French

Long before he was a top executive with two world championship rings and a gleaming resume, Andy MacPhail was a Baltimore kid with baseball in his dreams and eye black streaked above his cheeks. He was a 5-year-old who wouldn't take off his Orioles pajamas, an 8-year-old who constantly dragged around his Jackie Brandt two-tone bat and a pre-teen always searching for a game, even if it was against the bigger, older boys. MacPhail, named last week as the Orioles' new president of baseball operations, may have been baseball royalty - his father and grandfather are Hall of Famers - but you wouldn't have known it by looking at the 1960s version.

MARIGNANE, France -- Accusing him of behaving like an aging tyrant and siphoning off party finances to pay for a lavish lifestyle, followers of Europe's most notorious right-wing figure, Jean-Marie Le Pen, plunged his party into crisis yesterday by splitting it into rival factions.Meeting in a municipal basketball and handball arena in this industrial suburb of Marseilles, 2,300 rebel members of the 70-year-old ex-paratrooper's extremist National Front elected Bruno Megret, 49, a former high-ranking civil servant and Le Pen's estranged lieutenant, as their president.

From Thailand to New Zealand, from Los Angeles to Punxsutawney, Pa., French emissaries bearing medals have fanned out across the globe for almost a year. Their mission: to muster the old soldiers of World War I's Western Front one last time, calling them to attention for a final, halting march to fame.Yesterday the mission stopped at a retirement community in Catonsville, where 102-year-old George Manns of Baltimore rose slowly to his feet to accept the Chevalier Cross of the Legion of Honor.

SAINT-DENIS, France -- His second header of the evening had just touched the back of the Brazilian net, and Zinedine Zidane grabbed the front of his French jersey and kissed his number.Zidane's number, 10, is the most evocative in soccer. It implies creativity; it implies leadership, and on the most important evening in the history of French sport, Zidane lived up to his number and his reputation.When these World Cup finals began, the 26-year-old Zidane was a player with hundreds of moves, millions of admirers and no major title.

SAINT-DENIS, France -- When he was growing up in La Castellane, a low-income area of Marseille that is home to many immigrants, Zinedine Zidane used to help a hardware store owner with deliveries. The store owner paid Zidane in candies, and it seemed like a sweet thing to do."One day," Zidane thought, "maybe I can become a delivery truck driver."Yesterday, he delivered the goods for an entire nation.Zidane, who had been ejected earlier in the World Cup for dragging his spikes over a Saudi Arabian player, scored France's first two goals of a 3-0 victory over Brazil in the most lopsided final since 1958.

Sandra H. French was leading a field of seven Howard County school board candidates by a wide margin last night, according to early returns from the nonpartisan primary race. The top four vote-getters will advance to the Nov. 3 general election.With 84 of 88 precincts reporting, incumbent French held 32.84 percent of the vote. After French were former substitute teacher Laura Waters with 15.33 percent, transportation manager Glenn Amato with 13.63 percent, and engineer Arthur Neal Willoughby with 11.94 percent.

Sandra French had two things on her side during the September primary for school board -- name recognition and a six-year track record that seemed to satisfy voters.That powerful combination garnered French 33 percent of the vote in a seven-candidate field, now winnowed to four candidates for two seats in the general election Nov. 3. The 54-year-old former Glen Burnie High School English teacher was known in local and national education circles before she won a Howard County school board seat in 1992.

Exhausted and excited, four Howard County school board candidates were celebrating yesterday their survival of Tuesday's nonpartisan primary, earning them a chance to compete for two available seats in the Nov. 3 general election.Tuesday's big winner was incumbent Sandra H. French, who captured 32.82 percent of the vote. French -- a former English teacher who has mentioned equity among local schools and the achievement gap among students of different races as priority issues -- said she was "dumbstruck" but encouraged by the vote percentage that she received.

We were sitting in the office, humming the love theme to "Titanic," wondering Will that brilliant diva Celine Dion ever get the exposure she deserves? when something happened that made us want to rise to our feet and beat our chest with one clenched fist, the way Celine does when she sings "My Heart Will Go On." That something, of course, was the arrival of "A Voice and a Dream: The Celine Dion Story" (Ballantine Books, $5.99).Yes, Celine fans, we know what you're thinking: Between listening to Celine's newly released French album and her soon-to-be-released Christmas album, watching her just-around-the-corner holiday special and following her world tour into the year 2000, however will we find the time to read 174 pages about "the world's hottest diva in a captivating story of a real-life Cinderella"?

THIS SUMMER, FOR MY vacation, I went to Paris, France. I went there to follow in the footsteps of such great writers as Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller and F. Scott Fitzgerald, all of whom, for the record, are currently dead.I blame the Parisian drivers. Paris has only one vacant parking space, which is currently under heavy police guard in the Louvre museum. This means that thousands of frustrated motorists have been driving around the city since the reign of King Maurice XVII looking for a space, and the way they relieve their frustrations is by aiming at pedestrians, whom they will follow onto the sidewalk if necessary.

