Herald

MIAMI -- Miami Herald Publisher Jesus Diaz Jr. resigned yesterday after weeks of intense criticism from the Cuban-American community that he wrongly fired two reporters at the Herald's Spanish-language sister paper for accepting tens of thousands of dollars from the government to appear on Radio and TV Marti. Although Diaz said in a statement that he believes the money El Nuevo Herald writers received from federally funded Radio and TV Marti violated principles of journalistic independence, he announced that the writers would be reinstated because "policies prohibiting such behavior were ambiguously communicated, inconsistently applied and widely misunderstood over many years."

He didn't get down on one knee, but Christopher Lee wooed his wife with a skyscraping crane she literally could call her own at the dedication of the port of Baltimore's berth capable of handling the world's largest cargo ships. As founder of Highstar Capital, the Ruxton resident provided the financial backing for a $105 million expansion at Seagirt Marine Terminal to make Baltimore one of only two East Coast ports — the other is Norfolk, Va. — ready to handle the larger ships that could pass through the widened Panama Canal in 2015.

Over the past few years, sports journalism has become as ripe a topic for discussion as the games and sports personalities the journalists cover. The trend started with talk radio but really picked up steam when some cyber caveman invented the first blog. A fair amount of blogging, regardless of the subject matter, focuses on other media -- print, broadcast and even cyber -- because many bloggers are motivated by what they perceive as a disconnect between institutional media and the public that media is supposed to serve.

SARASOTA, Fla. -- Kevin Gausman's spring training locker sits along a row next to Orioles veteran pitchers Darren O'Day, Jim Johnson and Jason Hammel. That placement is strategic - manager Buck Showalter gives a sly grin when asked about it - just like 19-year-old left-handed pitching prospect Eduardo Rodriguez's locker being next to pitchers Miguel Gonzalez and Pedro Strop. The plan is for first-time big league campers like Gausman and Rodriguez, two of the Orioles top three pitching prospects, to learn what life is like in the big leagues by example.

BOSTON -- Long regarded as a feisty tabloid, the Boston Herald this week shocked the journalism world and surprised its own staff by suspending a reporter after he wrote a hard-hitting series on a major Boston bank. The reporter, Robin Washington, who is president of the Boston Association of Black Journalists, was indefinitely released without pay days after publicly suggesting that Herald editors censored his coverage of FleetBoston. The financial institution routinely advertises in the paper and, according to public documents, holds the $20 million mortgage on the Herald building.

One Missed Call, a horror movie about phone messages that herald grisly deaths, was not screened for critics.

* Brightleaf: Someone stole the tires from a 1988 Mazda parked in the 300 block of Ternwing Drive Monday.* Herald Harbor: Burglars broke into the Herald Harbor Inn in the 400 block of Herald Harbor Road in Crownsville Thursday and took $149.

Chris Korman is a content editor for The Baltimore Sun and has overseen, at various times, the newspaper's Ravens coverage, its Sunday sports section, its sports enterprise reporting and the horse racing coverage. A graduate of Penn State and the journalism school at Columbia, he previously covered Indiana basketball for  The Herald-Times (Bloomington, Ind.) and began his career as a staff writer at The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa.

WHITELAW REID, 95 Scion of publishing family Whitelaw Reid, scion of a prominent publishing family and groomed heir to the New York Herald Tribune, died Saturday of complications from lung and heart failure at White Plains Hospital Center in White Plains, N.Y. Mr. Reid was the grandson of Whitelaw Reid, who succeeded Horace Greeley, former ambassador to Great Britain and France, and owner and editor of the New York Tribune in the 1870s. Mr. Reid's father was Ogden Mills Reid, who merged The Tribune and The Herald in 1924 and was for many years editor and publisher of the paper and its European edition, known as the Paris Herald, now The International Herald Tribune and owned by The New York Times Co. From 1953 to 1955, Mr. Reid was editor and president of the Herald Tribune, and from 1955 to 1958 was chairman.

After a German tourist was murdered in Miami and before a British tourist was murdered near Tallahassee, the Miami Herald editorialized, "Fighting crime against visitors is only a partial answer to the problem . . . . We must also stop the daily savagery against each other." A Herald columnist wrote, "We should be less concerned about how others view us and more concerned about how we view ourselves." Sure, but precisely because the victims were visitors, no recent crime story has so highlighted the direct link between crime and a community's overall well being.

