Bp

Clutching a clear plastic tub containing two enormous white rats, Young Hee Ko scampers through a labyrinth of laboratory hallways at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences. Down stairwells, through automatic doors and across glassed-in bridges spanning busy East Baltimore streets, she is a blur of black clogs, blue jeans and obligatory white lab coat. Ko and her pink-eyed rats, named "One Dottie" and "July Mom" (JM), are late for a date in Dr. Martin G. Pomper's radiology lab, a pit stop in their marathon race to find a cure for cancer.

World-class track athlete Tatyana McFadden is not a flashy person. Soft-spoken with a thin face, dark brown eyes and a deceptively muscular frame, she is not the type to speak of her accomplishments without some prompting. But when she does talk about her accolades, she lets people know that success hasn't come easy. “I've worked hard for it,” says the Clarksville resident, who is paraplegic. Just shy of her 23rd birthday, McFadden has an impressive résumé. A graduate of Atholton High School, she holds U.S. records in the 100-meter, 200-meter, 400-meter, 800-meter and 1,500-meter races.

Why can't people understand that if they boycott BP, the company will have to declare bankruptcy at some future date, and that will halt payment for the cleanup, etc. Plus, they are punishing fellow Marylanders who operate gasoline businesses. It never stops. Finton Cordell

A day after leaving Target Field for a local hospital because of to shortness of breath, center fielder Adam Jones was back in the Orioles' starting lineup Wednesday and making jokes about his potential health scare. "I wanted my mom," joked Jones, who left Tuesday's game in the second inning. "I called my mom and said, 'Mommy, come fly to Minnesota and come take care of me.' " Jones said he had no trouble when he batted in the first Tuesday, but when he went out to the field in the bottom of the inning he couldn't catch his breath.

BP is a blatant repeat offender — a serial criminal. In 2005, BP's criminal conduct resulted in an explosion at its Texas City Oil Refinery that killed 15 people; this was followed by the Prudhoe Bay, Alaska pipeline oil spill in 2006. In both cases multi-million dollar criminal fines were imposed. BP also paid hundreds of millions of dollars in civil and administrative fines for Occupational Health and Safety Administration and environmental violations. And now, BP is responsible for yet even more deaths and an environmental disaster of devastating proportions.

Take it easy on BP. Sure, it's tempting to join the public posse that wants the government to bring criminal charges against oil company executives. Or the environmentalists who'd like to end all offshore drilling. Or the Republicans (formerly the party of "Drill, baby, drill") who insist the Obama administration should be doing more. They all need to take a deep breath and count to three. Why three? Three is the average number of gallons of gas and oil products that we Americans — all 310 million of us — consume every day. We need our oil, lots of oil, and no foreseeable combination of windmills or solar panels or fiberglass insulation is going to change that.

In an interview on National Public Radio this week, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said that the Gulf oil spill was an example of the free market working properly. He reasoned that BP had the most to lose from the spill, namely $100 million per day in costs. And thus, BP had the greatest incentive to clean-up the oil spill. His conclusion is odd: The market functions properly when an oil company has repeated safety violations, ultimately causing an oil rig explosion that causes a loss in lives and perhaps the greatest environmental catastrophe in history.

Unfortunately the boycott of BP gas stations affects local station owners, but consumers really don't have any other way to vent their frustration with the oil company. ("Sales fall at area BP pumps in wake of spill," June 14). As a consumer I know that the only way we can truly avoid such disasters is by cutting down on our consumption of oil and hope that automobile manufacturers will produce cars that will use renewable sources of energy that won't harm the environment as much as oil. That won't necessarily solve our problems as we have become a world dependent on the use of petroleum and other sources of fuel that pollute our earth.

Ever since BP's then-CEO Tony Haywood was caught on TV complaining about how he wanted his life back after the company's massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico — and then got himself photographed on a yacht while frantic cleanup efforts were under way — it's been evident he wouldn't be in his job much longer. On Monday, BP made it official by naming as his replacement Robert Dudley, the company's American-born operations manager, who stepped in as the oil giant's public face after the gaffe-prone Mr. Haywood was yanked from in front of the cameras.

Everyone who steps into the great outdoors and uses it in some way — hunters and hikers, campers and canoeists, bass anglers and those of us who fish for trout — are supposed to know the rules: Leave a place as you found it, take your trash with you, get involved in stewardship in some way so your children and grandchildren can experience the same pleasures of the natural world some day. There are a few other rules, borrowed from...

