Kach

Baltimore County's roads stand to receive $351 million in state- and federally funded improvements during the next six years -- but local officials are asking for more.With a $200 million pot of transportation money up for grabs, Baltimore County Executive C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger renewed his push yesterday for the state to contribute $50 million toward the construction of a long-planned extension of Route 43 in White Marsh."This project opens up almost 700 acres for new commercial development," Ruppersberger told state transportation secretary John D. Porcari and his top aides, in town for their annual meeting on local road and transit projects.

The Baltimore County Council's commission on redistricting has announced its plan for getting what critics said was lacking the last time lines were redrawn: public input. The six members, meeting for the first time Friday, said they are reluctant to schedule meetings with other groups that have drafted reform proposals or with people who complained that the council acted in secret when it drew new lines last summer. Such meetings, they said, could keep the commission from meeting its May 1 deadline.

To cut into conservative strength in Maryland's Eighth Legislative District, Democratic redistricters acted two years ago drop some of the Eighth's more Republican precincts in favor of city neighborhoods and other areas that would be inclined to vote for Democrats. The lone Democratic incumbent from the district, Sen. Thomas L. Bromwell, will nonetheless have a hard time winning re-election. For one thing, the district remains largely conservative. For another, his GOP opponent, Del. John J. Bishop Jr., is a moderate who can appeal to voters from both parties.

In 1929, Arab rioters killed some 60 Jews in Hebron. The event is etched in Israeli consciousness. Its remembrance forms part of Israeli nationalism. After partition in 1948, Hebron was controlled by Jordan, the ethnic cleansing complete. To roll it back, ardent Zionists founded Kiryat Arba and other settlements near Hebron and the reputed Cave of Abraham, after Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967.The slaughter of Arab Muslim worshipers at the Cave of Abraham by the American-Israeli Baruch Goldstein last Friday was a comparable atrocity.

Paris. -- The most extreme nationalist is the one whose nationality is in doubt. The Kach movement in Israel, whose member, Baruch Goldstein, killed 52 Muslim worshipers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, February 25, is one of several American politico-religious sects transplanted to Israel.Late arrivals on the Israeli scene, these sects aggressively employ the iconography of the Holocaust and of a Nazi persecution they never themselves experienced. The Hebron murderer, Baruch Goldstein, wore the yellow star to political demonstrations inside Israel but never had to wear it in Germany.

A House committee voted 16-6 yesterday to approve a bill that would create a state registry to allow unmarried roommates to make medical decisions for one another. Members of the Health and Government Operations Committee fought amendments to the Medical Decision Making Act of 2004 that would have widened its target beyond the two groups that want the protection because they are unable or unwilling to marry: gay couples and seniors age 62 and older. If the bill becomes law, eligible couples would be able to register their relationship with a state health agency in order to ease post-death and medical care decision-making.

Their party reeling from the loss of the governorship and seats in the legislature, several Republicans in the House of Delegates are pushing for new leadership and a move away from the confrontational tactics that defined relations between the GOP and Democratic General Assembly leaders for the past four years. The drive for more cooperation is the first move in what is expecting to be a post-election retrenching for the state GOP. Top party posts in the state Senate are also up for grabs, and the Maryland Republican Party is likely to select a new chairman to oversee operations.

What good is it living in one of fanciest corners of Baltimore if the neighborhood sign sticks it to you? Some wiseacre keeps messing with a quaint wooden sign that should tell Homelanders, in more ways than one, that they've arrived. Instead of "Homeland," the sign sometimes says, "Ho Land." Or someplace else that can't be printed in a family newspaper - not, as Seinfeldians know, that there's anything wrong with that. This, in a corner of Charm City that prides itself on covenant-controlled taste.

As residents of the Jacksonville area of Baltimore County struggle to cope with a massive gasoline leak threatening their wells, they are getting help and guidance from neighboring Fallston, where widespread contamination of groundwater by a gasoline additive still troubles the community. In Jacksonville, the leak of an estimated 25,000 gallons from an Exxon service station at the junction of Jarrettsville Pike and Paper Mill and Sweet Air roads has so far been found to have contaminated one well, though more than 80 others are being checked.

Walter Boyd, a Republican House of Delegates candidate in District 9A, says, "Everyone talks about crime, but nobody does anything about it."He's right about the first part. Everyone appears to be talking about crime first and everything else second in the huge district, which stretches from Baynesville to the Pennsylvania line.More than 44,500 people are registered to vote in the district in the Sept. 13 primary -- 23,568 as Democrats, 17,597 as Republicans. The rest are registered mostly as independents.