Horizon

Older adults, people with mental illnesses and low-income individuals in Howard County should see improved health care services over the next few years under a new $3 million partnership between the Horizon Foundation and Howard County General Hospital. After several years of planning, the Community Health Partnership officially took shape last week with a commitment of $950,000 over four years from Horizon -- the largest grant in that philanthropy's nine-year history -- and $2.1 million from the hospital.

On January 26, 2007, MRS. LENA WEBB. On Friday, friends may call at Vaughn C. Greene Funeral Services (EAST), 4905 York Road where the family will receive friends from 3 to 8 P.M. On Saturday, services will be held at New Horizon Baptist Church, 2200 St. Lukes Lane where the family will receive friends from 10:30 to 11 A.M., with services to follow. Inquiries to 410-433-7500.

Horizon Organic Holding Corp., the company that opened a dairy on Maryland's Eastern Shore last year and is eyeing the recently closed Naval Academy Dairy Farm for expansion, reported a sharp turnaround yesterday in fourth-quarter and year-end operations.Net income for the Boulder, Colo., company for the three months that ended Dec. 31 was $586,000, or 6 cents a common share. In the final quarter of 1997, the company posted a loss of $281,000, equal to 6 cents a share.Sales rose 62.6 percent to $14.7 million, from $9 million.

The Naval Academy announced yesterday that it will lease the 865-acre Anne Arundel County farm it has run since 1911 to the nation's largest producer of organic dairy products.The decision to sign the 10-year lease with Boulder, Colo.-based Horizon Organic Dairy came after several years of agonizing about how to dispose of one of the academy's more unusual holdings. The Navy launched the Gambrills dairy operation to provide midshipmen a safe source of milk during a typhoid outbreak, and continued farming until last year.

GDANSK, Poland -- Lech Walesa, legendary hero of the anti-Communist Solidarity movement, former president of Poland and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, is sitting at his big wooden desk pretending to read a newspaper.He flips through the pages and rattles them impatiently. He sips his coffee, then rattles the paper again. Head down, eyebrows raised, he barely notices his visitors. Who has time to notice such things? Not Walesa, a busy man on the go.But on this recent gloomy day, Lech Walesa is going nowhere.

The Naval Academy announced yesterday that it will lease the 865-acre Anne Arundel County farm it has run since 1911 to the nation's largest producer of organic dairy products.The decision to sign the 10-year lease with Boulder, Colo.-based Horizon Organic Dairy came after several years of agonizing about how to dispose of one of the academy's more unusual holdings. The Navy launched the Gambrills dairy operation to provide midshipmen a safe source of milk during a typhoid outbreak, and continued farming there until last year.

During a leisurely drive along West Virginia's Highland Scenic Highway, I pull over at Red Lick Overlook to enjoy the view. The air is cool, fresh and pine-fragrant. A summery panorama featuring every shade of the color green spreads out to the horizon -- a wide, forested valley and distant, time-softened mountains. Overhead, white clouds hang like dollops of meringue in a turquoise sky.Natural beauty of this magnitude is a feast for the senses. It nourishes the soul.Even as I look at it, I realize how soon this vista will change.

HYANNIS PORT, Mass. -- It was another hot and hazy day yesterday on Cape Cod -- just the kind of weather that makes flying airplanes here a complicated and sometimes risky endeavor, according to pilots, instructors and officials at the small airports that dot the peninsula and its islands.Since the disappearance of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s six-seat Piper Saratoga on Friday night, one of the questions asked by mourners and the media has been: Should he have flown at night, over water, in a haze that nearly blotted out the stars?

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The trip to Baghdad begins before dawn, hours after the first missiles fall on Iraq.An orange-and-white GMC Suburban carries three journalists and an Iraqi businessman named Yusef, a portly fellow with an anxious family awaiting his return. Bilal, the lanky driver, packs the jeep with basics -- cartons of bottled drinking water, orange juice, instant soup, apples, tangerines, carrots, coffee, tea, canned milk. Then, bags of whiskey, cigarettes, aspirin and cheap perfume to help negotiate the Iraqi border and beyond -- if need be.The two-lane road leads from the hilltops of Amman eastward through a barren landscape and several checkpoints, including Rueshet, the last place in Jordan where one can buy a clean, packaged syringe -- for the AIDS test on the other side.

