Ducks

Darron Thomas threw for 308 yards and three touchdowns and Heisman Trophy candidate LaMichael James ran for 123 yards and two touchdowns as top-ranked Oregon looked the part in a 60-13 thumping of UCLA. The Ducks (7-0, 4-0 Pac-10) amassed 582 total yards — 15 more than their season average — five different players scored and individual highlights were the norm. Remene Alston Jr. ran for 75 yards and three touchdowns and Jeff Maehl caught eight passes for 107 yards and a score in the victory.

Regardless of whether the Supreme Court is ready to declare a constitutional right to gay marriage, it has the responsibility to fully recognize the decisions Maryland and eight other states, plus the District of Columbia, have made to allow same-sex couples to wed. There is little other conclusion that could be drawn from the arguments today on the constitutionality of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which banned all federal recognition of same-sex...

City Council President Bernard C. "Jack" Young will recuse himself from the bottle tax vote because his cousin works for a beverage distributor? ("Councilman leans against bottle tax," June 17.) He's got to be kidding. Does he owe a duty to his cousin's employer or to the citizens that elected him to office? I say the latter, and he should do his duty. Or is this just a screen so he doesn't have to vote? Jim Astrachan, Baltimore

It's sometimes said that a lame-duck president is a weakened leader from the first day of his last term. The two-term limit of the 22nd Amendment, imposed by wrathful Republicans in 1951 in response to FDR's breach of the George Washington tradition, is supposedly a political kiss of death against achieving future goals. But President Barack Obama, in his second inaugural address and then in his State of the Union Address starting his second term, issued a blunt pushback against the lame-duck sentence.

THE GUILFORD Reservoir is dug into a man-made hill that stands high above the large houses and the tall trees of Guilford. The sloping, grassy sides of this earthen mass are met at the bottom by Old Cold Spring Lane on the north, Millbrook Road on the west and, on the south and east, by Reservoir Lane. Several feet above water level, a concrete walk and a black iron fence frame the reservoir's rectangular surface. A gate breaks the fence near the northeast corner and opens onto a concrete ramp that extends out over the water.

Washington. -- Let me state my own position, right up front: I am a dwarf wedge mussel man, a kit fox man, a friend of the shagreen snail that dwells on Magazine Mountain in the Ozarks. Count me in a corner with the bladderpod of Colorado and the beach mouse of Florida.I am a wetlands man, a wilderness man, a bird-watching, impractical, idealistic petal-picking amateur in the ranks of conservationists. The Endangered Species Act of 1973, which was last reauthorized in 1988, comes up for renewal this year, and I will be whooping it up for the Red Hills salamander of Butler County, Ala. Let the ugly critter alone!

The first time I was deployed to Iraq was in 2004, when we were still a peace-time Army trying to find our way through the fog of asymmetric warfare. We made a lot of mistakes and faced many challenges. But since then we have evolved into a much more effective fighting force. Not a day goes by without a news report praising the military's latest tactical or technological advancement. Since 2004 we re-learned that the best defense is a good offense. We got off of our enclosed bases and out of our stifling armored vehicles.

"Quack! Quack! The Ducks are back!!"This spirited spontaneous chant was heard moments after fifth-seeded Douglass held off third-seeded Poly, 75-71, in last // night's 3A East Region finals.The victory earned the Ducks a trip to this week's state semifinals at the University of Maryland's Cole Field House.In garnering one of the biggest wins in school history, the Ducks (12-9) weathered a furious last-minute comeback by the host Engineers (17-7).Poly fought its way back from a 12-point deficit at the 3:00 mark to get within two with 12 seconds left in the game.

The wild duck populations that will fly south from the prairie pothole regions on the north central United States and central Canada early this fall are at higher levels than at any time since the early 1980s and similar to counts in the early 1970s, according to figures compiled by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.And when Maryland opens its duck hunting season in October, it is possible that hunters will have a 40-day season, with a bag limit of three ducks per day.The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which originally planned to allow four ducks per day and a 30-day season, now has given Maryland the option of more ducks per day or more days to hunt.

June, 1990 -- Sitting in my backyard, I have found that, at any given moment, anything might happen. Surprise, if I want it, is there for the asking.Columbine, for example, is a surprise. Last year, nothing. This year, dozens of flowers, each one a marvel: five tapered burgundy petals and five creamy ovals with streaming burgundy tails, all surrounding a spray of yellow pistils. Who could have imagined such a flower?And rabbits, too, can catch me off guard. Baby bunnies leaping haphazardly, surprising not only me, but themselves.

