Leak

In recent years, album release dates haven't mattered as much as "leak" days have. That trend continued when the compilation album from Kanye West and his G.O.O.D. Music clique - "Cruel Summer," an odd name for a record that will hit stores on Tuesday, five days before fall begins - hit the Internet while most of us were sleeping last night. You won't find a link here, but if you're good with the Google, you should have no problem finding it. There's always iTunes, too. We've heard the singles - the ubiquitous "Mercy" has been banging out of cars for months and "New God Flow" (now with a wonderful Ghostface Killah verse tacked on at the end)

WASHINGTON - Joseph C. Wilson IV is having the time of his life. The former-diplomat-turned-Bush-administration-accuser spent last week ruminating over who might play his wife - the now-famous CIA operative Valerie Plame - when Hollywood comes knocking on the couple's door. "She is really quite amazing," Mr. Wilson told The Washington Post, which described Ms. Plame as a slim, 40-year-old blonde, possessing "the looks of a film star" herself. Somehow, this doesn't sound like a man worried that the leak of his wife's name and identity as a CIA employee by someone high up in the Bush administration might jeopardize her life.

OBSESSED BY leaks, a powerful chief executive directs eager-to-please law officers to find out which of his aides have been using the telephone to call reporters.When caught out abusing his power by causing the invasion of privacy, the leak-plugger insists he broke no law, belatedly admitting only an "error in judgment."Sound familiar? In the current case, the chief executive is Edwin L. Artzt of Procter & Gamble; his target was Alecia Swasy of the Wall Street Journal, who dared to make public corporate shake-ups and plans; his plumbers were police and prosecutors of Cincinnati, who subpoenaed the records of 803,000 home and business phones to satisfy a private company's lust to intimidate its critics and conceal its embarrassments.

The e-mail message was written in February 2007, a year after an underground leak at an Exxon gas station in northern Baltimore County fouled wells and hammered property values. After cleanup efforts are completed, "no one will remember Phoenix," the message said, referring to the address of the Jacksonville area where the spill occurred. "Just another notch in the tree of life. " Written by an Exxon Mobil Corp. project manager to a colleague, the text was enlarged and projected onto a screen in a Towson courtroom yesterday by Stephen L. Snyder, a lawyer for 309 residents who are suing the oil company for at least $1 billion in Baltimore County Circuit Court.

The problem: A leak in Northeast Baltimore leaves inches of ice on Belair Road. The back story: Eugene Byrnes was worried about the babies. He lives about a block from the intersection of Belair Road and Woodlea Avenue in Northeast Baltimore, and for weeks, Byrnes has witnessed people struggling across the ice that has become a regular feature of the northwest corner on cold days. "The bus gets in there to load and unload passengers and has trouble getting out," Byrnes said.

A hazardous materials crew was called to clean up a spill of automotive fluids into a small stream following a single vehicle accident north of Rocks State Park in northern Harford County Wednesday afternoon. A Honda Accord traveling north ran off Route 24 a few hundred feet north of Coen Road, flipping over and landing in the stream around 3:38 p.m., according to Rich Gardiner, a spokesman for the Harford Volunteer Fire & EMS Association. The driver, whose name and age were unavailable, was taken by ambulance to a regional trauma center, Gardiner said.

JOHN O. Requard Jr. waited 30 years to say it: He didn't leak Richard M. Nixon's income tax information to the press. And he thinks he knows who did. Sure, Requard says, he was there in late 1972 or early 1973 when another young Internal Revenue Service guy passed around microfilm prints showing Nixon paid a pittance in tax on a $200,000 salary. And yeah, he admits, he initially told IRS investigators he hadn't seen the prints - a misstatement that would haunt him. But he wasn't the one who dished the information to Jack White of The Providence Journal, blowing another hole in the Nixon presidency and allowing White to win the Pulitzer Prize, says Requard, who recently retired from the IRS. Although, now that he thinks about it, he kind of wishes he was. The illegal disclosure of Nixon's tax data in the fall of 1973 is obscured by more famous contemporary leaks such as that of the Pentagon Papers or those dispensed by Watergate's Deep Throat.

A small sulfur dioxide leak at the county sewage treatment plant in Broadneck was fixed yesterday morning before the toxic gas - that smells like rotten eggs - reached dangerous levels, officials said. After the water is chlorinated to purify it, sulfur dioxide is used to dechlorinate the treated water before it can be channeled into the Chesapeake Bay, said Anne Arundel County Fire Battalion Chief John M. Scholz. The leak was detected about 9 a.m., and the tank was repaired by 11 a.m. About a half-dozen county Public Works employees were evacuated from the building until tests showed no more sulfur dioxide was in the air, Scholz said.

A leak in Deep Creek Dam in Garrett County prompted an alert to area residents, Maryland Department of the Environment officials reported. There was no immediate threat of the dam failing, according to state officials. "MDE has sent staff from our compliance program to investigate the leak," MDE Secretary Shari T. Wilson said in a statement. "We will continue to monitor the situation as long as necessary to ensure the safety of Maryland residents living in the vicinity." The leak is in the penstock, which takes water from Deep Creek Lake to the dam's powerhouse.

Baltimore County jurors returned a verdict for punitive damages against ExxonMobil Corp. on Thursday that raises the total award stemming from an underground gasoline leak in 2006 to more than $1.5 billion, a figure that a plaintiffs' lawyer says could make it the largest judgment ever in a case of this type. A review of the final verdict, released in full Friday, shows that it includes more than $1 billion in new awards divided among 160 families and businesses in the small north county community of Jacksonville, plus compensatory damages awarded earlier in the week.