As the end of the Major League Baseball regular season drew to a close this year, something that hadn't happened in a long time came to pass: the Baltimore Orioles made it to the postseason, winning the wild card playoff with the Rangers and then dropping their divisional round playoff with the Yankees. All-in-all, the 2012 season was a success for the Orioles, who hadn't make the playoffs since 1997. Some credit the team management, some the players, most likely both. This is baseball, though, a sport notorious for its legendary superstitions.

With "VEEP and "Game Change" produced here, I have been writing a lot about Baltimore standing in for Washington. But Wednesday afternoon, the TV sleight of hand hit a little too close to home when the Calvert Street entrance to the Sun said in big bold letters "The Washington Herald. " Happily, it was not real institutional change -- just a little more TV magic as the crew for the $100 million Netflix series "House of Cards" had "dressed" the building for scenes to be shot later this week.

Flowermart, the official start of spring in Baltimore, is as much about food as it is about flowers. So it makes sense that among the women wearing hats covered in blooms there would be a guy dressed as a slice of pizza. Antoine Hays of Baltimore — he was a slice of pepperoni — was at Mount Vernon on Friday to promote an online food delivery service, as another edition of the century-old city tradition got under way. Even the plants eat at Flowermart. Carnivorous Plant Nursery, located inf Derwood in Montgomery County, was featuring a hanging basket of tropical pitcher plants that are guaranteed to attract, trap and eat your stink bugs.

Ocean City Springfest Ocean City 's Springfest sets summer in motion. The four-day event, in its 22nd year, begins May 3 and features live entertainment headlined by The Fabulous Hubcaps, Loretta Lynn, Eddie Money and Survivor. (Loretta Lynn concert is sold out.) The festival takes place in the inlet parking lot at the south end of the boardwalk and includes more than 30 vendors for food and nearly 200 artisans showcasing arts and crafts. Admission is free.

Chris Korman is a content editor for The Baltimore Sun and has overseen, at various times, the newspaper's Ravens coverage, its Sunday sports section, its sports enterprise reporting and the horse racing coverage. A graduate of Penn State and the journalism school at Columbia, he previously covered Indiana basketball for  The Herald-Times (Bloomington, Ind.) and began his career as a staff writer at The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa.

When Thiru Vignarajah left the Maryland U.S. attorney's office to lead a new unit of the city prosecutors, there was the matter of putting together a new team of lawyers to pursue major crimes, bolstering relationships with police and other law enforcement agencies, and identifying the city's most violent criminals. There was also another matter: painting the office. To help create a sense of ownership over their work, he encouraged his new prosecutors to pick out their offices and paint the walls with the color of their choice.

A state fire marshal robot fired a bullet into a pipe found on the side of a Herald Harbor bar Wednesday in an attempt to defuse what police and firefighters thought was a pipe bomb, county police said.When the device did not explode, a bomb technician examined it and determined it was a crack cocaine pipe.The incident caused emergency workers to evacuate the bar and a house directly across the street and shut down the single road in and out of Herald Harbor -- which has about 750 homes -- from about 3: 30 p.m. until about 6 p.m.The incident began about 2: 30 p.m. when Lawrence P. Arelland, an employee of the Herald Harbor Inn in the 400 block of Herald Harbor Road, notified the Herald Harbor fire station that he thought a pipe bomb was on the side of the bar.Firefighters agreed that the 12-inch cylindrical object wrapped in black electrical tape looked like a pipe bomb and called police and the state fire marshal's office.

Spring break is officially on, and don't think the locals take the huge influx of college-age tourists for granted after all these years. The Miami Herald has assigned its travel editor, Jane Wooldridge, to visit popular South Florida spring break locations throughout the week and write daily reports that will be published in the paper and on the Herald's Web site. The feature is called "Where's Jane Today?" Coincidentally, we were going to call our daily postcard from Florida "Where's Schmuck?"

As in life, youth is a tantalizing commodity in college lacrosse. From Nicky Galasso's record-setting campaign for North Carolina freshmen to Johns Hopkins' eight sophomore and freshman starters to Cornell junior attackman Rob Pannell's status as the leading candidate to win the Tewaaraton Award, youth has become a storyline in college lacrosse in 2011. On the opposite end of that spectrum is Maryland and Syracuse, a pair of storied programs that will meet in an NCAA tournament quarterfinal at noon Sunday at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass.

J -The Israeli government adds two culturally rich, millennium-old historic sites to a list of national treasures, and riots break out, followed by international condemnation. Yet, it is precisely this cynical, predictable response that demonstrates why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was right to add the Tomb of Rachel and the Cave of the Patriarchs to Israel's National Heritage Sites. There is no nation with firmer roots in a land than the Jewish people in the greater land of Israel.