Mystery

They don't make many power couples like this: He's a self-proclaimed whistle blower, the focus of international headlines and Obama administration ire. She describes herself as a "world-traveling, pole-dancing super hero. " Edward Snowden and Lindsay Mills lived in a modest blue clapboard house with white trim here in a Honolulu suburb until about six weeks ago. Their former neighbors described them as quiet and private. On Sunday, Snowden announced that he was responsible for leaking secrets about America's telephone and Internet surveillance pograms to the media, reviving a global debate about Big Brother-style government surveillance of private citizens.

Beginning this Saturday, the Tremont Grand Historic Venue will host a murder mystery dinner on the last Saturday of every month. The interactive mysteries will be staged by Do or Die Mysteries, which has been producing murder mystery events for the past 20 years in the Baltimore-Washington area. The kick-off production is titled Art of Murder , and the story line will change at each event. Reservations are required. Admission includes dinner, the show and non-alcoholic beverages.

Either you or Rep. C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger aren't telling the whole story about his decision leave the House Armed Services Committee, because the explanation given doesn't make any sense ("Ruppersberger steps down from Armed Services panel," June 27). Neither he nor your reporter answers the basic question: Why is a senior member of an important congressional committee stepping aside to make way for an incoming freshman? It should be the other way around. Sorry, but I must be missing something here.

President Barack Obama wants to invest an initial $110 billion in a study of the human brain that could have benefits as great as those achieved by the Human Genome Project. Maybe the first study should be done on the one-track minds of tea party Republicans who will undoubtedly oppose funding for the study because their brains are fixated on the single idea that government can do nothing right. After that, researchers could move on to figuring out Sarah Palin's brain. Perhaps they could answer this question: How can a person with so little knowledge and so little interest in acquiring knowledge imagine she has what it takes to be president of the United States?

The black-and-white Polaroid photo shows a building tilting precipitously to the right. Above what appears to be a picture window, a curving line of type clearly spells out "The Old Gold Store. " But when Ted Serios snapped that shot on May 13, 1965, he was sitting inside a hotel room, and the camera was pointed directly at his face. More than 46 years later, there's no consensus as to whether what Serios described as a "thoughtograph" is an example of a genuine paranormal event, or if it ranks among history's most clever cons.

Local author Sherban Young pens what he calls “mystery capers.” The 37-year-old Ellicott City resident got interested in solving puzzles and mysteries through CD-ROM interactive adventure games while at Loyola University, where he majored in English literature. Though in partnership with his father in a Columbia financial planning firm, Young has disciplined himself to devote time each morning to writing his mystery capers. “I love to solve puzzles,” he said, adding that his style of mystery writing enables “readers to enjoy themselves ... my writing is to be entertaining and intriguing.

There's new life in Back River — though not quite what folks had been hoping for. The eastern Baltimore County waterway, long degraded by sewage and development, has been humming the past few summers with hordes of midges, gnat-like insects that swarm over the water and along the shoreline. They don't bite, though they look like mosquitoes. But their mating swarms are bedeviling waterfront residents, boaters and marina operators because the bugs are drawn to lights and light-colored objects.

Beginning this Saturday, the Tremont Grand Historic Venue will host a murder mystery dinner on the last Saturday of every month. The interactive mysteries will be staged by Do or Die Mysteries, which has been producing murder mystery events for the past 20 years in the Baltimore-Washington area. The kick-off production is titled Art of Murder , and the story line will change at each event. Reservations are required. Admission includes dinner, the show and non-alcoholic beverages.

Monica Marcum sat in the office of the Baltimore City Historical Society and held a document she discovered among her late father's papers. It was a check dated July 6, 1874, for $62.81 for plumbing materials at the "new City Hall. " She was giving the canceled check to the historical group because she thought it deserved a proper home. She wondered how her father came into possession of this financial document for Baltimore's City Hall, which was under construction during this period and opened for business in 1875.

Well, that didn't take long. Less than 24 hours after The Baltimore Sun ran a story about the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum's year-long search for the owner of a rare and valuable baseball card, the owner has surfaced. A man identifying himself as Glenn Davis of Bethany Beach, Del., contacted the museum – and the newspaper -- to say he was the owner of the 1914 Baltimore News Babe Ruth rookie card. It's one of the most valuable cards on the market, with an estimated value of $500,000.

