Identity

I hope everyone has taken a few moments to collect themselves after that spectacular finale. Midway through, I was a bit worried as the episode was beginning to seem more like a series finale than a season finale. However, the last 15 minutes provided everything a good finale should: suspense, murder, a love triangle (quadrangle!), a drug overdose, break-ups (bonus points for calling off an engagement), a conniving friend, heart break, a parent finding their child unconscious, unplanned pregnancy, a declaration of “never speak to me again” followed by a quick hang up, an engagement, a serious accident (plane instead of car, way to go big!

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service is investigating the cause of a Marine's death in his Fort Meade barracks room Wednesday afternoon. Emergency medical teams that responded to the call pronounced him dead at the scene. The name of the Marine, who was assigned to the Marine Corps student training detachment, is being withheld pending next of kin notification. More information will be posted as it becomes available.

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service is investigating the cause of a Marine's death in his Fort Meade barracks room Wednesday afternoon. Emergency medical teams that responded to the call pronounced him dead at the scene. The name of the Marine, who was assigned to the Marine Corps student training detachment, is being withheld pending next of kin notification. More information will be posted as it becomes available.

Here's another reason to file your tax returns as early as possible: an identity thief might beat you to the money. Identity thieves are filing fake federal returns using taxpayers' Social Security numbers and claiming tax refunds worth billions of dollars. The taxpayers only find out about it when their returns are rejected by the IRS because someone already received a refund using their identity. It's a big problem — and one that's rapidly growing, according to a report this month from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

The nation watched as winning numbers for the record-setting Mega Millions jackpot were revealed Friday night, and then waited all day Saturday to learn the identity of a lucky Baltimore County shopper who would split the $656 million. His or her identity, however, remains a mystery. Three winning tickets were sold for the multistate lottery — in Maryland, Kansas and Illinois — and the ticket holders will split the pot. While the winners' identities remained unknown early Sunday, the buying frenzy in which 1.5 billion tickets were sold for $1 apiece turned to wild guessing as to who they are and why they haven't stepped forward.

The identity of a Howard County police officer found dead Sunday at her Columbia home was released Monday. Jennifer Cree, 31, was discovered by a relative, said police, who do not believe there was any foul play. Police are investigating the possibility that a medical condition might have contributed to the death of the eight-year veteran. "The entire Police Department family is saddened by Jennifer's death," Police Chief William J. McMahon said in a statement. "We are grateful for her service and extend our condolences to her family."

Science fiction tends to play by its own generous rules, but it helps to have a clearly defined purpose and a consistent tone. Those two traits are lacking in J-F Bibeau's "Self, Inc.," a Baltimore Playwrights Festival entry getting its premiere by the Theatrical Mining Company at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland. The time travel-reliant plot concerns personal identity-related issues within a corporate context, but it's not certain exactly what Bibeau wants to say about such things.

This is the last weekend to see Diane Samuels' "Kindertransport" at AXIS Theatre. An exploration of identity, the play rides a collision course between past and present. In the past, it concerns a German Jewish family that sends its daughter to England for safety on the eve of Kristallnacht. In the present, it focuses on a young English woman confronting her true heritage.Directed by Brian Klaas, "Kindertransport" features a cast including Carol Cohen, Amanda Brown-Lipitz, Bethany Brown, Mary Alice Feather and Mark Bernier.

"Hello. It's so good to see you again. I met you a couple of weeks ago at the museum," the nice lady said to me. "I'm so glad you could come to this. " "This" was the sendoff for the president of the Friends of Trees in Portland, Ore. I was videotaping a play involving some friends who were popping out like gnomes and fairies in the forest in the upper northwest part of the city. I was also on jet lag. "No," I said to her. "I just arrived in Portland yesterday. " "Oh, yes," she insisted, "it was you I met at the museum.

Stedman Graham is one self-help author who practices what he preaches almost every day of his life. If he didn't, he would likely be lost in one of the largest and most overwhelming shadows in American life. Graham, known to millions as "Oprah Winfrey's boyfriend," was in town last week promoting his 11th book, "Identity: Your Passport to Success," a guide to creating your own identity rather than letting others define and limit who and what you can imagine yourself being.

