New Hope

ROCHESTER, N.Y. - Much has transpired in the life of Rich Beem since he won last year's PGA Championship at Hazeltine National Golf Club near Minneapolis. Beem went from being a journeyman to a major champion. He found himself secure and confident among his peers, including the player he beat by a stroke, Tiger Woods. Yet nothing that's happened to Beem since could match what happened to him last month, when he became a first-time father. "I always knew I was going to be a father some day, but to be real honest with you, I wasn't too sure how I was going to handle it until the day he was born," Beem said yesterday.

GUMBORO, Del. - Emerging from several thousand acres of farmland that overlap the Maryland-Delaware line is new hope for restoring the Chesapeake Bay - but also new evidence that agricultural pollution control needs serious rethinking. Nitrogen and phosphorus from farm fertilizers and manure are among the bay's biggest water-quality problems. A decade and a half of trying to improve this has shown only modest progress. It's critical to do better. In Maryland, for example, even if the Ehrlich administration's ambitious pledge to improve sewage treatment is a success, it will reduce nitrogen by only about a third of what's needed to meet the bay's water-quality goals.

SHINANA VILLAGE, Iraq - One by one, the elders raise their hands. "Me." "Me." "Me," they murmur in response to the question: Whose father, brother, son had been executed by Saddam Hussein's government? Eleven hands in all, raised in the stagnant air inside the low mud-brick house of Sheik Kathem Al Wafi, signaling the death toll here. These men and their sheik, the elders of the Al Wafi tribe, are people of the Madan, the marsh Arabs who for five millennia lived in a vast area of wetlands that began about 50 miles north of Basra - lived, that is, until 1988, when Hussein's government began a systematic campaign of oppression, execution and internal exile against them.

Soccer and lacrosse have their loyal, ever-growing constituencies, no question, but don't discount baseball as continuing to be maybe the truest harbinger of spring in Howard County. Youth baseball organizations locally have some new leadership, which is the norm. In several instances this year, there is reason for new hope - and maybe even some growth in interest. An informal sampling of some things baseball folks are talking about locally while hoping to work in at least a few practices before opening games in the next couple of weeks: "Whatever slump baseball was in seems to be over," said Howard Carolan, who oversees all of the Howard County Youth Program's operations.

TANYARD -- They call it the "white-knuckle bridge," this dilapidated relic of the 1930s with lanes so narrow that truckers worry about scraping their mirrors against its battered steel girders. Offering the only Choptank River crossing for miles in either direction in rural Caroline and Talbot counties and in northern Dorchester County since 1933, Dover Bridge has vexed motorists for years. As Easton has grown to become a commercial center of 11,000, sleepy Route 331, the old Dover Road, has been transformed into a commuter thoroughfare, the bridge its dreaded bottleneck.

Clearly revitalized by the calendar change and its return home, the Blast wasted little time in taking advantage of the fresh start last night against the Cleveland Force. Getting the offense out of the way early and then showing poise and smarts in protecting the lead later, the Blast came away with a 15-6 win over the Force before 6,403 at 1st Mariner Arena. Goals came from seven players, with Danny Kelly and Tarik Walker leading the Blast with one goal and two assists each. Giuliano Celenza and Billy Nelson added a goal and an assist apiece, with Craig Scheer scoring his first goal of the season.

Not long after Christopher Reeve broke his neck in a 1995 equestrian accident and became paralyzed, the handsome actor who starred in Superman declared that he would walk by his 50th birthday. Though Reeve won't reach that goal - he turns 50 next week and remains a quadriplegic - the world took notice when a doctor reported that Reeve had made startling progress in the three years since he started exercising on a stationary bicycle with the aid of electrical charges that triggered his muscles.

NEW HOPE, Va. - In 1902, 26 years after Alexander Graham Bell patented the first telephone, a group of about two dozen New Hope farmers decided it was time they had access to the new technology making the world smaller. "They were just some farmers who wanted access to the markets in Staunton," said Kelly Chapman, who has been either president or vice president of the New Hope Telephone Company Board for 42 years. "So they got together and did it themselves," he said. Almost 100 years later, the New Hope Telephone Co. is still tiny - the second-smallest in the state - with 864 customers, about 1,000 lines and five full-time employees.

Three more Democrats and one more Republican have entered the race for Congress in Maryland's 2nd District, joining three other candidates seeking to win the seat. Kenneth T. Bosley, 72, a Democrat from Sparks who lost to Rep. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. in 1998 and 2000, will seek the office again. A retired Air Force major, he plans to focus his campaign on property rights, ethics for accountants, attorneys and judges, and national security issues. Another frequent candidate, James E. DeLoach Jr., of Chase, has also entered the race.

Six decades after they were created, Baltimore's two major United Steelworkers locals have merged in a move that members say makes sense but will take getting used to. With their ranks decreasing as the number of employees at Bethlehem Steel Corp.'s Sparrows Point plant dwindles, United Steelworkers of America Locals 2609 and 2610 have joined to create Local 9477. "It's sad, and I'm sure it's the same for 2609; everybody misses it," said Ron Allowatt, who stepped down as president of 2610 to become a safety coordinator after the merger.