Dirt Road

Harford County government will hold a public meeting later this month to discuss a petition to put a tar and chip surface on a dirt road in the northwestern part of the county. The petition is to modify a portion of Amoss Road in White Hall from a dirt to a tar and chip surface. The Harford County Department of Public Works, Division of Highways and Water Resources, will conduct the public meeting on March 27 at 6 p.m. on the third floor of the county office building, at 212 South Bond St. in Bel Air. Those interested who cannot attend the meeting can send written comments to H. Hudson Myers, III, deputy director of DPW at 212 South Bond St., Bel Air, Md., 21014, or by e-mail at hhmyers@harfordcountymd.gov .

Maryland State Police are investigating as a homicide the death of a woman found in an embankment in Worcester County. Authorities have identified the woman as 35-year-old Nicole Bennett of Millsboro, Del. A passerby told police Friday morning that he found the woman's body in an embankment off a dirt road in Whaleyville. She had been reported missing by her husband after she didn't come home from work the night before. Authorities say an autopsy is being done and the cause of death had not yet been determined.

More than nine years after Irvington handyman John Ruhs was found dead on a dirt road in Finksburg, the murder trial of one of the men accused in the slaying, Cordell Albert Patton, began with a visit by jurors to the the isolated crime scene.Opening statements by prosecutor David Daggett and defense attorney Michael Kaminkow were postponed a day by Circuit Judge Luke K. Burns Jr., who ordered that the panel of nine women and six men visit the Finksburg site where Ruhs' body was discovered March 27, 1987.

Harford County government will hold a public meeting later this month to discuss a petition to put a tar and chip surface on a dirt road in the northwestern part of the county. The petition is to modify a portion of Amoss Road in White Hall from a dirt to a tar and chip surface. The Harford County Department of Public Works, Division of Highways and Water Resources, will conduct the public meeting on March 27 at 6 p.m. on the third floor of the county office building, at 212 South Bond St. in Bel Air. Those interested who cannot attend the meeting can send written comments to H. Hudson Myers, III, deputy director of DPW at 212 South Bond St., Bel Air, Md., 21014, or by e-mail at hhmyers@harfordcountymd.gov .

For her chance to walk down the red carpet at Sunday night's Academy Awards, best actress Oscar winner Charlize Theron had to first drive down a dirt road in rural Michigan, out past Flint to where the blacktop narrows and the broken-down towns shrink. Theron had to go see Dawn Botkins, the woman who knew serial killer Aileen Wuornos best. Botkins owns everything Wuornos left in this world: boxes of court documents. The jailhouse flip-flops she wore to her execution. The sneakers she signed because they might be worth something one day. Her ashes.

Maryland State Police are investigating as a homicide the death of a woman found in an embankment in Worcester County. Authorities have identified the woman as 35-year-old Nicole Bennett of Millsboro, Del. A passerby told police Friday morning that he found the woman's body in an embankment off a dirt road in Whaleyville. She had been reported missing by her husband after she didn't come home from work the night before. Authorities say an autopsy is being done and the cause of death had not yet been determined.

Woman reports rape, beating at parking lot in EdgewaterAnne Arundel County police said yesterday they are investigating the alleged rape and beating of a Prince George's County woman in Edgewater Sunday night.The woman told police that her boyfriend drove onto a dirt road off Central Avenue where he beat and raped her after an argument over whether she should respond to a call on her pager.She said she picked up her boyfriend at his home in Alexandria, Va., about 8:30 p.m. Sunday. As they began driving toward lounge in Washington, the woman received a call on her pager, and the two began arguing over whether she should answer it, police said.

The body of an adult male found in a remote area of the Frederick city watershed was taken to the state medical examiner's office yesterday, and police investigators have not ruled out the possibility that it could be that of a National Science Foundation psychologist missing since February from his Carroll County home. The remains were found about 6:30 p.m. Monday by a man walking his dog along a dirt road in the City of Frederick Municipal Forest north of the city, said Maj. Greg Shipley, state police spokesman.

A Harford County man and his eldest son are facing charges in connection with a kidnapping, in which the victim was forced into a truck, then beaten and left on a Bel Air dirt road Friday night, authorities said. In what investigators say is an unrelated incident, the man's second son is wanted by the Harford County Sheriff's Office in a shooting that occurred at a Belcamp Waffle House restaurant early Saturday. "We don't think there is a correlation at all between the two of them," said Sgt. David Betz, spokesman for the Harford County Sheriff's Office, of the two incidents.

County police arrested and charged two men and two women in prostitution-related incidents in Brooklyn Park this week.In the first case, an officer arrested a Baltimore man and a Pasadena woman Sunday night in the 4700 block of Belle Grove Road in Brooklyn Park, officials said.The officer was on routine patrol shortly after 8 p.m. when he noticed a Dodge van parked on a lot. As he walked to the van he noticed a man and a woman, both partially clothed, get out through the side doors, police said.

