Herald

Baltimore Co. couple die in Florida auto crash A Baltimore County couple were killed in an automobile accident in West Miami on Wednesday night, according to the family and reports in the Miami Herald. Robert Kirkpatrick and his wife, Paulette, both 62, of Phoenix, were heading to the Everglades when their Chevrolet Cobalt crashed into a Toyota Tacoma driven by a 54-year-old man who had been arrested three times on drunken-driving charges and whose license had been suspended, the Miami Herald reported.

On the first day of free agency, the Ravens were merely spectators, watching three starters land big-money contracts elsewhere, including All-Pro outside linebacker Adalius Thomas. In a surprising turn of events, Thomas, 29, chose New England over the San Francisco 49ers and will sign with the Patriots today once he passes a physical, an unnamed league executive told the Boston Herald last night. It's expected that Thomas will become one of the highest-paid defensive players in the NFL. Considered the most versatile player in Ravens history, he will be the only starter not returning to the Ravens' defense, which ranked No. 1 in the league last season.

Anne Arundel County Department of Health workers inspected 125 restaurants and other food service establishments between July 1 and July 15 and found 18 with critical food safety violations that were immediately corrected. Six facilities were closed during the period.Shannon's at 1468 Snug Harbor Road in Shadyside is still closed because of an unsatisfactory water supply and the Tri Me Supermarket at 5558 Muddy Creek Road in West River is still closed because of inability to hold cold food at the proper temperature while operating on a generator.

William Randolph Hearst would try anything to boost his newspapers' circulation, offering his subscribers racehorses, gold coins, fabricated stories about starving orphans and yellow journalism that ignited the Spanish-American War.But the scheme hatched by his Washington Herald was so outrageous that he fired the publisher responsible for it. The Herald built a utopian, all-white summer colony north of Annapolis, used its front page to sell lots in "Herald...

Joseph Moody Harp Sr., retired executive editor of the Herald-Mail Co. in Hagerstown whose newspaper career spanned an era from the days of "The Front Page" to the computer age, died Tuesday of congestive heart failure at Washington County Hospital. He was 89.Mr. Harp, who had lived the last few years at Homewood of Williamsport retirement community near Hagerstown, was born in Cavetown, Washington County, and graduated from Smithsburg High School in 1925.After digging ditches, picking peaches and doing other odd jobs for 15 cents an hour, he learned of a job opening at the Herald-Mail in Hagerstown in 1926.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- A spate of bombings in Cuba this summer was the work of a ring of Salvadoran car thieves and armed robbers directed and financed by Cuban exiles in El Salvador and Miami, a two-month investigation by the Miami Herald shows.The ring's leader is reputed to be Francisco Chavez, son of an arms dealer with close ties to Cuban exiles. Chavez may have been in Havana just hours before the first bomb exploded at the luxury Melia Cohiba Hotel.The Salvadorans were only delivery boys for the bombs, paid and taught to assemble the explosives by a Cuban exile -- a man in his 30s who has participated in several other anti-Castro operations in Central and South America, according to the Herald.

IF YOU ARE a regular reader of this column, you know I make it my business to report on Stuff Guys Do.A good example is the sport of snowplow hockey, in which guys driving trucks use their snowplow blades to knock a bowling ball past trucks driven by opposing guys. This is not to be confused with car bowling, in which guys in low-flying airplanes try to drop bowling balls onto junked cars. I've also reported on guys going off a ski jump in a canoe, and on guys trying to build a huge, modernized version of a catapult-like, medieval war weapon and then using it to hurl a Buick 200 yards.

Walter F. Kerr,83, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and drama critic for the New York Times, died of congestive heart failure Wednesday in New York.He started his career in 1949 at Commonweal, a Roman Catholic weekly, and earned his reputation as a penetrating and insightful critic while writing for the New York Herald Tribune from 1951 to 1966.After the Herald folded, he went to work for the Times from 1966 until he retired in 1983. He was honored in 1990 when the restored Ritz Theater on West 48th Street in Manhattan was renamed The Walter Kerr Theater.

