NEWS
By C. Fraser Smith | April 27, 2008
There was something unsettling in the air last Monday at Unity United Methodist Church. It was disturbing for the Rev. Napoleon Rush, not because it was new but because he had seen it before. A funeral was about to begin. Young men were walking in and out of church and up to the casket to express ... what? Condolences? Good riddance? He asked them to behave appropriately. He asked them to respect the body that lay at the front of the church and the 300 assembled mourners. They ignored him. As always, he was prepared to speak about the defeating cycle of violence.
NEWS
By Tom Pelton | April 19, 2008
Baltimore is proposing to condemn and buy seven homes with arsenic pollution in their yards beside contaminated Swann Park as part of a large waterfront development. The plan for the 50-acre West Covington project in South Baltimore would include hundreds of homes and more than a million square feet of retail and offices beside a cleaned-up and reopened park, city officials said. "It's pretty clear that this part of the city and the whole Middle Branch area offers a very exciting opportunity for development that doesn't exist now," said City Solicitor George Nilson.
NEWS
January 21, 2008
Jan. 21 1793 During the French Revolution, King Louis XVI, condemned for treason, was executed on the guillotine.
NEWS
By Doug Smith and Saif Hameed | November 13, 2007
BAGHDAD -- U.S. officials yesterday sidestepped the demand of Iraq's prime minister for the immediate handover for execution of three former officials from Saddam Hussein's regime. The U.S. military issued a written statement reaffirming the position of the military and U.S. Embassy that the three condemned men would remain in U.S. custody until the Iraqi government has sorted out disputed procedures for death sentences handed down by Iraq's high tribunal for war crimes. The three men received death sentences in June for their roles in Hussein's internal campaigns during the 1980s that killed up to 180,000 Kurds.
NEWS
By Kevin Eck | April 27, 2007
Hollywood has done what the biggest and baddest professional wrestlers never could. It got a hold on "Stone Cold" Steve Austin and wouldn't let go until he gave in. The former World Wrestling Entertainment competitor, who said in a 2003 interview that if a good acting role "got dumped in my lap, I'm cool with that, but it's not something I care to pursue," now hopes to pin down a career as an action star. Austin, who was at the forefront of the wrestling boom in the late 1990s before neck injuries forced him out of the ring four years ago, makes his debut as a lead actor in the action thriller The Condemned, which opens today.
NEWS
By Michael Sragow | April 27, 2007
In a catastrophically messy action-movie mash-up, The Dirty Dozen meets Survivor and The Most Dangerous Game in The Condemned. This World Wrestling Entertainment production starring "Stone Cold" Steve Austin marks the first time this year I walked into an advance screening of an elaborate American action film and wasn't wanded for cell phones or recording devices. Maybe that's because 90 percent of the action scenes look, sound and move as if they were shot, mixed and edited on a BlackBerry.
NEWS
By Josh Mitchell | December 19, 2004
When the city of Aberdeen ordered Janice M. Grant to tear down her dilapidated house, it was enough to turn her into an overnight history buff. Racing against the imminent wrecking ball, Grant pulled out tattered newspaper clippings and yellowing letters and interviewed relatives about the home her family has owned for nine decades. She wrote a four-page primer on the history of her early 1900s Colonial: How Eleanor Roosevelt twice visited Grant's aunt, an aide to the first lady, and how the house was among the first in the city owned by blacks.
NEWS
By Rovan Wernsdorfer | August 17, 2003
IN PUBLIC discussions of homosexuality that now focus on the acceptance of gay clergy and gay marriage, references are frequently made to how homosexuality is condemned in Scripture. "It's in the Bible" is the statement often used. For many, this is conclusive that God condemns homosexuality. The implication, obviously, is that society should as well. I would beg to differ on both counts. The statement, "It's in the Bible," is not an argument against homosexuality. Homosexual acts are condemned in some parts of Scripture.
NEWS
By Clare McHugh | July 27, 2003
Strapless: John Singer Sargent & the Fall of Madame X, by Deborah Davis. Tarcher Penguin. 262 pages. $24.95. This is a strange book: a brief biography of the renowned artist John Singer Sargent, melded with a light social history of the belle epoque in France, plus a patchy account of the life of Virginie Amelie Avegno Gautreau, a.k.a. Madame X, subject of a famous Sargent portrait. The disparate elements add up to a book that -- no surprise -- lacks coherence and depth. The author would have been better off publishing Strapless as a magazine article.
NEWS
By Leonard Pitts Jr. | September 22, 2002
WASHINGTON -- Alexis Williams died last Sunday afternoon. He was sitting with some friends under an oak tree at a housing project in New Orleans when three men walked up and opened fire. As people scattered, one of the gunmen reportedly remained behind to shoot the dying man in the back. None of which, however awful it sounds, is the most shocking element of the man's death. No, that would be what happened next, as recounted by the New Orleans Times-Picayune: A crowd of more than 200 people assembled around the bullet-punctured corpse, and many of them celebrated.