A Harford County man and his eldest son are facing charges in connection with a kidnapping, in which the victim was forced into a truck, then beaten and left on a Bel Air dirt road Friday night, authorities said. In what investigators say is an unrelated incident, the man's second son is wanted by the Harford County Sheriff's Office in a shooting that occurred at a Belcamp Waffle House restaurant early Saturday. "We don't think there is a correlation at all between the two of them," said Sgt. David Betz, spokesman for the Harford County Sheriff's Office, of the two incidents.

Askole, Pakistan -- We finished repacking all of our gear into porter-sized loads at 1:30 a.m. today. Figuring it was silly to try to sleep for two hours, we grabbed a last shower and left Skardu at 2:40 a.m. The trip was magical: with a sky full of stars, a sliver of moon, the shapes of giant peaks towering above us and the roar of the Indus River below. As dawn caught up with us, we were weaving along a dirt road, winding our way up small hills into lushy vegetated, expertly irrigated farming villages.

I ONCE SPENT several months in Pondicherry, on the southeastern coast of India. Pondy, as it's called, was an overgrown small town, a place that had retained its traditional village rhythms even though its population had swelled to hundreds of thousands. I lived in an area teeming with the poorest of the poor, whose dwellings were small, flimsy shacks. The residential streets were unpaved. Since no one had a radio or record player, the government installed, on telephone poles, cheap tinny-sounding speakers that played - all day long - the hypnotic caterwaul of All-India Radio.

Liberty Road, which stretches nearly 50 miles from Frederick, past the Colonial-era homes of Libertytown to the rowhouses of West Baltimore (where it becomes Liberty Heights Avenue), has seen the passage of a distinctly American journey over the years. Eighteenth-century farmers brought their bounty to city markets aboard wagons when it was still a dirt road. Before the Civil War, Libertytown was the largest slave-owning area of Frederick County. During the war, troops marched toward battle in Gettysburg along it. In the early 1920s, "trackless trolleys" along the road began moving city dwellers out to new suburbs in Randallstown.

For her chance to walk down the red carpet at Sunday night's Academy Awards, best actress Oscar winner Charlize Theron had to first drive down a dirt road in rural Michigan, out past Flint to where the blacktop narrows and the broken-down towns shrink. Theron had to go see Dawn Botkins, the woman who knew serial killer Aileen Wuornos best. Botkins owns everything Wuornos left in this world: boxes of court documents. The jailhouse flip-flops she wore to her execution. The sneakers she signed because they might be worth something one day. Her ashes.

The body of an adult male found in a remote area of the Frederick city watershed was taken to the state medical examiner's office yesterday, and police investigators have not ruled out the possibility that it could be that of a National Science Foundation psychologist missing since February from his Carroll County home. The remains were found about 6:30 p.m. Monday by a man walking his dog along a dirt road in the City of Frederick Municipal Forest north of the city, said Maj. Greg Shipley, state police spokesman.

Mabel Barnett, 58, and her neighbors on Sands Road in Lothian have posted no trespassing signs, roped off a field and even bulldozed a trench along a dirt road to stop the nightly visits of drug dealers. But to no avail.Police finally stepped in, but not exactly the way Mrs. Barnett expected they would. They arrested 17 people after a month-long investigation, but they also contended Mrs. Barnett, a cafeteria worker at Frederick Douglass High School in Upper Marlboro, was allowing drug dealing to take place on her 2-acre property.

* Pasadena: An 11-year-old Pasadena boy told county police that someone stole his bicycle while it sat unattended near a tree outside his doctor's office Friday.The youth said he parked his 18-speed Huffy mountain bike near a tree, without a lock, outside the doctor's office in the 8600 block of Fort Smallwood Road at 3:20 p.m.A witness told police that she saw two men take the bike.* Pasadena: Two men were charged with possession of drug paraphernalia after police caught them with pipes used to smoke narcotics.

Sometimes, it seemed like the long, slow trek to the county seat of Annapolis would never end, what with traffic moving at the proverbial snail's pace -- but what could you expect in the 1830s? Unlike now, when travelers seek wider highways and faster vehicles but are still sometimes stuck in stalled traffic, Howard residents from the early 19th century had a different solution. They split Howard free from Anne Arundel County, built their own courthouse in Ellicott City and moved their destination closer to home.

The suburbanization of Reisterstown Road outside the Beltway is nearly complete.With the opening in April of Avalon, a very large planned community that straddles Reisterstown Road between Interstate 695 and McDonogh, the final vestiges of the area's rural past have disappeared.Single-family homes, townhouses and condominiums sprout from land that once yielded corn and tobacco. Sedans and sport utility vehicles have replaced the tractors that once worked the fields. The Grey Rock Mansion, once surrounded by open space, is a focal point for a growing community.