Domino

High school students from Anne Arundel County and across the state came to Annapolis yesterday to defend the graduation requirement that forces them to complete 75 hours of "service learning" to receive their diplomas.Armed with anecdotes about such activities as organizing school cleanups or writing and printing children's books for a day care center, the students urged members of a House of Delegates committee to keep the community-service requirement intact."When I was a freshman, if I had not been forced into service learning, I would not have been involved in it," said Heather Keating, 17, a senior at South River High School.

A man wielding a knife robbed Domino's Pizza in Eldersburg Monday night, state police said yesterday.Police said a man entered Domino's in the 1300 block of Liberty Road about 10: 10 p.m. Flashing a knife, he demanded money, ordered employees to lie on the floor and fled with an undisclosed amount of cash.No one was injured, police said.The suspect is believed to be the same man who has robbed a half-dozen stores since Dec. 22 in Carroll and Howard counties, police said.The suspect was described as white, 25 to 30 years old, about 6 feet tall and weighing about 145 pounds.

I'LL MISS the sound of what seemed like a hundred hammers banging away at the Stieff Silver plant perched on the edge of the Jones Falls Valley. The old plant closes in a few months, as yet one more Baltimore manufacturing tradition evaporates.I grew up eating birthday fare on Stieff ice cream forks, those strange devices that had curved edges and pricked your tongue. We were Stieff disciples, and even owned an upright piano made by another branch of this celebrated Baltimore family.It's local blasphemy, but I liked the sign atop the Stieff building more than I liked its rival, the Domino Sugars one on the harbor, even though the Domino sign had it all over Stieff for kilowatt dazzle.

Moving to chain down a Baltimore landmark, state and city officials want to give Domino Sugar Corp. more than $3 million in financing in return for the company's assurance that it won't close its distinctive harbor-front refinery, a state official said yesterday.Maryland's economic development department intends to ask legislators for $3 million in loans and grants to help pay for a $12.5 million refurbishment and modernization at the factory, established in 1922 and now employing about 530.Baltimore City would furnish a $750,000 loan under the deal, and the state would throw in a $75,000 grant for training.

Two witnesses, including a friend of the suspect, testified yesterday that William "Danny" Stewart fatally shot a Bowie teen-ager outside a Crofton pool hall in March 1995.The victim's friend, Robert B. Saunders, now 22 and a Hanover resident, and Rueben L. Williams, a friend of the defendant, both pointed to Stewart as the gunman during testimony in Circuit Court in Annapolis.Stewart, 25, of the 6900 block of Hawthorne St. in Landover, Prince George's County, is being tried on a charge of first-degree murder and 11 other counts stemming from the incident.

When Prabhjot S. Kohli came to the United States from India 12 years ago, he believed that acceptance of his race and religion "would be no problem because it's the most democratic, multicultural society."Ten years and $20,000 in legal bills later, he has discovered it can be costly to win acceptance on his terms.Kohli, 59, has spent a decade fighting Domino's Pizza over its corporate policy banning beards on employees, and the fight is not over. An appeals court has told a Baltimore County judge to decide whether a Human Relations Commission appeals board was correct in finding that Domino's illegally discriminated.

After comparing notes with Howard County officers, state police investigators in Westminster aren't certain if one or more men are involved in a series of convenience store and pizza shop robberies in both counties during the past two months.Witnesses in five incidents in Carroll County and several more in Howard have been unable to provide a definitive description of the suspect."Some similarities suggest it's the same guy, but we haven't gotten any videotapes to be able to determine if we're dealing with one or more individuals," said Tfc. William Corun, a detective at the Westminster barracks.

A worker for Domino's Pizza was robbed at gunpoint early yesterday behind the store at 8775 Cloud Leap Court in Columbia, Howard County police said.An undisclosed amount of money was taken, police said. The worker was not injured in the robbery, which occurred at 12: 02 a.m.Pub Date: 10/13/97

Prabhjot S. Kohli fled his native India where Sikhs like himself were being hounded and worse, and came to the United States. He tried for a job as a management trainee at a pizza parlor while he waited for his engineering credentials to come through.But Domino's Pizza Inc. told him he'd have to shave -- something his religion forbids -- because it has a no-beard policy. The man who had fled religious persecution complained to the Maryland Human Relations Commission and waited for U.S. justice.

After comparing notes with Howard County officers, state police investigators in Westminster aren't certain if one or more men are involved in a series of convenience store and pizza shop robberies in both counties during the past two months.Witnesses in five incidents in Carroll County and several more in Howard have been unable to provide a definitive description of the suspect."Some similarities suggest it's the same guy, but we haven't gotten any videotapes to be able to determine if we're dealing with one or more individuals," said Tfc. William Corun, a detective at the Westminster barracks.

