Canary

With six weeks until our wedding, Rob and I took a trip to Radcliffe's in Towson to pick out our bands. Below are a few tips. in my inexpert opinion.    Take your time . We were lucky to have a really lovely woman assist us at Radcliffe's, and we never felt pressured to make a snap decision. If you do feel that you're being rushed, ask for a new sales person, or go to another store. You have to look at this thing for the rest of your life (or marriage, ha) and you should be sure you're both happy with what you choose.

FOR DECADES, small investors saving for college and retirement through mutual funds could take some comfort knowing that the fund industry had avoided the kind of scandals that periodically erupt on Wall Street. That's now changed. Last month, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer accused several fund companies of sacrificing the interests of long-term shareholders by allowing a hedge fund to make trades that either violated the law or the funds' own rules. Spitzer's investigation is continuing, and major fund companies, including Putnam Investments, Vanguard Group, Legg Mason and Fidelity Investments, said they have received subpoenas.

From The Sun June 23-29, 1841zTC June 25: Samuel Canaby, Esq., of Woodside, near Wilmington, Del., has a short horned Durham cow, which yields on an average 253 quarts of milk weekly -- an average of over 36 quarts a day -- yielding over 17 pounds of good butter.June 29: The number of Christians in China is estimated at 300,000.From The Sun June 23-29, 1891June 28: A syndicate of American and English capitalists have just concluded negotiations for the purchase of 800 acres of land adjoining the northern city limits of Baltimore, with the view of developing it into a suburban town.

Slammed for months by late-trading and market timing scandals, embattled mutual fund representatives have been dragged before Senate panels and federal regulators as they try to defend industry practices that some say have cost investors billions of dollars. Now, executives at several companies will have to go before federal judges in Baltimore in what one securities attorney said could be the "Olympics" of civil litigation surrounding the $7.5 trillion industry. To the surprise of many in the legal community, a federal judicial panel decided Feb. 20 to transfer more than 170 lawsuits against six scandal-torn mutual fund companies to U.S. District Court in Baltimore.

The problem with many environmental crises is that they creep up so slowly they are easy to ignore. For many years now, the public has listened to dire warnings only to look around and note that everything seems fine, at least on the surface.Many of these warnings have come from the Worldwatch Institute, a non-profit research organization based in ) Washington, D.C. For the past 11 years the group has issued an annual State of the World report, detailing progress (or lack of it) in such areas as balancing food production with population growth, preserving rain forests or ending poverty.

They arrive beginning in April, coming into the United States and Canada under the cover of night, moving in large groups.They are warblers, sometimes called the butterflies of the bird world because of their bright range of colors and diminutive size.They fly in mixed-species flocks, eat mostly insects, make all kinds of noise, and many are no bigger than a man's thumb.Warblers are not the most common songbirds in the United States, experts say. That distinction may well fall to the sparrow.

AS DAMAGED as the Chesapeake Bay is from centuries of pollution and exploitation, the only species that called these waters home in Colonial days has declined to perhaps the point of no return. That would be the sturgeon, both shortnose and Atlantic. The larger, more numerous Atlantics were the dreadnoughts of the Chesapeake in the spring as they lumbered up every significant tributary to spawn. They reached as far upstream as Washington on the Potomac, and well into Pennsylvania on the Susquehanna.

If there is one thing the federal government does not need is more politics. It needs less. Yet the Senate last week voted to amend the Hatch Act to allow federal civil servants to engage in political activity. The Senate bill would allow most executive branch and Postal Service employees to manage political campaigns, run for party offices, solicit campaign contributions from fellow workers. Yet it was abuse of this sort intermingling of partisan politics with governmental activity that produced the Hatch Act in 1939.

WHAT DOES IT mean when applications for welfare spike in the affluent suburbs? Are these cases, like dead canaries in coal mines, signals of impending disaster? For the working poor who have lost their jobs and can't find new ones, disaster is all too obvious. And it may be closer for other families struggling through a jobless economic recovery. Unemployment benefits are running out for millions, so some families are turning to welfare for help. It's not surprising, then, to see the increases in welfare cases reported in many Maryland counties by The Sun's Larry Carson.

THOSE OF YOU who have seen the October issue of Baltimore magazine and its list of the city's 50 most powerful people will know me as a ''600-pound canary'' whose prospects for appearing on a future version of that list depend on what kind of song he sings. It's still too early to give you a complete rendition of my song, but I'd like to try out a few phrases. I am going out on a limb a bit with some personal ideas about the University of Maryland system's proper role in greater Baltimore.