Examiner

The Baltimore Development Corp. board this morning agreed to enter into an exclusive negotiating agreement with the owner of the former Examiner building, 400 E. Pratt St., so that an addition to the building can be built on city-owned land. The Peter D. Leibowits Co. wants to build a 22,600 square foot, glass-fronted retail space on land along East Pratt and Commerce streets, according to BDC records. The plan, which the developer hopes will be leased to a national retail chain or restaurant, is expected to make the Pratt Street sidewalk more pedestrian friendly, BDC Economic Development Officer Kerry DeVilbiss told the board.

A homeowner cleaning out debris from a detached garage in Essex on Saturday stumbled upon skeletal remains. Baltimore County police detectives responded to the house in the 200 block of Back River Neck Road about 4:30 p.m. and examined the bones. They sent them to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for identification and an autopsy, which could determine the cause of death. Police said there appeared to be no sign of foul play. jgeorge@baltsun.com Twitter.com/justingeorge

Doctors in the state medical examiner's officer determined Friday that the death of Antoine Greene, 17, a Dunbar High basketball player, was caused by diabetic ketoacidosis, a disturbance of the metabolism of glucose in his body.Greene, a senior, collapsed in his home Nov. 14 after being "lethargic" all day and asking for an ambulance, according to police and fire officials who received a 911 call at approximately 4:22 p.m.Paramedics at the scene determined Greene had gone into cardiac arrest.

Two U.S. Navy sailors who died diving in the Super Pond at Aberdeen Proving Ground in February accidentally drowned, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said Monday. Further details about how the men died will not be released for two to three months while the medical examiner's office prepares its final report, said the office's spokesman, Bruce Goldfarb. The sailors were Diver 1st Class James Reyher, 28, of Caldwell, Ohio, and Diver 2nd Class Ryan Harris, 23, of Gladstone, Mo. They were based at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story in Virginia Beach, Va. Another person died at the Super Pond in January, less than a month before the deaths of the two divers, prompting the U.S. Army in early March to close the facility indefinitely.

Force, asphyxiation killed woman, examiner says A 70-year-old Dundalk woman found June 23 lying dead in the courtyard of her apartment building died of blunt force injury and asphyxiation, the state medical examiner's office's ruled yesterday. Bill Toohey, a Baltimore County police spokesman, said her death is being investigated as a homicide. Toohey would not say if police have suspects or if they believe the attack was random or targeted. Edwina Delores Arnett, a resident of the Willow Spring Apartments in the 2100 block of Dundalk Ave., was discovered by police officers responding to a possible cardiac arrest call.

A state medical examiner ruled yesterday that 20-year-old Michael E. DePinto, whose mother found his body at their Westminster home eight days ago, died of narcotics intoxication complicated by bronchial pneumonia.Until results from additional toxicology tests are completed, the medical examiner will not be able to tell authorities what drug or combination of drugs might have been involved, said Capt. Dean Brewer, a spokesman for Westminster Police Department.The investigation is continuing, he said.

Mary A. Stepney, a retired Social Security Administration worker who enjoyed entertaining family and friends, died of lung cancer Sunday at Maryland General Hospital. She was 58. She was born Mary A. Williams in Tacoma, Wash., and was raised in West Baltimore. She was a 1965 graduate of Douglass High School and attended the Community College of Baltimore. She began working at SSA in 1973 as a benefits examiner technician and worked at Woodlawn until 2003, when she retired on a medical disability.

This town isn't big enough for two Michael Phelpses. Baltimore still has its Olympic superstar, but it is losing the newspaper with the like-named CEO. And it is a loss. Of local color. (We'll miss The Baltimore Examiner's "Bludgeoned!" "INSANE?" and other punchy New York Post-style headlines.) Of social status. (I never felt richer than when The Examiner, supposedly delivered only to the most affluent homes in Baltimore, made its first, surprise appearance on my humble Southwest Baltimore driveway.

Less than three years after its debut, the Baltimore Examiner free newspaper will cease publication next month, a victim of the worst advertising climate in decades. The last issue will be on Feb. 15. The decision comes after months of unsuccessful attempts to find a buyer for the paper and failed efforts to package ads with a sister publication in Washington, Denver-based owner Clarity Media Group said yesterday. "This is very disappointing for all of us. Obviously, this is not what we envisioned when we launched the newspaper," Clarity Chief Executive Officer Ryan McKibben said in a letter sent to Examiner staff yesterday morning.

Saying he cannot get The Examiner to stop throwing unwanted papers in his driveway each morning, a Baltimore lawyer has asked the Baltimore County Circuit Court for a temporary restraining order to force an end to the deliveries. "They're trespassing, technically," said Joel L. Levin, referring to the carriers who deliver the papers in his Pikesville neighborhood. Almost a month ago, he said, he began calling the paper's circulation department to have them stopped, but they keep coming.