You can be dead and still be a victim in this world. A new report by ID Analytics find that thieves target the dead, using their Social Security numbers to get credit cards, cellphones and other services. The company says it compared the names, Social Security numbers and birth date on 100 million credit applications in the first quarter of last year with Social Security's Death Master File to find out if applicants were using the information of the dead. The findings: -     132,000 applications had some deliberate manipulations of Social Security numbers -     66,000 were straight up-and-up ID theft of the dead -   the person had died months before the application was made.

With the Supreme Court taking up Arizona's "show me your papers" immigration law, we're once again thrust into a useful debate over the role of the government and the obligations of the citizen -- and non-citizen. Rather than come at it from the usual angle, I thought I'd try something different. If there were one thing I could impress upon people about the nature of the state, it's that governments by their very nature want to make their citizens "legible. " I borrow that word from James C. Scott, whose book "Seeing Like a State" left a lasting impression on me. Mr. Scott studied why the state has always seen "people who move around" to be the enemy.

As the Washington Capitals sat in the dressing room at their Arlington, Va., practice facility ahead of a flight to Boston for a final showdown with the Boston Bruins in this Eastern Conference quarterfinal series, the mood was noticeably loose. Players lobbed well-intended jabs at one another, exchanged jokes with reporters and seemed relaxed to the point that an uninformed observer might not have believed the team will be fighting to keep its season alive tonight in Game 7 at TDGarden.

A traveling EDM festival might have seemed like a far-fetched notion, but Live Nation's IDentity is returning this year, with a show planned at Jiffy Lube Live again. The festival, which last year attracted big-timer Kaskade, back when when he didn't headline arenas, and Hercules and Love Affair, consists of genre stars - this year it's Wolfgang Gartner, Nero, and Paul Van Dyk, among others - taking turns at the turntables for several hours before an arena crowd. Kaskade, presumably, was busy with his own arena tour . Live Nation did not disclose last year's attendance numbers with Billboard, which ran the press release . Nice detail: "IDENTITY's sponsors include Rockstar Energy Drink, Emazing Lights, Slurpee, TIGI Bedhead, and Lifestyle Condoms.

Let's turn to baseball to sum up the Maryland legislative session's impact on consumers: It had a few singles but no home runs. "We made a lot of progress on some really critical issues," says Marceline White, executive director of the Maryland Consumer Rights Coalition. "But there is a lot of work left to do and in some places we had some setbacks. " Last year's legislative session was strong on consumer protections, with Marylanders still reeling from the foreclosure crisis and weak economy, White says.

A state business group has invited members of the public to bring their sensitive documents Saturday to "Shred Day" identity theft prevention events in Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties. The events, hosted by the Better Business Bureau of Greater Maryland, will send trucks to Arundel Mills (behind hhgregg) and The Avenue in White Marsh (behind the AMC Lowes), and will accept documents until noon. Each truck is capable of shredding up to 8,000 pounds of personal information.

Barbara Kruger's "Untitled" in UMBC's show "Ciphers of Identity" plays with identity in several ways. She used an existing photograph of a woman's hands pulling a photograph out of a file drawer filled with folders bearing numbers -- 2400, 3150, etc.The photo the hand holds is blurred; you can't tell what it shows, so the subject doesn't have an identity. The numbers indicate that whatever or whoever the photo shows has been reduced to something nameless for the purposes of this file. On the photo Kruger has superimposed the written legend "Who do you think you are?"

Stedman Graham is one self-help author who practices what he preaches almost every day of his life. If he didn't, he would likely be lost in one of the largest and most overwhelming shadows in American life. Graham, known to millions as "Oprah Winfrey's boyfriend," was in town last week promoting his 11th book, "Identity: Your Passport to Success," a guide to creating your own identity rather than letting others define and limit who and what you can imagine yourself being.

A man died following a two-vehicle accident Monday night on Robert Fulton Drive in Columbia, according to the Howard County police department. The driver of a 1985 Mercedes was attempting to make a left turn onto Commerce Center Drive from Robert Fulton Drive at approximately 9:45 p.m. and turned in front of a 2008 Toyota 4 Runner, officials said. The driver of the Mercedes was transported to the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center, where he later died, officials said.