the Season 3 "Downton" finale, or the "Christmas special" as its called in the U.K., took place in Scotland, where the whole family (minus Branson) visits the Highlands home of the Dowager's niece, Susan, and her husband, Shrimpy. Most of the trip included bagpipes, hunting, more bagpipes and Scottish reel dancing. But more on that later (and more on O'Brien meeting her Scottish lady's maid doppelganger)

The Senate this week begins debate on the proposed immigration reform bill. If this bill becomes law, there is one likely outcome for low-skilled Maryland workers: disaster. The assurances of the bill's proponents that the bill will somehow help the economy obscure copious evidence that it will wreak enormous damage to the employment prospects of American workers who have already seen their wages and employment rates plummet. Indeed, it is no secret that the employment picture for low-skilled workers is abysmal.

It's hard being a black man in America. I don't know any other way to say it. I wrestled over and over again trying to find the most literary and eloquent way, but, well, there it is.And I make no apologies for how I said it. No one has apologized to me for making it hard to be a black man.Three Baltimore City prosecutors never said they were sorry on the three occasions they assumed I was a defendant awaiting trial because I was sitting in a courtroom at...

A singular piece of metal is the only evidence that it ever existed; a small, dull, jagged, piece of red hardware."These were the lips," he tells me. "Each time, I've kept the lips."Take these lips. Build a blue-black face around them. Add some big white eyes. Embellish with a cap of wiry dark hair. Put that head on a squat compact body with an outstretched arm.Now, you have the thing this used to be.This used to be a lawn jockey, an accessory of the most manicured American front yards.My visitor and I spent nearly an hour trying to agree on its worth.

My search for William Lynch began last summer after a friend gave me a copy of a 10-page pamphlet that circulated during the Million Man March.The pamphlet was called the "Let's Make a Slave Kit." It explained how Lynch, a white slave owner from Jamaica, stood on the banks of the James River in 1712 and told Virginia slave owners how to solve their slave "problems."When Louis Farrakhan addressed the multitudes at the Million Man March in October 1995, he quoted key passages from "Willie" Lynch's narrative to illustrate the lingering vestiges of slavery.

For quite some time now, enthusiastic volunteers have been whacking brush, clearing debris and replacing ties and rails on the old Pennsylvania Railroad's Northern Central Division, one of the nation's most historic stretches of railroad, which courses 10 miles northward from New Freedom, Pa., to Hanover Junction. This work has been done under the guidance of Steam Into History Inc., a nonprofit that has returned the sights and sounds of steam railroading to York County just in time to observe the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg and Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

If you didn't get a chance to attend the recent Black and White Party, a fund-raiser for the Enoch Pratt Free Library, you can get a taste of the event at this Baltimore Sun photo gallery. The event, whose theme was "Evening in Paris," was organized by the Pratt Contemporaries, a group of young professional who support the library.  Here's another Pratt event worth attending: this Saturday's Booklovers' Breakfast with Michael Eric Dyson. It will be held at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel, 700 Aliceanna St., from 8:30 a.m. to noon.

Since Wiz Khalifa released his chart-topping Pittsburgh anthem "Black and Yellow," we have been treated to a bunch of remixes from rappers across the country who are repping their hometown teams, including Mullyman's Ravens-themed " Black and Purple . " Now Orioles fans have gotten their own anthem from Dboi Da Dome, E' From Da Wic and Jay Luv. We can all relate to "Orange and Black. " Well, except for the parts about drinking purple stuff and pulling out guns on non-Orioles fans.

When Tasha Wilkie helped out in the math department as an undergrad at Coppin State University, she dealt with some students who came in without basic skills. They didn't know their multiplication tables or how to work with fractions. "We have students who've taken courses like three times" before they passed, said Wilkie, who graduated in 2011 and is now working toward a doctorate in biology at Ohio State University. There, she realized she also was ill-equipped for some classes by her studies at Coppin.

Major League Baseball has gone to great pains to move past its so-called steroid era, which gripped the game for more than a decade and stained the reputations of many of its greatest players. But nearly six years after the release of the Mitchell Report, which was designed to put an end to that period, baseball is again shadowed by a drug scandal that has fans and analysts wondering if the problem can ever be stamped out. About 20 players, including former Most Valuable Players Alex Rodriguez and Ryan Braun, could face suspensions of up to 100 games based on their dealings with the Biogenesis clinic in South Florida, according to an ESPN report.

As Tyrone Brown sat in his jail cell at the Baltimore County Detention Center late last year, awaiting trial for the murder of a man in a Towson Town Center parking garage, he kept busy in part by smoking marijuana and memorizing contraband writings of the Black Guerrilla Family - the same gang prosecutors say he killed to become a part of. Meanwhile, Frank Williams, who helped Brown plot the 2011 mall attack and was arrested with a group of...

A bankruptcy judge has approved an auction of The Inn at the Black Olive, a boutique hotel in Fells Point, according to court records. The sale is scheduled for mid-June. First Mariner Bank foreclosed on the hotel's developers, the Black Olive Development Co. LLC, in January, listing mortgage debt of $5.4 million. A foreclosure auction of the 12-suite luxury inn on South Caroline Street was scheduled for late March but was canceled after Black Olive Development filed for bankruptcy.

President Barack Obama gave two commencement addresses in one to graduates of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Ga., last weekend. It would be easy for this conservative to critique the political and social elements of his speech. Instead, I choose to focus on the inspirational part. The president struck the right note at the historically black, all-male college. African-American men in America need more role models and encouragement to counter the reality, reinforced by much of the media, of too much failure, crime, imprisonment, out-of-wedlock births, a disproportionate abortion rate and other social maladies affecting many in the black community.

As afternoon light tried to filter through the thick, stained-glass windows of Sharp Street United Methodist Church last weekend, Marco K. Merrick pounded out the bass line of a spiritual on a raw-sounding piano, singing along in a raspy voice: "Great day, the righteous marching. Great day, God's going to build up Zion's walls. " From the tightly packed pews in front of him, basses and baritones of the Community Concert Choir of Baltimore picked up the vocal line tentatively at first, but gained in confidence with each measure.

HAGERSTOWN — The state Department of Natural Resources says Maryland's bear hunt is closed. Sixty-seven bears were killed as of 9 p.m. on Friday and the hunt was closed. The season began on Monday. The hunt was limited to Allegany and Garrett counties.

WASHINGTON -- The National Security Agency's second-highest official is being forced out by the agency's director, who is moving to install his own leadership team nine months into his tenure, current and former government officials said yesterday. Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the NSA's director, announced in a memo to agency employees last week that Deputy Director William B. Black Jr. would be taking a new position in mid-August as the NSA's liaison officer to its British intelligence counterpart, the officials said.

Jos. A. Bank Clothiers Inc.'s top executive, R. Neal Black, earned $2.9 million last year, a decrease from the $4 million in compensation Black earned in 2011, the Hampstead-based men's apparel retailer said. Executive compensation for CEO Black, who also serves as the company's president, included a base salary of $806,492 and $1.96 million in stock awards, Bank reported in a filing Friday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In 2011, Black's earnings also included $1.2 million in non-equity incentive plan compensation.

Thanks for Mike Klingaman 's article, which focused on Kevin Krigger and his aspirations to break the over 100-year absence of African American jockey winners at the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes ("With the weight of racing history," May 16). One quibble: The article gives the impression that African American jockeys emerged during Reconstruction, when as Mr. Klingaman writes "the sport was young, agrarian and accepting of former slaves and their kin who rode the animals they'd once cared for. " On the contrary, African Americans, both free and slave, basically dominated horse racing from the 17th century up to Reconstruction.