Germantown

Cecil L. Keseling, an area home builder for three decades, died Saturday at Glade Valley Nursing Home in Walkersville of an apparent heart attack. He was 91. Born in Baltimore, Mr. Keseling graduated from Polytechnic Institute in 1932 and attended night classes at the Johns Hopkins University. He worked in the family home-building business, George H. Keseling and Sons, from the 1940s to the 1970s. He and his brother, George, built the Shirley Hills, Kimberly, Kimberly West and Kelbrooke developments in western Baltimore County.

Two tourists slashed in Light Street PavilionBALTIMORE -- Two tourists visiting the Inner Harbor on Saturday night were slashed with a box cutter inside the Light Street Pavilion at Harborplace after confronting six men who had made lewd comments about the wife of one of the tourists, police said.The two men were released yesterday from the Maryland Shock Trauma Center after being treated for serious cuts.Investigators said Lamont Valdez, 25, of Alexandria, Va., suffered a 4-inch wound over his right eye and a 6-inch wound to his back after questioning one of the men about what had been said.

Hampered by the lack of a passing game last season, Morgan State brought in three quarterbacks on national signing day in a recruiting haul that landed 23 high school or Division I transfers. The Bears recruited the prolific passing combination of quarterback Delonte Williams and wide receiver Winfield Diggs from Friendship Collegiate High in Washington. The two other quarterbacks signed were Donavan Dickerson, who led Detroit's Martin Luther King High to a 14-0 state championship, and Carlton Jackson, a transfer from Akron and one of seven Florida natives added to the roster.

Most people who sign up for an online dating service hope they might meet someone nice, have a few dates, maybe see romance blossom. But a trio of online daters from Maryland made a different kind of match - they started their own online dating site. After striking out romantically when they met through an online dating service, Sandra Furton Gabriel, George Paley and Perry Wheelock joined creative forces to launch www.love homepage.com. It's a new Germantown-based service that provides each client with his or her own home page to mix and mingle with others seeking love, friendship or, perhaps, even business relationships.

GERMANTOWN, Pa. - Not far from where Awbury Arboretum's state-champion river birch spreads its improbably wide branches to the sky, Sidney Jones ran a crack house, raking in $1,500 a week. He doesn't make nearly that much now. Jones, a recovering addict from East Falls, Pa., is one of 13 men struggling to refocus their lives through a program at the Germantown arboretum that teaches landscaping skills and offers a chance at a paying job. It's dirty work of a different sort, for which Jones and the other trainees get $20 a week, a transportation pass and a chance to roam the 55-acre urban sanctuary, a place lush with trees and bird life.

GERMANTOWN -- Here in Montgomery County, a children's game applauded for its simplicity has become a multimillion-dollar, corporately sponsored controversy.And that's just on paper.The Maryland Soccer Foundation wants to turn a chunk of a county park in Germantown into a "Soccerplex" of 21 outdoor fields, an outdoor championship field with bleacher seating for 3,200 and an indoor arena with several fields.The price: $19.8 million.Officials of the nonprofit group say they will pay for more than half the cost of the project through user fees and corporate donations.

GERMANTOWN -- Beneath the soccer field at Great Seneca Creek Elementary School, antifreeze circulates through a coil of pipes deep underground, where it absorbs the earth's warmth to heat classrooms. The school's speckled bathroom stalls are built from recycled soda bottles. The bookshelves are made from wheat, to save trees. Welcome to Maryland's first officially "green" school, built to meet the standards of the U.S. Green Building Council. The number of green buildings registered by the nonprofit group has soared nationally, with 770 across the country today compared with fewer than 50 in 2002.

GERMANTOWN -- The deliveries that arrive at this quiet, nondescript suite, tucked away in a shoe box of an office building just off Interstate 270, are anything but nondescript: A hair. A bloodstained swatch of fabric. A lipstick-smudged cigarette butt. A torn fingernail. An ax.They are all remnants of sordid episodes of murder, rape, acts of betrayal.Each item will be combed for a trace of human life, a genetic calling card that can be used to help answer such questions as: "Who killed JonBenet Ramsey?"

FRIENDSVILLE -- Twenty men and women, some with feathers dangling from coal-black hair, some with moccasins as footwear, step purposefully in a circle around a barren pole they say reaches to the sky.In pairs, they walk in cadence with the rhythmic beating of a drum, oblivious to the panoramic views the lofty pasture affords them of the surrounding forested mountains -- exploding in brilliant hues of red and yellow -- and the river valley below.From distant vantage points in the ridges that fortress the Youghiogheny River, these conspicuous people might lead you to believe you've slipped into another century, when the Shawnees roamed these parts, hunting and fishing.

State health officials have suspended surgical abortion procedures at three clinics, including one in Baltimore where a patient suffered cardiac arrest and later died at a hospital. The physician who performed the abortion at Associates in OB/GYN Care LLC on North Calvert Street wasn't certified in CPR and a defibrillator at the facility did not work, state officials said in a letter Friday to the General Assembly. Although the cardiac arrest was caused by underlying health conditions and not the abortion, investigators found that it raised questions whether doctors at the clinic can handle an abortion that goes wrong.