The White House proposed a sweeping new initiative Tuesday to map the individual cells and circuits that make up the human brain, a project that will give scientists a better understanding of how a healthy brain works and how to devise better treatments for injuries and diseases. "There is this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked," said President Barack Obama of the project unveiled at a White House ceremony packed with scientists. Called the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative, the program would be funded with an initial $100 million from the president's fiscal 2014 budget, which the White House is to release next week.

100 Years Ago 'Refined' burlesque An ad in the Times: "Gayety Theatre - A Big Event in Local Theatricals - An announcement will soon be made of the coming to Baltimore of one stellar aggregation of stars, that will surprise even the regular theatre patrons. In the last few years we have had several All Star Revivals, the Lambs and Friars Star Gambols, etc., but the first and only Burlesque Jubilee will be seen at the Gayety theatre, Baltimore, Md. "The signal honor was tendered Al Reeves, who will head this big organization as Mr. Reeves is considered without a peer in his line.

Act first and ask questions later is not always a great management strategy, but in the case of Anne Arundel County Executive Laura Neuman's response to a mysterious network of surveillance cameras in and around government buildings, it's hard to consider it rash. Ms. Neuman has now been on the job for a little over a week, after being named by the County Council to replace former executive John Leopold, and given the circumstances of his departure, Ms. Neuman can't act fast enough to convince county workers and residents that a new leader has taken charge at the Arundel Center.

When Jeff Chase committed to Loyola as a member of the Boys' Latin lacrosse team, the Greyhounds thought they were getting one of the country's premier midfielders. The program is still high on the Monrovia native, but it's unclear what Chase can provide because of yet another injury. Chase, an Under Armour All-America selection in his senior year, redshirted last season because of an unspecified injury, and another ailment has delayed his return to the practice field this winter, according to coach Charley Toomey.

When reporters asked Baltimore police and state agencies where the guns used in city crimes came from, no one could provide specific information. "I can tell you that the vast majority, 95 percent plus, are committed with illegal guns," Baltimore police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said. But he didn't use data to support that widely held assumption. Local law enforcement agencies don't have that information because of a federal blockage of gun tracing data. Police also can't reveal what gun tracing data they do have because a federal law passed a decade ago shields most firearm tracking information from the public.

Tonight's "American Idol" in Baton Rouge was the best episode thus far. We actually got to see more authentic talent than squabbles between the lady judges and misfits. It was awesome.  In the very beginning, we were introduced to Miss Baton Rouge herself, Megan Miller, who opted to postpone surgery on her leg to not miss her audition. Megan did us all a huge favor, siding with singing versus going under the knife. "I would let my leg fall off before I missed this audition," Megan said.

HADDONFIELD, N.J. - Sometimes I think of myself as threads of my father, angles of light that come forward in time to illuminate the years since he passed away. On his famous marathon walks through the city, he taught me to read by mouthing words off overhead signs, window advertisements and billboards that plastered construction sites. Six-foot-four with a mop of orange hair, he'd act like a kid sometimes. He loved to gawk at skyscraper excavations, which opened up like the Grand Canyon as gargantuan machines rumbled down earthen ramps and tiny men rode elephantine tractors and giraffe-like cranes to raise steel scaffolding high into the noonday sun. Dad loved to share the mysteries of the world with us as kids, as if there were great secrets hiding behind every corner.

"Ashes of Glory: Richmond at War," by Ernest B. Furgurson. Knopf, 432 pages. $30.As the Civil War ground inexorably to an end in the spring of 1865, a correspondent for the New York Herald, mired in the mud with Grant's troops outside Richmond, wrote of the Confederate capital: "Its history is the epitome of the whole contest, and to us, shivering out thunderbolts against it for more than four years, Richmond is still a mystery."More than 400 pages later, Richmond is a mystery no more. Not that it was still a total mystery in modern times.

A few years ago I raised my hand at an auction and bought a box of 19th-century sepia-toned landscape photographs. After hours of looking at them, I detected that they had been taken not far away, in the heart of the Jones Falls Valley in Baltimore City, before an elevated highway and 125 years of development intervened. The other morning I was standing in the bottom floor of the old cotton warehouse at the Mount Vernon Mill on Falls Road, an amazing property that will make its debut this spring as Mill No. 1, a residential and office complex.

By now, 60 long years after Agatha Christie's “The Mousetrap” opened in London, the whodunit is more of a fixture than a stage show. It apparently cannot ever be stopped on that side of The Pond, where it has surpassed the 25,000th performance mark and still holds firmly onto the record as the world's longest-running play. On our shores, the work never became such an institution, but it still continues to attract attention now and then, particularly from community theater groups.