National Service

Joseph B. Williams, former aide to three Baltimore County public schools superintendents and a founder of Alternatives Unlimited, a national educational services company, died of complications from diabetes at Stella Maris Hospice in Timonium. The Pikesville resident was 72. Born in Gettysburg, Pa., Mr. Williams moved to Baltimore, where he attended Douglass High School. He earned his General Educational Development certificate while serving in the Army Transportation Corps from 1957 to 1959.

The Gambrills-Odenton Recreation Council 95-pound football team often draws crowds to its games. But every week this fall, millions are seeing the Wildcats in action. Some members of the Wildcats wound up being last-minute replacements in a public service announcement filmed for USA Football, an independent, nonprofit organization that advocates the development of youth and amateur football. The kids, ages 9 and 10, some parents and coach Rick Peacock spent a long day at North County High School in July filming the public service announcement supporting USA Football's Play Football Month, which runs from mid-August to mid-September.

Standing on scaffolding, wearing eye-protecting glasses and with a steel hammer in his hand, Louis Brown sweated in the humid air as he laboriously restored the stone chinks between hand-hewn logs that farmer Aaron McKenzie first erected in Howard County 145 years ago. "It gives you the feel of what they had to go through back in time," said Brown, 28, a National Park Service employee helping Howard County restore the two-story, 1860 log barn McKenzie built...

Kayakers will soon be able to paddle and explore the Eastern Neck National Wildlife Refuge via an educational water trail paid for by one of four federal grants to be announced today. At today's ceremony at the Seven Foot Knoll Lighthouse, the National Park Service will award a total of $327,538 to the Gwynns Falls Trail Council, the Baltimore Maritime Museum, the National Aquarium in Baltimore and the USS Constellation Museum. The groups - which are required to raise matching funds - will put the money toward restoration work, trails and the improvement of educational materials relating to the Chesapeake Bay. The "projects are intended to help people explore and understand the depth and connections there are to the Chesapeake throughout the entire region," said Jonathan Doherty, director of the Chesapeake Bay Gateways Network, which is distributing the grants for the park service.

Hands covered in hot dog juices and cold tomato soup, 11-year-old Joshua Geathers thought yesterday about the homeless man he has seen near the garbage containers behind his downtown Baltimore middle school. "We have a homeless person in the back of our school, and I think this food would really cheer him up," said Joshua, a sixth-grader at Mother Seton Academy. The hot dogs and tomato soup were two of the key ingredients in more than 450 casseroles prepared yesterday for the Our Daily Bread food kitchen by sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders from the School of the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen and Mother Seton Academy.

WASHINGTON - With community service groups bracing for severe cuts in their volunteer staffs, a group of senators moved yesterday to stop the bleeding with a $100 million infusion for the AmeriCorps national service program. The funding increase faces dim prospects in the Republican-led House and will probably stall unless President Bush aggressively pushes for it. The Senate Appropriations Committee agreed to include the money for AmeriCorps in a $1.9 billion emergency disaster spending bill, set for action by the full Senate this month and enactment next month.

In Washington No. 2 official of EPA submits her resignation The second-ranking official at the Environmental Protection Agency submitted her resignation yesterday, a day before Administrator Christine Todd Whitman leaves her job to return to New Jersey. Linda Fisher, the deputy administrator, had been seen as a possible successor to Whitman, who took over the agency after serving as New Jersey governor. Fisher told President Bush in her resignation letter that she plans to step down July 11. Her decision further narrows the list of candidates to head EPA. Other names frequently circulated include GOP Gov. Dirk Kempthorne of Idaho and Tom Skinner, an EPA regional administrator for the Midwest region whose father, Samuel K. Skinner, was White House chief of staff for Bush's father.

The B&O Railroad Museum has requested $1 million from a program administered by the National Park Service to help pay to restore exhibits damaged in the collapse of the roundhouse roof. The Save America's Treasures program has $30 million earmarked this year for preserving and restoring sites and collections considered national icons. The most an organization can request this year is $1 million in matching funds. Last year, no project was awarded more than $500,000. "That's a pretty big grab," Courtney B. Wilson, the B&O's executive director, said of his request.

The National Park Service issued its final ruling yesterday, allowing personal watercraft such as Jet Skis in two small areas off Assateague Island - a decision that environmentalists say will likely be challenged in court. The move occurs more than three years after the Park Service banned the motorized craft in national parks, and two years after a closer, site-specific look at the rules was ordered for Assateague and 21 parks and other land preserves. The approval confirms a plan developed two years ago by officials on Assateague that outlawed the fast-moving craft in most of the 22,000 acres of water under Park Service jurisdiction (up to a half-mile offshore)

He recently won a precedent-setting war-crimes conviction. But as former Carroll County State's Attorney Thomas E. Hickman begins his third year as a United Nations prosecutor in Kosovo, he finds as much meaning - and a reason to hope for better times in the dangerous Balkans - in a case involving a single homicide. A Serb woman had been beaten to death at the door of her bustling apartment building, but his investigation stalled when no one would acknowledge having seen anything. Then about a year later, an ethnic Albanian woman named the killer: an Albanian man who hated Serbs and wanted the victim's apartment.