The government in Britain recently did something interesting. It asked everyone receiving an "incapacity benefit" -- a disability program slowly being phased out under new reforms -- to submit to a medical test to confirm they were too disabled to work. A third of recipients (878,000 people) didn't even bother and dropped out of the program rather than be examined. Of those tested, more than half (55 percent) were found fit for work, and a quarter were found fit for some work. But that's Britain, where there's a long tradition of gaming the dole.

Anne Arundel County police are investigating the discovery of human remains found in a wooded area near Spring Road and Whiskey Bottom Road in Laurel. Police said they were called to the scene Feb. 24 at noon to meet with a citizen who reported finding the suspected human remains. The man told police that he and his girlfriend had been bird watching and hiking when they came upon what appeared to be a human skull. The remains were recovered and transported to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore, and on Tuesday police said the skull had been confirmed as human.

As a child in the mid-1950s, I asked my mother why we didn't live in a modern house built of new, salmon-toned brick like my schoolmates. We lived in a traditional city neighborhood, in a three-story 1915 rowhouse. We had only a small backyard that lacked a barbecue area or swing set. A new exhibition staged by the Jewish Museum of Maryland and presented at downtown's Enoch Pratt Free Library examines this same point, and many others. "Jews on the Move: Baltimore and the Suburban Exodus, 1945-1968" demonstrates how thousands of families called up Davidson movers and took off for ranchers and split levels in greater Northwest Baltimore.

A homeless woman died in a fire outside a Westminster thrift store early Tuesday morning, according to the office of Maryland state fire marshal. The woman, who has not been identified, was found by firefighters behind The Spare Room at 28 West Main St. in Westminster, officials said. The thrift store is operated by the Westminster Rescue Mission. The Westminster Fire Department was called to the one-alarm fire at 1:49 a.m. when they located the remains of a body and clothing effects burning.

We know that universities often use forgiving admissions criteria to admit top athletes who wouldn't otherwise get in. But what happens to these football and basketball players once they arrive in their college classrooms? Do their grades ever catch up to those of other students? Do they get degrees? Six months ago, I started filing open-records law requests to try to find out. I filed with Maryland, Georgia Tech, North Carolina, N.C. State, Florida State and the other public schools in the conference - as well as some in the Big Ten. The findings - that special admits tend to maintain worse college GPAs, graduate at a lower rate and leave school at a higher rate than other athletes - raise more questions.

Baltimore homicide detectives are investigating the death of an infant who was found in his Northeast Baltimore home Wednesday afternoon. The father of the four-month-old boy told investigators that he had put the child in his crib with a bottle and returned more than an hour later to find him face down and unresponsive. The child was rushed to Johns Hopkins Hospital where he was pronounced dead at 3:02 p.m. The family's home is located on the 2100 block of Belair Road on the edge of the Four by Four neighborhood.

Local residents living in affluent neighborhoods will begin receiving a free tabloid newspaper next spring, published by a Denver corporation owned by billionaire Philip F. Anschutz. The Baltimore Examiner will be the third in a chain of free papers - the others are The Washington Examiner and The San Francisco Examiner - owned by Anschutz's Clarity Media Group, which intends to start similar periodicals in dozens of other American cities. In Baltimore, Clarity Media Group plans to deliver most of its 250,000 papers to specific ZIP codes, but also has purchased 2,000 newspaper racks to be placed around town.

Tamila Aliyeva has won a Howard County hearing examiner's approval for a home beauty parlor that was vigorously opposed by dozens of residents in her Centennial neighborhood in Ellicott City. "I'm so happy. I'm very happy," she said. "I think it is the right decision." She said she would now move to open, despite the possibility of an appeal. Thomas P. Carbo, the examiner, issued a 10-page decision yesterday brushing aside opposition arguments that Aliyeva's small business in the 9800 block of Gwynn Park Drive would be incompatible and could cause traffic or environmental problems.

Forty-three years of letters, photographs, campaign buttons, itineraries and the occasional miniature flag are crammed into 2,000 fat binders lining three walls - floor to ceiling - of a storage room in the University of Maryland School of Law. They amount to a meticulous chronicle of Larry S. Gibson's professional life from 1965, when he was still a law student, to 2008, when he was active in a presidential election in Ghana. And that doesn't include 160 binders worth of material that's still in boxes, plus 200 more at Gibson's home and his law school office.

A task force charged with evaluating Towson athletic director Mike Waddell's recommendation to cut baseball and men's soccer has yet to forward its findings to the university president's office. Part of the delay has to do with their revised understanding of Towson's Title IX situation, which was one of the reasons Waddell gave for wanting to eliminating 60 roster spots for male athletes. He has insisted the school needs to try to achieve athlete proportionality -- meaning the percentage of women athletes is about equal to the percentage of women enrolled at the school -- and that cutting sports was therefore necessary.