Demonstrators

About 25 demonstrators took a protest of U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf to downtown's evening rush hour yesterday.The demonstrators, part of the newly formed Baltimore Area Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the Middle East, gathered on the corner of Baltimore and St. Paul streets at 5:30 p.m.Chanting "Bush, Bush, we won't go, we won't fight for Texaco," they held up signs for rush-hour traffic and handed out a brochure promoting another demonstration...

A powerful stench was in the air Saturday at the Inner Harbor as 12-year-olds Alison Chase and Marissa Westerbeke hunched over the water's edge, studying tiny crabs floating to the surface. The girls were in town from Connecticut for a relaxing annual vacation with Alison's family, but the pervasive smell of dead fish and rotting plant matter — caused by a massive algae bloom — had them totally grossed out. "It's, like, sad and disgusting," said Marissa. "It's gross.

Area peace groups opposed to NATO's bombing in Yugoslavia took their case to thousands of Baltimore commuters yesterday with a rush-hour banner across the Jones Falls Expressway. The 30-foot-wide sign, raised on the 28th Street bridge facing northbound traffic, said in letters 3 feet high, "Build Bridges, Don't Bomb Them." "We're asking for a negotiated stop to the bombing. It's not helping, and it's killed a lot of people," said Mike Bardoff, a spokesman for the Baltimore Emergency Response Network, part of the newly formed Baltimore Coalition Against War in the Balkans.

When the state's leading Democrats gather for a fund-raising gala Monday evening in Greenbelt, they can expect to see members of the party's most liberal wing demonstrating outside. The group Progressive Maryland will rally to urge Democratic lawmakers to vote for the income tax increase and other measures necessary to avoid the so-called Doomsday cuts that were left in the state budget for next year as a result of the General Assembly's failure to  pass those companion measures on the last night of the regular session that ended April 9. That much the group can pretty well count on. Gov. Martin O'Malley on Friday issued a call for lawmakers to reconvene in Annapolis May 14, and he and legislative leaders appear to be on the same page regarding their determination to pass the measures needed to avoid cuts of more than $500 million to programs liberals generally support.

Ruth Stringfellow's car was only about 50 feet from the exit of the Social Security Administration and Health Care Financing Administration building when the group of disabled demonstrators blocked her in."I almost made it," she said sadly, looking out toward Woodlawn Road.Yesterday, for the second day in a row, demonstrators protested federal rules that they say relegate many of them to nursing homes when they should be able to live on their own.The government, they said, should shift money in the Medicaid health program, which serves the poor and disabled, away from nursing homes and toward payments to attendants who can care for the disabled in their own homes.

A small band of protesters, some on foot and others in wheelchairs, besieged a red brick building in the heart of residential Lansdowne yesterday. Singing, chanting and rapping on windows, the demonstrators complained that officials at the Hearth Inc. program for homeless women have virtually imprisoned a disabled tenant in her apartment.More than three hours later, the protesters had failed to get tenant Gail Riddic moved to an apartment with a ramp for her wheelchair.Still, they took satisfaction in presuming that the shelter's director had avoided them only by retreating to his basement office -- stuck there, they believed, just as Riddic has been stuck in her second-floor apartment.

CAIRO, Egypt - Dozens of protesters were kicked, beaten with clubs and thrown into trucks yesterday by hundreds of police and plainclothes agents who rushed the streets to stifle a protest against President Hosni Mubarak. The beatings occurred in Cairo days after Mubarak announced his candidacy in Egypt's first presidential election. The regime has portrayed September's voting as a ground-breaking step toward democracy. It would be the first time that Egyptians have had a chance to chose a president from among multiple candidates.

THE debacle in Seattle last week was a defeat for President Clinton. It was also a delay, probably of one year, in forging a world consensus agenda for further lowering trade barriers. Any exultation or damnation that the street demonstrators prevailed, however, is dead wrong.What happened inside the World Trade Organization's conference hall is that the United States deadlocked with most other nations. President Clinton adopted some of the positions of organized labor and the environmental movement as the U.S. initiative.

KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine -- Nearly 1,000 AIDS activists briefly took over the main roads of this tiny town yesterday to highlight their demand that President Bush take bolder action to combat the deadly epidemic.Although sponsored by ACT-UP, a group known for its extreme tactics, yesterday's demonstration was calm, peaceful and extremely well-organized.When parading protesters were stopped by heavily gloved Maine State Police about a quarter-mile from Mr. Bush's vacation home, they chanted for the benefit of onlookers and camera crews for about 30 minutes and then retreated quietly.

Demonstrators marching through downtown Baltimore on Saturday to mark the approaching Martin Luther King Jr. holiday had a brief face-off with the police, but the two sides parted ways peacefully without arrests. About 50 marchers who were beginning a three-day trek to Washington, D.C., to decry economic and social inequality stopped at about 1 p.m. at the corner of Howard and Lexington streets — the former location of Read's Drug Store, a landmark in civil rights history. The store was the scene of a sit-in protesting racial segregation by students from what was then Morgan State College in January 1955, months before the Montgomery bus boycott and five years before the more celebrated lunch counter sit-in in Greensboro, N.C. The police, who had been trying to get the marchers to stay on the sidewalk when they walked down Eutaw Street toward Lexington, kept watch on foot and in several cruisers as the crowd stopped at what is now a boarded-up store and began chanting "No justice, no peace, no racist police.