Plays with an exclamation point in the title have to work really hard to earn that punctuation mark."Go Comedy!" simply hasn't got enough comic savvy to live up to its title. As a spoof of the celebrity-roast syndrome, it's as lame as the tacky Vegas-type events it's sending up.Although Bowman Ensemble artistic director Matthew Ramsay, who wrote and directed "Go Comedy!," has some ambitious and well-received productions to his credit, his latest show is no laughing matter.A basic problem with this play is that the audience may find itself wondering what point there is parodying something that is already so close to self-parody.

I guess everybody wants to hear about how I almost got killed by a possibly supernatural being. This happened about a month ago, and I blame Comet Hyakutake.Comet Hyakutake was, of course, the most recent spectacular breathtaking once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event that nobody could see except astronomers. Every few years, when they figure we've forgotten the last alleged comet, the astronomers get together at a big party sponsored by the Telescope and Binocular Manufacturers Association, and after several hours of drinking gin straight out of bottles they "discover" a new comet, which they predict will be an awesome display of celestial fireworks.

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.

On the day the last newspaper is published, I expect no sympathy card from Kwame Kilpatrick. Were it not for a newspaper - The Detroit Free Press - his use of public funds to cover up his affair with one of his aides would be unrevealed, and he might still be mayor of Detroit. Nor will I expect flowers from Larry Craig. Were it not for a newspaper - The Idaho Statesman - we would not know of his propensity for taking a "wide stance" in airport men's rooms and he might still be serving in the U.S. Senate.

Baltimore Co. couple die in Florida auto crash A Baltimore County couple were killed in an automobile accident in West Miami on Wednesday night, according to the family and reports in the Miami Herald. Robert Kirkpatrick and his wife, Paulette, both 62, of Phoenix, were heading to the Everglades when their Chevrolet Cobalt crashed into a Toyota Tacoma driven by a 54-year-old man who had been arrested three times on drunken-driving charges and whose license had been suspended, the Miami Herald reported.

JHERYL BUSBY, 58 Motown Records head Jheryl Busby, the former president and chief executive of Motown Records who helped foster the careers of Boyz II Men and Johnny Gill, has died. He was 59. Mr. Busby was found early Tuesday in a hot tub at his home in Malibu, Calif., said Los Angeles County Assistant Coroner Chief Ed Winter. "It was a possible accident or else he died of natural causes," Mr. Winter said. Mr. Busby was named Motown's president and chief executive officer in 1988 and stayed there for seven years.

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.

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

Two Hagerstown daily newspapers announced plans over the weekend to merge into one amid ever-declining interest in afternoon editions. The afternoon Daily Mail, which first went to press July 4, 1828, will cease publication Sept. 28 and merge with its sister paper founded in 1862, The Morning Herald. Both publications are owned by Schurz Communications Inc. of South Bend, Ind., and they already share many resources, including advertising and news staff. The combined paper, which is to make its debut Oct. 1 and publish in the morning, will be called The Herald-Mail.

Anne Arundel County is looking to shed hundreds of properties in hopes of getting them back on the tax rolls, a prospect that could end up putting about 11 acres in a Crownsville neighborhood into permanent preservation. The County Council night will hold a public hearing tomorrow on whether to declare surplus land it owns on Glendale Terrace and Laurel Lane in Glen Burnie, Generals Highway near Annapolis and Melvin Avenue in West Annapolis, with the vast majority - 192 lots - in the Herald Harbor community in Crownsville.

Alvin P. Sanoff, a former Sun reporter who covered the 1968 riots here before moving on to launch U.S. News & World Report's annual "America's Best Colleges" editions, died of pancreatic cancer Thursday at Georgetown University Hospital. The Bethesda resident was 65. Born in the Bronx, N.Y., Mr. Sanoff was the son of Russian immigrants who fled the communists and settled eventually in Brookline, Mass., near Boston. His father sold antiques and worked in a family meat business. Mr. Sanoff graduated from the Boston Latin School in 1959 and entered Harvard University, helping to pay his way through as a soda jerk and with newspaper internships, according to his son, Geoff Sanoff of New York City.

I have been arrested several times during the past couple of years. I'd admit some were my fault but swear others were bogus - overzealous cops or me just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Might I expect the embarrassment I have caused The Miami Herald and its parent company to continue to be abided? Or should I think my employer may be justified to fire me or at least mete out a suspension or other discipline? Welcome to the real world, NFL players. Your "Get Out of Jail Free" card is hereby revoked.