Independent

Just months after Erickson Retirement Communities filed for bankruptcy, the company's new owners say they are poised for expansion with the same business model that seized up along with the housing and credit markets last year. Local entrepreneur Jim Davis, whose Redwood Capital Investments LLC bought Erickson for $365 million this month, said the Catonsville-based company is more financially sound than ever after wiping out most of its debt through the bankruptcy. That will enable Erickson to move forward in the next year with new housing at about a dozen of its existing communities that are not fully developed, he said.

The woman who says she represents North American Power is not telling the truth about the benefits of buying electricity from her company. "You can save up to 10, 15, 20 percent of your bill, depending on your usage," she says in a telemarketing call to my house. But the rate she eventually quotes is only about 7 percent less than the standard price offered by Baltimore Gas & Electric — something the average customer would have no way of knowing. And of course the percentage savings won't vary even if my "usage" goes up to that of a steel mill.

The Johns Hopkins men's lacrosse program plans to surrender its status as an independent and join a conference, the university announced Friday. The Blue Jays have competed independently for 130 years, winning nine NCAA championships and qualifying for 41 consecutive NCAA tournaments before getting left out of the postseason earlier this month. In a letter to the Johns Hopkins community and posted on the school's website, president Ronald J. Daniels said he accepted the recommendation of a seven-member special committee that proposed that the program pursue a conference affiliation.

If an auto repair shop says it charges $70 an hour for labor, and the job takes one hour, how much is the labor bill? David Verdiner thought the answer should be $70 when he had his car fixed at a Pep Boys - Manny, Moe & Jack Inc. garage in Los Angeles two years ago. The store had signs stating that its hourly labor rate was $70. But instead, Verdiner claims, he was billed $112 for the labor, even though the job took only 40 minutes. Verdiner paid his bill. But in October 2002 he sued Pep Boys for fraud and false advertising.

Filming of the second season of the Netflix production “House of Cards” began in the Baltimore area Monday, and with it came an announcement from Gov. Martin O'Malley that the first season of the political thriller starring Kevin Spacey had brought $140 million in economic impact and 2,200 jobs to the state. The state's Film Production Tax Credit helped bring “House of Cards” here, according to O'Malley. “Together with our leaders in the General Assembly, we've expanded the Film Production Tax Credit,” O'Malley said in a statement, “and as we welcome the cast and crew back, we also look forward to more job creation and economic opportunity to come.” Both the dollar figures and the politics behind them in O'Malley's statement were quickly called into question by critics of the incentives program.

In 2008, Ed DeRosa witnessed the infamy of the Preakness infield - the passed-out partiers, the chucking of full beer cans into crowds and of course, the "Running of the Urinals," where drunken infielders ran down a row of portable toilets. DeRosa, a horse-racing reporter from Lexington, Ky., who attended Preakness from 2005 to 2011, says nothing could have prepared a first-timer for the debauchery. "I was in Vegas for New Year's Eve a couple times, and until I had been to the Preakness infield, that was the craziest I'd ever seen people behave," DeRosa, now 33, said.

CRUMPTON -- Pulpwood cutters Joe and Annie Clark are part of a vanishing breed -- small independent contractors who cut Eastern Shore pine trees used to make paper. No matter -- these woodchoppers are having a ball."People don't do this kind of work anymore," Mr. Clark says. "When I started, pulpwood was mostly guys like me -- mom-and-pop operations. Now, it's mostly loggers."Thirty years ago, hundreds of independently contracted crews cut pulpwood on the Shore. Today, fewer than a dozen such crews still work in the woods, their number diminished over the last two decades by huge logging companies that work faster and cheaper.

An installation artist who sculpts with mirrors and salt, an innovative cellist and a self-taught photographer whose work has been informed by the four decades that she has spent battling a rare genetic illness are the winners of the 2013 Baker Artist Awards. The $25,000 awards, announced Thursday night on Maryland Public Television's "ArtWorks," are being bestowed upon Dariusz Skoraczewski, the principal cellist of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; sculptor Jonathan Latiano, a recent graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art ; and photographer Lynne Parks.

The Justice Department's secret review of Associated Press telephone records gives advocates for federal employees one more reason to doubt the Obama administration's full commitment to protecting whistleblowers, particularly those in national security agencies. Revelations about the department's broad prying into the work, home and mobile phone records of AP journalists in Washington, New York and Hartford, Conn., sent a chill through news organizations. Perhaps that was the point.

There was a sharp contrast between the two headlining performances at this year's Preakness InfieldFest. Frugal rapper Macklemore, an independent artist with two No. 1 hit singles to his name, won the crowd over Saturday with messages that were positive, compassionate and sometimes just silly. Pitbull, the stoic purveyor of Eurodance-inspired rap-meets-pop, bludgeoned the crowd with rib-cage-shaking bass. And though Macklemore performed to a dry crowd while Pitbull fought through the rain, the results were largely the same, with an approving crowd fist-pumping and dancing.