Mcdade

BaseballChicago White Sox -- Named Dave Yoakum special assistant to the senior VP of major-league operations.Detroit Tigers -- Agreed to terms with C Mickey Tettleton on a 3-year contract.Tidewater Tides (Class AAA) -- Named Kevin Greene assistant GM.San Jose Giants (Class A) -- Named Frank Reberger pitching coach.BasketballNew Jersey Nets -- Waived F Von McDade, F Sydney Grider and F Emmanuel Davis.San Antonio Spurs -- Reached agreement on a 3-year contract with F Antoine Carr (20.1 ppg, 5.5 rpg with Sacramento Kings last season)

PharmaKinetics Laboratories Inc. and its former vice president have pleaded guilty to obstructing a federal investigation of Bolar Pharmaceutical Co., a generic drug company that itself has been convicted of a corruption charge.Judge John R. Hargrove accepted the pleas in U.S. District Court in Baltimore yesterday and fined PharmaKinetics $200,000, an amount recommended by federal prosecutors.Mark B. Perkal, a PharmaKinetics founder and former executive vice president, pleaded guilty at a separate hearing yesterday.

When Stephen W. Lafferty opened the newspaper Dec. 7, he could not believe his eyes: Some MSPAP scores at his well-heeled neighborhood's high-achieving elementary school had nose-dived. Twenty-eight percent of third-graders at Stoneleigh Elementary School had earned a satisfactory score on MSPAP's reading test, a 23 percent drop. Of about 100 elementary schools in the county, only six posted larger losses. Lafferty, a state housing official who does not have children, discussed this with his wife, and later talked with friends.

Nestled among the Pocono Mountains, tiny Marywood College in Scranton, Pa., would seem to be a peaceful refuge from worldly strife. But the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, who run Marywood, are in fact military contractors; the 1992 Defense Appropriation Act earmarked $10 million in military research funds for the sisters.The year before, Scranton University, an obscure Jesuit school that does not offer a doctorate degree, was also awarded $10 million in Department of Defense research funds.

My object is to mystify and entertain. I wouldn't deceive you for the world. — Howard Thurston If Central Casting were looking for an archetypical prestidigitator, it could do no better than George Goebel, the veteran Baltimore magician and Houdini expert who also owns A.T. Jones & Sons, the Howard Street costume shop. "In our day, magicians looked like magicians. Today, they wear jeans and other outfits," Goebel said in an interview the other day. "A magician should wear a full dress suit, pique vest, turban and have a beard.

Former senior officials of Bolar Pharmaceutical Co. ordered product substitutions, coverups and other criminal misconduct so the company could derail federal investigations and continue to sell a highly successful generic hypertension drug to the public, according to federal prosecutors.Sales of the drug, a Dyazide generic substitute called Triamterene/Hydrochlorothiazide, brought Bolar $142 million in revenues in 2-1/2 years, between August 1987 and January 1990, before it was removed from the market at the request of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Westminster attorney Geoffrey S. Black is the kind of person Rotary clubs would love to have as a member.Heavily involved in the community, he is a former town council member in Manchester and past president of the local Lions Club. The reason he hasn't joined helps explain why many Maryland Rotary clubs are struggling to keep going."The number of evenings that you have available is a finite number," said Mr. Black, who juggles his law practice with helping ferry his three children to ballet, gymnastics and Girl Scouts.

ATLANTA -- After bludgeoning his wife and two children to death with a hammer, and just eight hours before slaughtering nine people in the brokerage houses where he traded, Mark O. Barton typed a chilling confession on his computer and warned that he planned to live just long enough to kill "the people that greedily sought my destruction."The letter, which Barton apparently wrote near sunrise Thursday and then left in the Stockbridge, Ga., apartment where he had killed his family, suggested that he was tortured by his estrangement from his wife, by his losses in the stock market and by unexplained fears that he said had been "transferred from my father to me and from me to my son."

DELAWARE WATER GAP, Pa. -- There's a remarkable new building in the federal park in Pennsylvania: a two-hole outhouse, without running water, that cost the National Park Service at least $333,000.It's nestled amid evergreens, with a gabled slate roof, cottage-style porches, and a handsomely tapered cobblestone masonry foundation in the manner of Frank Lloyd Wright. A medley of wildflowers hides any sign of new construction.Inside each spacious restroom, a green horizontal stripe at baseboard level plays off the green of hemlocks visible through discreetly placed picture windows.

Given the numerous antics Wednesday as the General Assembly opened, one legislator likens this year's 90-day session to an extended Legislative Follies. (The annual Follies is one-night of skits in which lawmakers poke fun at themselves.)The remark set the stage for a delightful few hours I spent with a couple of Annapolis insiders at the historic Middleton's Tavern in Annapolis making up a "wish list" for a few movers and shakers.We would wish for:* Maryland Court of Appeals Chief Judge Robert C. Murphy: No-doze pills to be distributed to legislators before he delivers his State of the Judiciary today.