Prize

CANNES, France - In a political climate where the war on terrorism hung like a cloud over even the festivities here on the French Riviera, it was a film about an earlier world war that walked off with top honors at the 55th Cannes Film Festival. Roman Polanski, a long-time Cannes favorite who, up until yesterday, hadn't won the festival's biggest prize, accepted the Palm D'Or for The Pianist, the story of a musical prodigy who is befriended by a German officer while hiding out in a Warsaw ghetto.

Donna Abell, a Westminster game-show fan who missed a million but won a $100,000 second prize in the Maryland Lottery's Millennium Mania, is still excited about the whole thing. "It was very touching, it really was," she said yesterday. "It was almost more that I wanted to play the game than that I was paying attention to the money." The 41-year-old doctor's receptionist has been playing the lottery almost every day, usually with her mother, with whom she'll share the prize. Her mother, husband and two sons, ages 17 and 20, were with her at the studio for the taping last week.

Amid renewed debate over a gun raffle to benefit Carroll County Republicans, a Baltimore-area state senator plans to introduce legislation that would prohibit offering a handgun as a prize in such a contest. Sen. Barbara A. Hoffman, a Democrat whose district includes parts of the city and Baltimore County, has told a Manchester couple whose 13-year-old son died in an accidental shooting two years ago that she would push for such a ban. "We have worked with the senator on several bills, and she has told us she is willing to sponsor one that would ban gun raffles," said John Price, who approached Hoffman with his wife, Carole.

County officials unveiled yesterday a $200,000 promotion and revamped trash recycling guidelines aimed at encouraging the 72 percent of county households that don't recycle to join the effort. A "prize patrol" will inspect about 2,000 randomly selected households on recycling days until April 22, Earth Day. Those with recycling bins outside will be entered into one of nine drawings. Ten winners will receive prizes including a cordless phone or compact disc player, free pizzas and $50 gift certificates for groceries.

Everyone knows the best way to Carnegie Hall. (Practice, practice, practice.) But how do you get to eat a Nobel Prize banquet? Um ... study harder? Surprisingly, it's a whole lot easier than that. Simply head to City Hall in Stockholm, Sweden, which is where the 2003 Nobel laureates will dine tonight in high style. Here, you'll find a subterranean restaurant called Stadshus Kallaren where, starting tomorrow, you can eat exactly the same meal. What's more, if you order in advance and have a party of at least six, you can request any menu from the Nobel banquet's 102-year history, and it will be served on the same gold-leafed Orrefors china from which the winners dine.

GREENCASTLE, Pa. - It was a letter that Whitney Donahue never expected to get. "I have never seen anybody so brave," began fifth-grader Daniel Poffenburger. "You should get all the prize money for saving so many lives." Donahue, a paunchy refrigerator repairman who drives a white van with a union bumper sticker on the back, may not look the part of a superhero. But to the pupils at his daughter's school, he is the man who helped make soccer and trick-or-treating safe again. On Oct. 24, 2002, Donahue spotted the faded Chevrolet Caprice belonging to sniper suspects John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo at a Frederick County rest stop and called police.

Each of the six electric guitars on display, crafted from such exotic woods as cocobolo and padauk, could easily have belonged to one of the greats. If only Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia and Chet Atkins could show up to claim them, press the sculpted wooden bodies to their torsos and let their fingers bring them to life. But wait. Are these actual musical instruments, or just for show? After all, there is an almost otherworldly quality to their glossy physical perfection. And check out the name of the manufacturer, gracefully inset in mother of pearl.

A Baltimore artist whose portraits of family and friends painted on black velvet capture the poignant and gritty flavor of working class life in the city was named the winner yesterday of this year's Janet and Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize. Tony Shore, 35, accepted the $25,000 award from Mayor Sheila Dixon amid tears of joy and gratitude before a crowd of several hundred assembled at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where the work of the finalists is on display. The award is named after the longtime Baltimore civic leader and his wife.

When the New York Stock Exchange opens today, it will be with the blessing of Anne Arundel County Superintendent Eric J. Smith, who is scheduled to be in town to receive a prestigious national award for educators that includes a $25,000 cash prize. Smith and two other winners, selected by one of the nation's largest publishers of educational materials for their contributions in the field of education, will ring the bell that marks the start of the trading day. "I guess that's good news or bad news, depending on how well the market does tomorrow," Smith said yesterday before he left for the Big Apple, where he will receive the Harold W. McGraw Jr. Prize in Education at a ceremony in the New York Public Library.

CHESTERTOWN -- A 22-year-old poet from Towson - who can't decide whether she'll keep blogging on the Internet or printing her work with an antique hand letterpress - walked away from her Washington College graduation yesterday clutching a check for more than $67,000. A portfolio of poems, critical essays and writings for her blog won Emma Sovich the richest undergraduate writing award in the nation, the Sophie Kerr Prize. This year's award was the largest in the history of the prize, officials said.