Prize

Special prizes will be given throughout the evening to all players at the Laurel Boys and Girls Club Holiday Bingo. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 19 at the Phelps Center, 701 Montgomery St. The bingo includes a guaranteed $500 bonanza game. Prizes include electronics, kitchen items and jewelry. The kitchen will offer reasonably priced food. For information, call 240-264-6642.

The winning Powerball numbers - for the second-largest jackpot in U.S. history - were drawn Saturday night: 10-13-14-22-52 and the Powerball number 11. Lottery officials were working Saturday night to determine if anyone won the jackpot, which hovered around $600 million. The prize tempted many Marylanders to buy tickets for the lottery game before the 11 p.m. drawing. "We expect there will be brisk sales both [Friday and Saturday]," said Stephen L. Martino, director of the Maryland Lottery, said Friday.

Baltimore must be a very generous place, because just about everybody who was asked said they'd share the $242 million Mega-Million lottery prize if they happened to be the lucky winner in Friday night's drawing. However, no one won Friday night's drawing, so the prize will be $290 million on Tuesday. The estimated cash out payment is $182.6 million. But on Friday, Rick Tamborine, who was busy selling lottery tickets at the Royal Farms in Hampden, said, "I'd take a trip to the moon" if he won. He'd purchased $20 worth himself.

Congratulations to Tim Marcin, winner of Washington College 's Sophie Kerr Prize, worth $61,192 this year. The 22-year-old  from Wilmington, Del., who is headed to Northwestern University, plans to pursue a sports writing career. That's a worthy goal -- to follow in the footsteps of luminaries such as Ring Lardner and Roger Angell. (I'd even toss John McPhee into the crowd.) According to the college, he submitted "poems whose subjects included teen romance, the music of Bob Dylan, and up-close perceptions of his father's well-worn coat, and the red stitches on a baseball.

When Brandon E. Hopkins was named the winner yesterday of Washington College's lucrative Sophie Kerr Prize, and his friends started cheering, "I just totally blanked out," he recalled afterward. "It was sensory overload. It's a rush."Hopkins, a 21-year-old senior from Frederick, won $29,300 -- America's largest undergraduate literary prize.He was chosen in part for a novel he began writing last year about a university student who finds love, makes a literary pilgrimage to Paris, and faces a difficult reunion with his father.

The jackpot in tomorrow night's Maryland Lotto drawing has been increased to $3 million after Wednesday's drawing failed to produce a winner.The numbers drawn Wednesday night were 07, 14, 19, 23, 27, 36.Lottery spokeswoman Theresa Gutierrez said 39 people correctly matched five of the six numbers. They will collect $756 each.Another 1,732 bettors matched four of the six numbers drawn Wednesday night. Each of their tickets is worth $28.=1 Lotto sales for the drawing totaled $736,475.

I wanted to use your name on this, but the South Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice asked me not to. Maybe you'll recognize yourself from the following description. You are 16. You are confined to a juvenile detention center. You were convicted of public disorderly conduct and "assault and battery of a high and aggravated nature." And Stacey Haynes has taken a special interest in you. She's a federal prosecutor who told me about you when I visited Columbia, S.C., last month to give a speech.

A Las Vegas, Nev., company that lured Marylanders with the prospect of a "millionaire's treasure" must part with some of its own under an agreement reached with the state attorney general's office.The company, Honeywell & Roberts Inc., which sponsors prize contests, has agreed to stop sending "deceptive solicitations" to Maryland residents and will pay $16,175 into a restitution fund for Marylanders who sent illegal "judging fees" to the company, Attorney General J. Joseph Curran Jr. announced yesterday.

on the job hanah.cho@baltsun.com Since Towson University's The Apprentice-like competition began four years ago, it has provided the winning contestant a full-time gig with a Baltimore-area employer. Executives playing the Donald Trump role have included Ed Hale, chairman and chief executive of First Mariner Bank; Frank Bramble, a director at Bank of America; Jonathan Murray, senior vice president at The Murray Group of UBS Financial; and John Tolmie, president and CEO of St. Joseph Medical Center.

Up to half of sexually active young people will get a sexually transmitted disease by the time they are 25, yet many don't seek testing because it may be difficult, costly or embarrassing. Public health officials nationally and in particularly affected cities like Baltimore, however, say they've found a method that seems to address the major hurdles — a website that supplies free in-home testing kits for three of the most commonly reported STDs. "The highest prevalence is in young adults, and we knew we had to reach these kids," said Charlotte A. Gaydos, a professor of infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

As the five young writers sat with bated breath, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda told them that a life of wordsmithing would bring them pain. One of them would soon win the nation's most lucrative literary award, the Sophie Kerr Prize, and experience a moment of greatness. Dirda spoke to those who lost. "You will feel heartbroken for a while, but if you pursue a literary career, it's best to get used to that feeling," he said. On Tuesday night at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Washington College bestowed its annual Sophie Kerr Prize on Tim Marcin, a 22-year-old graduating senior from Wilmington, Del., who hopes to pursue a career in sports journalism.

