Imminent Threat

The development rights for three large farms in northern Baltimore County have been purchased for $1.4 million under land preservation programs, county officials said. In all, 423 acres will be preserved, including 166 acres being added to the Piney Run Rural Legacy area, a 10,000-acre block of protected land in northwest Baltimore County. The Piney Run area is the largest such block in the county and one of the largest protected areas on the East Coast, said Wally Lippincott Jr., land preservation program administrator for the county Department of Environmental Protection and Resource Management.

ANNAPOLIS -- Over the past few months, a 39-year-old Baltimore woman says she petitioned the court three times to keep her husband away from her. But she still wound up beaten, raped and brutalized.Her husband returned each time a 30-day civil protection order expired, the woman told the House Judiciary Committee yesterday.He fractured her jaw and knocked out her teeth the first time, and raped and spit and urinated on her the second time, said the woman, who testified on condition of anonymity.

President Barack Obama's nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency, John O. Brennan, was about as cagey as they come last week at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Asked right off the bat by the committee chairwoman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whether he would be more forthcoming than his predecessors in apprising committee members of covert U.S. military operations abroad - particularly the administration's secret drone program of targeted killings - he vigorously affirmed that to be his intention.

Brushing aside concerns raised by environmental groups, the Bush administration exempted most poultry farms yesterday from reporting releases of ammonia and other hazardous substances from the waste their flocks produce. The Environmental Protection Agency backed away from the blanket exemption it had originally proposed, saying the largest livestock farms will still have to report releases of potentially harmful gases - but only to emergency response planners, not environmental regulators.

ELDERSBURG -- After Lorraine Small's husband passed away about two weeks ago, she began to sort through some of his belongings while straightening up the house. But when she came upon a collection of chemicals her husband used in his septic testing business, Mrs. Small knew she had stumbled upon something she could not properly dispose of.Mrs. Small alerted the Carroll County Emergency Operations Center Thursday and county officials, in turn, summoned state and federal officials to the home in the residential community of Gaither.

VIENNA, Austria -- North Korea sidestepped the threat of impending U.N. economic sanctions yesterday by agreeing, after months of delay, to allow international inspections of seven nuclear facilities.The International Atomic Energy Agency announced that the Pyongyang regime of President Kim Il-Sung had accepted the agency's plans and conditions for inspecting the facilities. The inspections are expected to take place within a few weeks.Though other issues remain unresolved, both the IAEA and the Clinton administration portrayed the new agreement as an important step forward.

Sen. Richard M. Burr's proposal to create a new agency to combat outbreaks of infectious diseases, natural and man-made, is wrongheaded in two major respects. There are already two agencies that support research and preparedness for biothreats: the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And they both do it without throwing out the basic public policy safeguards of the Freedom of Information Act and the Federal Advisory Committee Act. Recent talk of the imminent threat of bird flu and other pandemics has ratcheted up the post-9/11 fear of a terrorist loosing some biological weapon in our midst.

A man wanted in seven shootings and armed robberies eluded efforts to arrest him yesterday after he scaled the outside of a public-housing high-rise and disappeared on the seventh floor, police said.More than 50 heavily armed city police officers and FBI agents searched the 14-story Murphy Homes building for five hours before quitting about 3 p.m.Police believe the man managed to leave the Argyle Avenue high-rise.As they searched, police closed Martin Luther King Boulevard and U.S. 40, both major roads into and out of the city, causing tie-ups that lasted several hours.

There was an earnest debate last year about whether torture should ever be used in a democracy, and the favorite argument of the pro-torture side was the "ticking bomb" example - that to save a (hypothetical) city from imminent destruction, you should be able to use whatever means you needed to if you were lucky enough to have one of the plotters in your custody. Such a situation, to be sure, has almost certainly never arisen at any time in world history, but the idea of it was sufficient to convince a lot of people that, just maybe, it would be imprudent to absolutely rule out torture in any circumstances.

Eighteen health care workers were inoculated against smallpox in Baltimore yesterday - the long-anticipated inaugural step in creating a Maryland work force to respond in the event of an outbreak. After months of planning, nine employees each from the Baltimore Health Department and the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene voluntarily rolled up their sleeves at the Clarence H. Du Burns Arena in Southeast Baltimore. City Health Department workers administered the vaccine. "This provides a ready health-response work force, and it provides the protection to go out and do the job should there be a case or an outbreak," said Dr. Julie Casani, head of Maryland's Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response, who received the vaccine.