Howard Hughes

A vice president of the largest philanthropic foundation in the country and his wife were found fatally shot yesterday in a house in the affluent community of Winchester on the Severn, county police said.Jose Enrique Trias, 49, an executive and general counsel for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and his wife, Julie Noel Gilbert, 48, a Bethesda attorney, were found just after noon in a house in the 1600 block of Winchester Road, said Officer Randy Bell, police spokesman.The victims appeared to have been dead for 48 hours.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute will distribute $80 million over the next four years to 30 U.S. medical schools -- including $3.4 million to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine -- to shore up their research facilities, the institute announced today.Officials at the Chevy Chase-based research philanthropy intend the money to help support younger faculty members, pilot studies and communication technology."Academic medical centers across the country are being squeezed by reductions in patient-care revenues and restrictions on government research spending," Dr. Purnell W. Choppin, the institute's president, said in a written statement.

Dorothy W. "Dotty" Taylor, a former WAMPAS Baby starlet and Hollywood movie actress who appeared during the early 1930s in comedies starring Laurel & Hardy and Charlie Chase, died in her sleep Thursday at the Edenwald retirement community in Towson. She was 96. She was born Dorothy Violet Wannenwetch, the daughter of a founder of the Western Southern Life Insurance Co. and a homemaker. During her early years, she moved with her family to Virginia Beach, Va., and later to Baltimore, where she graduated in 1929 from the old Hannah More Academy in Reisterstown.

In Baltimore City College student, 19, fatally shot in possible robbery try Rio-Jarell Tatum, a Polytechnic Institute graduate home from his first year at Pennsylvania State University, was killed Sunday night, apparently on his way to a nightclub in downtown Baltimore. Officer Troy J. Harris, a police spokesman, said Tatum was shot once in a possible attempted robbery as he was walking in the 400 block of N. Paca St. about 10:30 p.m. He was taken to Maryland Shock Trauma Center, where he died.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association loves its California wines, loves Howard Hughes, and is pretty keen on the guy who played Ray Charles, if the 62nd Golden Globe nominations announced yesterday are any indication. Sideways, Alexander Payne's offbeat comic romance set in California's wine country, led the field with seven nominations. The Aviator, the Martin Scorsese/Leonardo DiCaprio epic on the life of Howard Hughes, scored six. But any way you look at it, Jamie Foxx was on the association's mind.

Joe Smitherman, 75, whose decades as a councilman and mayor in Selma, Ala., included the turbulent civil rights era, died Sunday in a Montgomery hospital. A former appliance salesman, Mr. Smitherman was a 34-year- old city councilman when first elected mayor in 1964 as a segregationist. At the time, about 150 blacks were registered to vote in Selma. Six months later, marchers seeking equal voting rights were beaten by police on a Selma bridge in what came to be known as "Bloody Sunday."

Basketball is back. "The Simpsons," "Seinfeld" and "Frasier" are showing reruns. One of the recent Oscar winners is showcased in a repeat of an oldie but goodie miniseries. That about covers it.* "NCAA basketball tournament" (8 p.m.-conclusion, WBAL, Channel 11) -- Here's something to ponder. If you had used an alphabetical system to choose winners for the second round, going with whichever city came first in the alphabet, you would have predicted 13 out of the 16 winners, including the upset by Boston College over top-seeded North Carolina.

Able to leap tall bullets at a single bound, faster than a speeding building, more powerful than someone doing the locomotion, and a lot more fun than all of them, "The Rocketeer" is a romp through the deco style and the heroic postures of the late '30s,which ought to please both literaly minded kids and ironic parents.(If you are an ironic kid or a literal-minded parent,you ought to stay away.)The genius of the movie is how it operates with a great deal of brio on two levels: It is both a sterling aviation adventure about a boy who can fly and an amusing farrago of myths set in the popular culture of the times.

The two Bethesda lawyers killed at their weekend retreat in Arnold were shot in the back of the head in an apparent robbery, Anne Arundel County police said yesterday.The dark red Acura Legend that had been taken from the home of Julie Noel Gilbert, 48, and her husband Jose E. Trias, 49, was found by police in the 900 block of E. 20th St. in East Baltimore. It was taken back to police headquarters to be searched for evidence.A handyman found the bodies of Mr. Trias and his wife lying in the bed of their weekend home in the 1600 block of Father Urban Lane about noon Monday.

ROCKETEER'' doesn't take off until it is 30 minutes along, but when it does, it zooms, offering a good time.Based on the comic book series authored by Dale Stevens, which first appeared in 1981, the new film takes place in 1938 when the world was on the brink of war.The government is experimenting with a rocket pack that will allow a man to fly, so long as he is wearing fire resistant pants. This device is used in one of the Sean Connery-James Bond movies, and before that, ''Buck Rogers'' used it as his principal form of travel, but ''Rocketeer'' makes it all seem new and most amusing.