Bobby Spivey can walk through the halls of Sparrows Point High School without drawing much attention from anyone aside from his group of close friends. But put the 16-year-old in the small Southern hamlet of Stuttgart, Ark. - the self-proclaimed "Rice and Duck Capital of the World" - and Spivey is something of a celebrity. Given his age and achievements to date, Spivey might become to duck calling what a teenage prodigy named Tiger Woods became to golf. Spivey had been to Stuttgart for the International Duck Calling Championship before last year's event in late November, finishing near the bottom the first time he tried in 2009 and coming in third in 2010.

Havre de Grace Mayor Wayne Dougherty led the way. He raised the most money. And he was the best dressed. So at the appointed hour - 10 a.m. Saturday - the mayor and dozens of others, including Scotty Hurst, Chief of the Susquehanna Hose Co., ran, walked, waddled and squealed into the Chesapeake Bay for the second annual Havre de Grace Duck Dunk. It's a fundraiser for the Havre de Grace volunteer fire company similar to the Polar Bear Plunge, Maryland's huge winter fundraiser to benefit the Special Olympics.

President Barack Obama just continues to avoid questions on requests that were made for help in the Libya attacks on our consulate and the killing of our ambassador and three other brave Americans. President Obama did not give a yes or no answer last Friday when asked pointedly whether the Americans under attack in Benghazi were denied requests for help during the attack However, it has been reveled that Mr. Obama was watching the assault on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi unfold from the White House.

Twenty-five thousand ducklings can't be wrong. That's how many baby ducks — give or take a flock — that Cliff Brown and his all-volunteer Maryland Wood Duck Initiative helped peck their way into the world. The network builds and manages 1,900 wood duck nesting boxes on 75 sites statewide. Outdoors magazine Field & Stream calls Brown the "Nest Protector" and named him a finalist for its 2012 Hero of Conservation award. It has also given his group a $5,000 grant. The Rock Hall resident is featured in the October issue, and he and five other recipients will be honored Thursday at a reception at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington.

The purchase of Voice over Internet Protocol telephones and related equipment by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake's administration may not have been illegal. That's the kindest conclusion one can draw from a report on the matter by the city's inspector general, David N. McClintock, which otherwise notes that the process was inefficient and rife with possible conflicts of interest and deception. But it is to that slender reed of vindication that Ms. Rawlings-Blake is clinging as she continues to avoid taking real responsibility for the mess and fails to provide a path forward to responsibly handle a needed upgrade of the city's communications technology.

Baltimore's City Council this week voted down a proposed charter amendment that would have required that each city agency be audited every two years. And no wonder; such a proposal may be unprecedented in Maryland. A review of the charters of Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Harford, Howard, Prince George's and Montgomery counties reveals that they have no such requirement. No, in those jurisdictions, the charters require that audits be conducted every year. During the debate on the amendment, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blakeformally requested that the city comptroller's office, of which the city auditor is a part, investigate some agencies, including the Department of Recreation and Parks, whose books have not been audited for decades.

There were two hours and more to sunrise. Ninety minutes and more until shooting time, but the talk was easy and the coffee fresh at the Sportsman Service Center in Chester.Sleep had come slowly to several among us the night before.Dutch Swonger, for more years than he can quickly recall a guide on the Shore, said, yes, he had tossed and turned -- anxious for the morning and the whisper of wind on ducks' wings.One gunner, eager to be settled in a blind, paced in the parking lot, newly purchased double-reed duck call making strident sounds.

LANDOVER -- The Washington Capitals must have thought they'd gone to Fantasyland last night.As a crowd of 17,616 -- 515 short of a sellout -- watched, Washington goaltender Rick Tabaracci returned to action for the first time since spraining his wrist Dec. 23 and shut out the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, 3-0, as the Capitals evened their record at 17-17-3.It was Washington's first shutout of the season and the first since Tabaracci blanked the New York Rangers on April 14.Last night, Tabaracci stopped all 26 of Anaheim's shots.

The moviemakers behind "Crooked Arrows" take square aim at making a "Mighty Ducks with lacrosse. " Is it fair to say a film hits the bull's-eye when the target is so easy? You wish this movie had focused on its fresh material about lacrosse's Native American roots and ditched its dark-horse cliches. Screenwriters Todd Baird and Brad Riddell bank that familiarity will breed affection rather than contempt. They adhere so strictly to the teen-sports genre that audiences can predict every turn as the struggling team from the Sunaquot reservation in upstate New York (a fictional seventh part of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, Nations)

Almost three years ago Devon Branch was working at a Holiday Inn in Harford County and playing pickup ball occasionally. The former Aberdeen shooting guard said that at that point in his life, he “never thought” he'd end up playing basketball for a high-major school. But after his post-graduation hiatus from the game, Branch resurfaced at Cloud County Community College in Concordia, Kan., and developed into one of the most wanted JUCO shooting guards in the country.