Something is very wrong here when an employee of the Baltimore public schools system can have a base salary of $76,000 for driving a car - not to mention earn an additional $78,000 in overtime ("Overtime costing schools millions," March 2). A city teacher with a master's degree and 25 years experience doesn't make $76,000 a year. This is a total insult to the taxpayers and once again shows the waste in the Baltimore schools. According to Tisha Edwards, these are the "costs of doing business.

At first, it seemed as if Rick Santorum was questioning President Barack Obama's religious faith. Now, it appears that what he meant was to question the faith of all Americans who believe clean water, air and land is in the public interest. For someone running for secular office, the former Pennsylvania senator has expressed a lot of thoughts about Catholicism, Christianity and religion in general, but even his supporters must have been surprised when he denounced President Obama as embracing a "phony theology" during a recent campaign appearance in Ohio.

To our knowledge, The Sun's newsroom staff has received no special training in tax assessment and record keeping, yet reporters armed with no more than foot leather and personal computers seem to have a gift for uncovering gross errors - more charitably known as "discrepancies" - in Baltimore's property tax records. First, it was the abuse of the Homestead Tax Credit, both legal and not, that has likely cost the city substantial sums in tax breaks given to properties that weren't eligible for the cap on assessment increases.

A prosecution witness in a prisoner's death penalty trial demonstrated Tuesday how a cell door from the now-closed Maryland House of Correction could be tampered with, and a fellow inmate called by the state said he watched a fatal attack on a correctional officer by a pair of prisoners who left their cells. The jury stood and watched an expert in jail cell locks manipulate the locking system on a door brought into the Anne Arundel County courtroom to show how he believes the locks on the cell doors of two state prisoners were jimmied, and testifying that nearly half of the cell door locks he checked barely functioned.

Demonstrators marching through downtown Baltimore on Saturday to mark the approaching Martin Luther King Jr. holiday had a brief face-off with the police, but the two sides parted ways peacefully without arrests. About 50 marchers who were beginning a three-day trek to Washington, D.C., to decry economic and social inequality stopped at about 1 p.m. at the corner of Howard and Lexington streets — the former location of Read's Drug Store, a landmark in civil rights history. The store was the scene of a sit-in protesting racial segregation by students from what was then Morgan State College in January 1955, months before the Montgomery bus boycott and five years before the more celebrated lunch counter sit-in in Greensboro, N.C. The police, who had been trying to get the marchers to stay on the sidewalk when they walked down Eutaw Street toward Lexington, kept watch on foot and in several cruisers as the crowd stopped at what is now a boarded-up store and began chanting "No justice, no peace, no racist police.

As political theater, the Republican Party's Iowa caucuses came through: A photo finish with a mere 8 votes separating winner Mitt Romney from the runner-up, former Sen. Rick Santorum. Throw in a third-place for Rep. Ron Paul as well as a decent showing by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. The rest of the field were poor also-rans with their viability at an end, Michele Bachmann being simply the first to recognize that reality. But as for the predictive value of the nation's first presidential voting?

PROSPERITY in the past decade improved the lives of more Americans than not, and of much of the world. Expansion of world trade brought it about.That is why a successful Millennium Round of trade talks beginning this week in Seattle is in the U.S. interest.But expansion was not without cost. Along with unprecedented job creation came painful job losses. Some Third World industrialization degraded the environment.The massive demonstrations at the World Trade Organization conference that caught Seattle authorities by surprise this week reflected the renewed vitality of organized labor.

Four anti-Castro demonstrators were arrested at Camden Yards last night as protesters began taking to the playing field in the fourth inning.One of the demonstrators -- who rushed the field in the fifth inning with a Cuban flag -- was tackled and thrown to the ground by second base umpire Cesar Valdez, who traveled to Baltimore from Havana with the Cuban team."

In an effort to drum up interest in his presidential bid for the 1968 elections, Michigan's governor, George Romney - Mitt Romney's father - went into the belly of the beast. During the summer of 1967, the elder Romney gave a stump speech in San Francisco's Golden Gate panhandle, a couple of blocks from Haight and Ashbury, the epicenter of hippiedom. I was there the day that several buses pulled up at the panhandle and disgorged George Romney, his entourage and reporters. No vote-getting reason could possibly justify Romney's being there, in front of this group of people, most of whom had probably never voted.

I was recently shown a picture from one of the Occupy protests taking place across the country. It featured a young woman surrounded by police. She was the only protester in the picture, but she didn't seem intimidated. All by herself, up against the police barricade, she held a handwritten sign saying simply, "I am a born again American. " I've never met this woman, but I think I know exactly what she's feeling. I had my first "born again American" moment 30 years ago, when I was moved to outrage and action by a group of hate-preaching televangelists who were trying to claim sole ownership of patriotism, faith and flag for the far right.