Abraham Rosenthal has become the rarest of Baltimore businessmen: an acquirer.But sitting in front of stockholders and employees yesterday before they approved a deal to buy a Michigan company for nearly $1 billion, Prime Retail Inc.'s chief executive didn't sense the oddity of the situation."

The International Space Station is back in our evening skies tonight, flying high over Baltimore (and almost directly over Ocean City) on its way up the East Coast. Look for a bright, fast-moving "star" rising out of the southwest horizon at 6:14 p.m. It will climb above brilliant Jupiter -- brightest object in the southern sky - by 6:17 p.m., just before vanishing into Earth's shadow. Up-to-the-minute local data and radar at marylandweather.com

Tonight's sunset will be the latest of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. For Baltimore, the last direct rays of sunlight will sink below a flat horizon at 8:37 p.m. EDT. At the beach, sunset occurs at 8:28 p.m. Total solar illumination has been diminishing since the solstice June 21, but the air and ocean are slow to respond. So average Maryland temperatures don't start cooling until after July 20.

Attention, Space Cadets! If the skies clear in time tonight, we'll get a fine view of the International Space Station and its crew of three as they zip from Alabama to Maine. Look for a bright, star-like object above the western horizon at 9:56 p.m. It will climb to more than halfway up the northwest sky by 9:59, to just below the Big Dipper, then race off toward the northeast, disappearing at 10:01 p.m.

The full moon rises above Baltimore's eastern horizon at 9:08 tonight, even if these miserable clouds block our view. It won't be precisely full until just after midnight, but who's measuring? This is the second full moon after the spring equinox, and therefore the one once called by various people in various place the Milk Moon, Corn Planting Moon, Flower Moon or Hare Moon.

1 Familiar faces: Look in the stands at the Orioles-Red Sox exhibition game (1 p.m., MASN), and you might see some of the same Boston fans who come to Camden Yards. 2 Shining moments: Tonight's conference finals are connected, sort of: the Summit (8, ESPN2), Horizon (9, ESPN) and Sun Belt (10, ESPN2). 3 Sour notes: The Capitals are skidding a bit, but they're in Nashville (8 p.m., Comcast SportsNet), so someone can write a sad song about it if they lose again. 4 Run carefully: Three World Baseball Classic games are on TV (5 p.m., ESPN2; 6:30 and 10 p.m., MLB Network)

No Line on the Horizon U2 [Interscope Records] ** 1/2 (2 1/2 STARS) Less than a minute into the first track on U2's new album, No Line on the Horizon, it's clear the Irish rockers are ready to take risks again. That much is refreshing. For all of the copies sold and Grammys won, U2's last album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, was a safe bet. The songs were focused and vaguely reminiscent of the group's early years, but few were very memorable. Not so with No Line on the Horizon, which won't be released in stores in the U.S. until next Tuesday, but was available for listening this weekend on U2's MySpace page and on U2.com.

The Southeast Horizon Council will hold its sixth Family Health Expo from 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Saturday at Murray Hill Middle School. The event is designed to give residents and North Laurel and Savage access to Howard County's health and human services providers. Free blood pressure, bone density, dental, vision, hearing and breast health screenings will be offered. A representative from the Health Department will be available to provide Flu Mist to children, ages 2 to 18, who qualify.

Charles Grene in Westminster asks: "In the Central and Mountain time zones, with all their mountains, hills, forests and deserts, how are the sunset and sunrise times arrived at?" Same as for urban canyons: math. Local conditions vary so widely that published tables for any location must assume ideal conditions: a clear, flat horizon at the same altitude as the observer. Rise and set times are pegged to the moment when the top of the sun's disk would first appear and the last bit would disappear.

The Horizon Foundation is providing $223,748 to eight Howard County human services agencies this fiscal year, including $100,000 for the county-run North Laurel Multiservice Center. The grants were announced by Horizon President and Chief Executive Officer Richard Krieg, who noted that the county's largest foundation has already donated $618,000 to help the multiservice center, in the Whiskey Bottom Shopping Center in the 9100 block of All Saints Road. "The center is a vital part of the safety net in the southeastern part of the county," Krieg said in a news release announcing the grants.

A retiree recently wrote to Your Money asking for suggestions on where to invest the savings he has been generating by not spending all of his retirement income. He has $30,000 in a taxable savings account, but the bulk of his income is generated from retirement accounts. He's looking for longer-term returns, not income that he can spend right away. But he may be locked into the assumption that because he can no longer contribute to his individual retirement account, his options for investing in his taxable account should be limited to ultra-safe bank products.