BP Solar warned state regulators Monday that it will close what remains of its Frederick operation and lay off 58 employees, starting this fall. The company's decision to shut the solar-power facility, cutting research and development jobs as well as sales and marketing positions, came after it relocated the manufacturing operation there overseas. BP announced in March 2010 that the site would lose 320 manufacturing jobs as a result. The remainder of the facility will close by March of next year, with layoffs beginning in October, said a BP Solar spokesman, Pete Resler.

A year ago today, the nation gasped in collective horror at the catastrophic explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, the loss of 11 workers' lives, and the beginning of what would become a months-long gush of some 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Time was when such events spurred a cleansing tide of soul-searching and reform. Not this time. Subsequent reforms have been slight, most gulf drilling continued all along, and new permits are now being issued for more deepwater sites — even in the face of reports that the supposedly "failsafe" blowout preventers that are the industry's last line of defense against spills are prone to failure.

Baltimore County police say they quickly found the connection between an assault at a Timonium restaurant and a crash at a gas station in Hunt Valley early Thursday morning. Officers responded to an emergency call at An Poitin Stil on York Road about 2 a.m., only to find that the assailant had fled. Police said the restaurant staff identified the man as an intoxicated patron who had been asked to leave. When two workers escorted the man from the restaurant, he assaulted them, police said.

A couple of weeks ago, the folks over at Baseball Prospectus said that Orioles catcher Matt Wieters would be the team's biggest disappointment in 2011 . Now they have labeled the 24-year-old former first-round pick as one of the " most disappointing prospects of all time . " Really. "As we were among the first to hop on the Wieters bandwagon, let us be among the first off of it," wrote Steven Goldman. "The backstop is heading into his age-25 season. Whatever his .343/.

Orioles starter Justin Duchscherer took another step in the right direction Thursday in his attempt to come back from nearly two years of physical and emotional turmoil, completing another live batting practice session excited about his command and his comfort on the mound. "I felt awesome," Duchscherer said. "Everything was good. I had a little trouble with my breaking ball a couple of days ago, and today it was great. I threw probably seven, eight of them, and I threw all of them for strikes.

Six months ago, on April 20, BP's Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig exploded in a fiery mass that killed 11 men and led to the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Around 200 million gallons of oil — about 11 times more than the Exxon-Valdez spill — flowed into the Gulf of Mexico over the next 87 days before BP's fifth or sixth attempt to stop the well finally worked. This catastrophic spill spread across hundreds of miles of coast despite the best efforts of more than 40,000 cleanup workers, thousands of boats, the involvement of the Nobel Prize-wining physicist who heads the Department of Energy, the input of our nation's national energy laboratories, and BP's expenditure of $8 billion on cleanup.

Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin said after touring the oil-smeared Louisiana coast Friday that federal officials appear to be making progress in curtailing the huge leak from the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. But the Maryland Democrat urged Obama administration officials to challenge BP more, and he vowed to push legislation in the Senate to hold the energy company liable for all damages caused to coastal communities as well as the cleanup costs "It is just beyond description," Cardin said by telephone of the devastation he and other senators saw in a helicopter flyover as well as a boat tour of the waters near Queen Bess Island and Grand Isle.

Looking out from his waterfront home in Fairhope, Ala., Frederick "Rick" T. Kuykendall III can see miles of boom protecting a coastline endangered by millions of gallons of oil pouring out of a well in the Gulf of Mexico. In all his years of environmental law, Kuykendall couldn't have expected that what might be his biggest case would happen in the region where he grew up. Kuykendall, 55, is a lawyer affiliated with the Murphy Firm in Baltimore, headed by Billy Murphy, that specializes in complex commercial litigation.

Days after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, officials at BP were still assuring the Obama administration their estimates showed the blown-out well was only leaking about 5,000 barrels of oil a day into the surrounding waters. That was the figure the administration initially used to describe one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history, even though other government experts and independent scientists were already warning that the spill was likely much larger than oil company officials were letting on. In the weeks and months that followed, the government repeatedly underestimated the size of the spill, giving the public a distorted impression of the extent of the damage while making its own and BP's efforts to contain the oil seem more effective than they actually were.

Calls for education reform are again dominating the news, which is no surprise during an election year. The usual suspects are being rounded up to blame for the failures in our school systems — poor teachers, lax standards, lack of parental involvement. But is it realistic to expect our schools to be islands of academic rigor within a society that does not model the educational standards it espouses? Let us briefly survey how well many adults might fare in standard academic subjects.