Plunging into a novel by James Kelman is like diving head-first into a chilly lake. It's a shock to your system at first, and a bit disorienting, but the trick is to keep moving. Once your muscles get warmed up and you get your bearings, the experience is exhilarating. Kelman, 66, is the Man Booker Award-winning author (in 1994 for "How Late It Was, How Late") whose novels champion the working-class people of his native Scotland. His novels are typically told through the point of view of one character, and from the opening sentence, the reader is thrust headlong into his narrator's thoughts and perceptions.

The future economic growth and competitiveness of the United States depends on our capacity to innovate. Many ideas have emerged from government, industry and academia regarding how best to inspire and support innovation. But nothing spurs creativity and innovation more than a combination of incentive and challenge: a reward for achievement, combined with the urgency of a dare to succeed and the reality that we must race against others. We are at our best when we compete. This is why I believe that prizes and competitions are crucial to create a climate of innovation and entrepreneurship, and for driving new advances in targeted areas.

Six finalists were announced Wednesday for the 2013 Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize - and the prestigious award is edging more toward alternate media than it ever has before. The candidates in the running to win the eighth annual award include two documentary photographers, a video artist, a photographer inspired by anonymous tweets, and two sculptors who specialize in large-scale installation art. There's nary a traditional painter in the bunch. The finalists are: Gabriel Bulisova, a documentary photographer and multimedia artist based in Washington; photographer and video artist Larry Cook of Landover; sculptural installation artist Caitlin Cunningham of Baltimore; Nate Larson, a faculty member of the Maryland Institute, College of Art who photographs the locations of tweets sent by mobile phone; documentary photographer Louie Palu of Baltimore and sculptural installation artist Dan Steinhilber of Washington.

The 2013 Pulitzer Prizes were announced today, and among the winners is "Devil in the Grove," a non-fiction account of Baltimore native Thurgood Marshall's fearless work for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in a Florida case. As we all know, Marshall went on to bring the nation's landmark school integration case, Brown vs. Board of Education, and later became a U.S. Supreme Court justice. The winners: FICTION -- "The Orphan Master's Son" by Adam Johnson, DRAMA -- "Disgraced" by Ayad Akhtar, HISTORY -- "Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam" by Fredrik Logeval l (Random House)

A pharmaceutical company, a corporate-data analytics firm and a lighting company learned Monday night that they won the top prizes at the state's inaugural competition for start-up firms — $100,000 each. The InvestMaryland Challenge drew entries from nearly 260 companies nationwide, a pool that was narrowed earlier this month to nine finalists. Organizers kept the winners' names under wraps until the awards ceremony at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, leaving the companies in suspense until Gov. Martin O'Malley announced them to the crowd, Oscars-style.

WASHINGTON -- Consumer advocate Ralph Nader urged the Supreme Court justices and other federal judges yesterday to end any role they have in a prize program for federal judges that is financed by a major legal publisher, West Publishing Co. of Minneapolis.In a letter to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and the policy-making U.S. Judiciary Conference, Mr. Nader reacted to recent published reports about expensive travel by justices at West's expense as they sat on a prize selection committee.

Students at Arundel High School have received their prize of a rock concert for winning a food-drive contest sponsored by an area radio station. The band Good Charlotte performed Friday for hundreds of students in the Gambrills school's auditorium as their prize in the WHFS-FM Capital Area Food Drive. The Arundel High Key Club, with help from its club counterparts at several other schools, ran a campaign that collected 4.5 tons of nonperishable items during six school days in early November.

Maryland's competition for startup companies — with three grand prizes of $100,000 each — was narrowed to nine finalists Monday. The companies, based largely in Baltimore and Montgomery County, were part of an original field of nearly 260 in the InvestMaryland Challenge. Winners will be announced April 15. The contest comes at a time of tight purse strings among the venture capitalists who invest in young firms. Venture capital funding in Maryland dropped 12 percent last year, mirroring a national contraction, according to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association.

The plaque hangs on the wall of the doctor's office, proof of its worth to Greg Brouse, 1981 grand-prize winner of the Greater Baltimore Chapter of the National Football Foundation Scholar Athlete award. "My kids can't believe I was either a scholar or an athlete," said Brouse, who is now an oncologist in Monroe, N.C. "I think that, quietly, they make fun of me, but at the same time, they'd like to do the same for themselves. " Brouse, who starred at Centennial, turned 50 this month.