On November 5, 2009 ELSIE M., beloved wife of Willie French, Jr. Funeral services for Mrs. French will be held at the CHATMAN-HARRIS FUNERAL HOME, 5240 Reisterstown Road Thursday, November 12, 2009. Wake, 11 a.m. Funeral services will begin 11:30 a.m. Further services and interment will be held in Archer Creek Cemetery, Concord, VA, Friday, November 13, 2009 at 2 p.m.

On September 22, 2009, FRENCH ALBERT JACKSON PhD. Survived by wife Juanita L. Jackson, sons Martin Alford Jackson of MD. and Warren Moore of NC., brother Charles Jackson of NC, sister Bernice Jackson Miller of NC, two granddaughters and a host of other family and friends. Family will receive friends at the family owned WYLIE FUNERAL HOME P.A. OF BALTIMORE COUNTY, 9200 Liberty Road Monday from 6 to 8 P.M. Services Tuesday at the Upper Room Baptist Church,60 Burns Street NE,Washington, DC 11:00 A.M. wake 12:00 P.M. funeral.

In June 2004, Randy Woods and Dwayne Harrison purchased a three-story Georgian-style home in the bucolic Baltimore neighborhood of Ten Hills. Woods, 50, and Harrison, 49, wanted a single-family home, after living for many years in a town house. Most important, they were seeking an older home that was structurally sound, but with an interior crying out for renovation. They spent $339,000 on a 3,800-square-foot 1924 Colonial. The house is constructed of brick and capped with a slate roof in fine condition.

PARIS - French police found dynamite in a Paris department store yesterday, triggering a bomb scare during the holiday shopping season that was accompanied by an unknown group's demand for the withdrawal of French troops from Afghanistan. The five relatively old sticks of dynamite planted in the men's store of the elegant Printemps department chain were not attached to a detonator and did not pose a risk of explosion, authorities said. After evacuating the packed store in the heart of the downtown shopping district about 11 a.m., police used bomb-sniffing dogs to find the explosives, which a warning letter sent to a French news agency had said were in a third-floor bathroom.

On December 11,2 008, MARGARET F. SICHER; beloved wife of Michael Sicher; devoted mother of Peter, Sam and Lexie; daughter of Katharine Iglehart French and G. Ross French; also survived by one brother George R. French, Jr. A memorial reception will be held at the L'Hirondelle Club in Ruxton on Friday, January 9 at 4 P.M. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be sent to Jemicy School, 11 Celedon road, Owings Mills, MD, 21117 or the Johns Hopkins University Brian...

Long after the curtain has closed on most high school theater productions, 35 students and recent graduates at Glenelg Country School are in their eighth month of rehearsing lines, learning songs and working out choreography for the musical Aesop's Foibles. They say the extended effort will be worthwhile when they perform the show - written by two Glenelg Country School teachers - Aug. 16 through 19 at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. "From the get-go, we were all extremely excited," said Collin Lyons, 18, of Glenelg, who plays Aesop.

Cherry will begin his ESPN gig tonight on SportsCenter after the first game of the Eastern Conference finals between the Philadelphia Flyers and the Pittsburgh Penguins. He'll do post-game analysis during the conference finals, and contribute both pre-game and post-game during the Stanley Cup Finals. Cherry, whose nickname is Grapes, is simply not to be missed, if only for his sartorial shock value, which is so brilliant at times that Cherry has to wear sunglasses. I think it's to protect his retinas from his own reflection off the glass around the rink.

The last time I saw my grandmother, she was lying in a hospital bed, mostly still, no longer talking very much. I was 11, and all I really knew about my grandmother was that, first, I loved the little bonbons she used to ply me with, and second, she had a funny accent. I loved her, as many children love their grandparents, but I didn't yet know her. During that last visit, when my father left the room to speak with one of the doctors, my grandmother rolled her head on the pillow so her piercing blue eyes were staring straight into mine and began speaking, rapid fire, in what at the time I could only discern as rhythmic gibberish.

NEW YORK -- Are you a locavore who decries the tapafication of restaurants or a latte liberal on the fence about Billary? No matter, the explosion of new words in the English language is enough to make you want to bury your head under a blankie or run off to Godzone. English always has been something of a mongrel language, but thanks to factors such as e-mail, the Internet and the spread of English around the world, new words are cropping up so quickly that one language watcher says English is nearing a milestone: its millionth word.

BRUSSELS -- To the uninitiated, the existential crisis splitting Belgium down the middle these days might seem like a (very) civilized war as told by Dr. Seuss, with the French-speaking Walloons on one side and the Dutch-speaking Flemings on the other. To continue the literary analogy, consider the library at Belgium's Leuven University. Make that two libraries. German armies had burned down Leuven's library in the two world wars, and it was rebuilt after each. But then in 1970, the last time the Flemings and the Walloons got seriously restive, the million-volume collection was carved into two: Odd-numbered books remained on the original campus in the Dutch-speaking part of the country, while even-numbered books went to a new Francophone school built in a field 17 miles to the south.