Interview

A.J. Foyt, Indy car racing's all-time winningest driver (67) and championship record holder (7), is now 77. He's had open heart surgery, and in January went through an illness that nearly killed him. But here he is, alive, opinionated and planning to get his race team back among the top teams in the IndyCar Series. In a recent one-on-one interview Foyt talked about many things, among them why the 1977 Indy 500 win was special to him beyond making him the first driver to win the race four times, the recent announcement that he'll field a car for minority driver Chase Austin in the Indianapolis 500 next May and a recent staph infection following same-day surgeries to remove bone spurs from his artificial knee and repair a rotator cuff.

You can see why a state might require minors to have a parent's OK before they receive medical care. But Maryland law has made life especially difficult for homeless teenagers who have no adults watching out for them. It's the sort of problem that drives Lisa Stambolis crazy. As director of pediatric and adolescent health at Health Care for the Homeless in Baltimore, she organized people — including homeless teens — to press for change. It worked. A new law offering more leeway for minors' medical treatment goes into effect Oct. 1. In July, Stambolis was honored for her efforts and named a White House "Champion of Change," one of 13 selected for their efforts on behalf of homeless youth.

This year I've had the opporrtunity to enjoy all the action from Los Angeles in the days leading up to Summerslam 2012. Here are the tidbits I have collected from several WWE Superstars: Stephanie McMahon gives an interesting answer on whether or not she will return to WWE TV. Wade Barrett  says he is 99 percent healed from injury and details the character changes we can expect when he returns to WWE TV. Antonio Cesaro...

I thought I had said all I was going to say about Fareed Zakaria's plagiarism Friday night when I wrote about how wrong it was to steal the words and ideas of another -- and how deadly for a public intellectual. Read here what I said about Zakaria's actions shredding any sense of intellectual authority I once thought he had. But then, came the lame defenses from some other people in the media the last two days -- defenses that only underlined in my mind what I said about the deeply confused and debased state of journalism today.

Mitt Romney's campaign got its shot at introducing Paul Ryan to America Saturday morning in front of the USS Wisconsin in Norfolk, Va. But the more important introduction in terms of mainstream America came Sunday night courtesy of '60 Minutes,' which scored the first sit-down TV interview with the Republican team. I'm glad Schieffer and '60 Minutes'  were the ones the Romney campaign chose to talk to. The veteran Washington journalist and the production team from the most successful news show in the history of the medium handled the conversation as well as it could be handled.

Baltimore BioWorks is John Powers's third biotech company — and the one that he says he's most excited about. The 56-year-old Ellicott City doctor built a career in biotechnology, working for the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, and more recently as an entrepreneur and consultant. He already grew and sold two biotech companies in Maryland. He's a minority investor in his latest venture, Baltimore BioWorks, which is taking an unusual tack in the biotechnology sector.

Does it feel as if NBC and its affiliates are getting a little greedy with its London coverage? As one who has defended the network's right to try and make as much money as it can off the games in hopes of offsetting the $1.18 billion it paid for rights, I have to admit even I have been getting a little queasy as to the way  that long-held patterns of network prime-time programming and affiliate news are being bent in pursuit of extra profits....

NBC will air a one-hour look at the career of Michael Phelps at 7 tonight, the network announced late Saturday night. "Michael Phelps: America's Golden Champion" will feature what the NBC Sports is calling an "exclusive" interview by Bob Costas done with the Phelps at the end of his final day of competition Saturday. "America's greatest interviewer sitting down with the world's greatest Olympic champion makes for an inspiring piece of television," NBC Olympics executive producer Jim Bell said in a statement announcing the prime-time special.

Could Lynne Zink sell a curling iron to a bald man? Maybe. Since becoming an auctioneer more than a decade ago, the Joppa resident and former high school teacher has handled tens of thousands of items at property sales and nonprofit fundraisers such as the Washington Humane Society's annual Bark Ball. Last month, the self-employed Zink won the women's division of the International Auctioneer Championship in Spokane, Wash., where 79 male and female competitors were judged by the National Auctioneers Association on their presentation, voice quality, body language and knowledge of their business.

Robert L. Wallace, CEO of Baltimore-based Bithgroup Technologies, has spent more than two decades building a minority-owned business into a multimillion-dollar success and writing and lecturing about entrepreneurship. The Cherry Hill-born mechanical engineer recently was tapped to head a new, 25-member advisory council created by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to help improve the city's minority- and women-owned business enterprise program. Wallace, who attended city public schools and earned an MBA from Dartmouth College, worked for DuPont and IBM in Baltimore in the 1980s before starting his company, which is now located in Mount Vernon.