I am a poor, wayfaring stranger traveling through this world of woe, but it's OK, I am well paid for the woe and I enjoy watching my fellow wayfarers, the road guys, the men who fly from town to town, talking on their cell phones, hustling software and industrial carpeting, advising companies on branding issues, guys with pagers, laptops, BlackBerries and voices like drill bits. Road guys tend to be a little grim, which you would be too if you were trying to peddle your widgets these days.

Sprint this week started making available in stores the first 3G/4G dual-mode device, which operates on both the Sprint 3G and 4G networks. Sprint launched its 4G service in Baltimore in September and plans to launch in other markets across the country next year. With 4G, downloads of a song might take several seconds or a movie less than an hour while outside or moving through the city - three to five times faster than 3G networks. The device is priced at $149.99 with a two-year contract, after a $50 mail-in rebate.

The Maryland Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined Domino Sugar $4,000 for allowing sugar dust to accumulate in its refinery, which is believed to have caused an explosion last year at the Key Highway plant in South Baltimore, according to a state report. The Nov. 2 explosion echoed across the harbor, and authorities said they suspected sugar dust might have ignited. Three employees suffered minor injuries, several pieces of equipment were destroyed and dozens of windows were shattered in the blast.

Francis Joseph Chmilewski, a retired Domino Sugars Co. mechanic and veteran of two branches of the military, died of lung cancer July 13 at Mercy Medical Center. The Edgemere resident was 76. Mr. Chmilewski was born and raised in Baltimore and attended city public schools. He later earned his General Educational Development diploma while serving in the Army. "He lied about his age when he enlisted in the Navy, where he served for four years," said the former May Birkelien, his wife of 11 years.

Those champagne corks heard on the Inner Harbor yesterday may well have been popping at Domino Sugar, where the high prices and corporate welfare are sweeter than anything that gets loaded on the trucks. Congress' veto-proof passage of the 2008 farm bill ensures that Domino's proprietor, the Fanjul family, and fat-cat farmers across the nation will keep wallowing in trade protections that disappeared decades ago for other industries. But while the bill is good for Domino, its 400 Baltimore jobs and a few agri-corporations, it hurts everybody else.

For years now, I have tried to keep life simple and not get dragged under by modern technology and the slow geek death of being chained to a PC or laptop or BlackBerry. Ordering a delivery pizza used to be simple. You picked up the phone, placed your order and, a half-hour later, a jumpy kid with stringy hair was ringing your doorbell and handing you a large sausage pizza with extra cheese. It was a beautiful system. You think they do this in North Korea? They don't, believe me. But now, Domino's Pizza comes out with a new gimmick called Pizza Tracker, which allows customers to go online and follow the progress of their pizza from the time they order it until the jumpy kid delivers it to their door.

The familiar yellow and white bags of Domino sugar are once again rolling off the conveyor belts at the Key Highway plant, one week after an explosion blew out windows and rendered the powdered sugar mill a total loss. There is more work to be done, with windows still being boarded up yesterday. But managers picked up mops and workers volunteered overtime to get production lines operating again in advance of the busy holiday baking season. "It was a spectacular effort," refinery manager Stuart FitzGibbon said at a news conference yesterday at the Museum of Industry on Key Highway.

The Domino Sugar plant in South Baltimore that shut down after an explosion and fire last week could restart operations by Friday, a company official said yesterday. Brian O'Malley, president of sales and marketing for Domino Foods Inc.in Iselin, N.J., said work crews are doing an extensive overhaul and cleaning of the nine-story building on Key Highway. "We certainly feel very fortunate that nobody was seriously injured or killed," O'Malley said. "It's too early to tell on the damage estimate, but we're going to be back 100 percent in a very short period of time."

Shattered windows of the Domino Sugar plant looked out over South Baltimore last night after an explosion, so powerful that it shook buildings across the Inner Harbor, forced the refinery's evacuation and closure - possibly for days. Fire officials said the blast did not appear to have done any significant damage to structures at the plant, an integral part of the city skyline for 85 years. The explosion and fires, on the sixth and ninth floors of a building where sugar is refined and packaged, were confined to a dust collection system, officials said.

Its dimensions and power inspire urban awe: the second-largest field of neon on the East Coast, a 120-by-70-foot spectacular electrical blaze that has cast its blood-orange radiance across the upriver waters of the Patapsco since April 25, 1951. "The sign has 650 neon tubes searing a 760-amps-per-hour image into the psyche of Charm City," as a Sun article described it a decade ago. Baltimore's iconic Domino Sugars sign (the final S is never pronounced, nor is it part of the company's official name)