Canon

PHILADELPHIA - One morning in January 1900, Mother Katharine Drexel was riding to Lynchburg, Va., when her train stopped in a little town. "Columbia" read the station sign, and through the trees she spied a gilt cross atop a small building. "Do you think that is a Catholic church?" she asked her traveling companion. Not likely, replied Sister Mercedes, who said there were no Catholic churches between Richmond and Lynchburg. But Mother Katharine was intrigued. Days later she dispatched some sisters of her religious order who discovered "the only colored Catholic in Columbia" tending to the abandoned Catholic church, bringing fresh flowers to it each week.

Canon, a big player in scanners for years, recently introduced the CanoScan FB 630Ui, a diminutive $149 flat-bed machine targeting Mac users, but not for them exclusively. The 630Ui is one of the first scanners to be connected and fully powered via the computer's USB port. This means there's only one cord to keep up with. After placing a photo on the glass, the user pushes the scanner's only button to bring up the CanoScan Toolbox on the computer screen, a pretty cool and fast way to launch the software.

Faced with a slash in state funding, Carroll County Family Center is seeking donations for a program that provides licensed day care and support services to teen-age mothers and their children."

The price of digital video cameras continues to plummet. While you can get a digital handycam for $800, if you want something that can deliver near-broadcast quality, you'll need to spend more. This higher-end consumer market is known as "prosumer," and the Canon Elura MiniDV ($1,799) is a fine example.The Elura is two cameras in one. In video mode, it takes gorgeous full-motion video. In photo mode, it acts as a digital still camera, capturing up to 500 images on a MiniDV cassette. A third mode, progressive scan movie mode, allows you to capture continuous still images at 30 frames per second.

The camcorder has become a fixture on the American landscape. In the right hands, it can yield a documentary of pivotal moments in your life. But in the wrong hands - like mine - it can yield results that make 12 hours of Monica Lewinsky's deposition look like an Emmy winner.The average video camera in the hands of the average user produces a few memorable moments trapped in a quagmire of quirky pans, shaky zooms and footage of the photographer's feet. The picture is frequently blurry even when it's in focus and the audio sounds like you've been yelling into a cheap cassette recorder in a high wind.

VATICAN CITY -- Pope John Paul II bestowed sainthood yesterday on Edith Stein, a Jewish-born Catholic nun executed by the Nazis in 1942, and said the Roman Catholic Church will use her feast day each year to commemorate the Holocaust.Speaking at a canonization Mass in St. Peter's Square, the pope paid tribute to "the millions of Jewish brothers and sisters" slaughtered by the Nazis and pleaded that there will be no recurrence of such a "brutal plan to wipe out a people.""For the love of God and man, I once again raise my voice in a heartfelt cry: Never again may such a criminal act be repeated against any ethnic group, any people, any race, in any corner of the Earth," the pope said, drawing applause from a crowd of thousands.

Homosexuality used to be, to quote Victorian literary light Lord Alfred Douglas, "the love that dare not speak its name." Doulgas would have known: in 1895 his gay affaire de coeur sent fellow writer Oscar Wlide to prison after a notorious trial. The end of the Victorian era did not end anti-gay sentiment. When Radclyffe Hall penned her now-classic novel of lesbian love "The Well of Loneliness" (Doubleday, 437 pages, $10.95) in 1928, the book was banned outright in England. A lengthy obscenity trial ensued in the United States.

The ritual is set now, a combination of secrecy and ceremony not unlike the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. A lucky winner has been chosen, America's next millionaire. The trucks are ready to roll with their mysterious cargo. The media is on standby.Yes, it's time once again for Oprah Winfrey to make her book club selection.Today Oprah will announce the selection of the eighth book in what has become the world's largest reading group. The author and the title are, as always, a tightly held secret, but enough patterns have been established to allow a few predictions.

Carroll County Food Sunday is serving more people with less money and facing its worst crisis since its founding in 1982.The charity, which distributes food at three county locations, could be forced to close its doors or, at least, decrease the amount of food it gives weekly to 350 families, mostly the working poor."