Queen Elizabeth

LONDON - She became queen when Winston Churchill was prime minister, food was rationed and the British Empire was crumbling along with its influence. Harry S. Truman was president of the United States. Stalin was running the Soviet Union. Mao Tse-tung was less then three years into his communist grip on China. In Britain, it was an era when housewives spent a quarter of their 15-hour workday in the kitchen, one in three households didn't have a bath, and only a few hundred thousand television sets existed.

Secret Service agents yesterday sought to interview the Baltimore president of Irish Northern Aid, an organization which plans to protest at Memorial Stadium when the Queen of England attends an Oriole game May 15.But they changed their mind when they found a reporter and a photographer from The Evening Sun sitting with John F. Oliveira, the local Noraid leader, and Brendan Walsh, a Noraid supporter and longtime human rights activist, on Oliveira's front...

Want to pore over a letter written by A.A. Milne? Or, instead of a letter from the creator of Winnie the Pooh, would you prefer a note from Queen Elizabeth I? How about riffling through an Elizabethan vicar's diary? Or perusing a manuscript handwritten by Mark Twain? You are invited to do so, as part of an exhibition of 100 plays, poems, books, letters, warrants, deeds and receipts spanning 700 years and on display through June 8 at Washington's Folger Shakespeare Library. Titled "The Pen's Excellencie": Treasures from the Manuscript Collection, the exhibit breathes life into historical figures.

Culturally, architecturally and gastronomically exciting, Montreal is tailor-made for a weekend rail trek. Though close at hand, it offers a hint of the exotic -- a foreign destination where you can brush up your high-school French.Amtrak operates a pair of services to take you there from Baltimore. One is the daylight Adirondack, which connects with Northeast Corridor trains at New York and then runs along the Hudson River and Lake Champlain over one of the East's most scenic lines.The other is the overnight Montrealer, which takes a more easterly route through Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont.

You're one of the wealthiest and most-watched women in the world, on an official state visit to the United States. So what do you do for fun?Get yerself to Bawlmer and catch the O's, hon. What else?The Orioles front office was all abuzz today about news that Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Phillip, would take in at least part of the May 15 Orioles home game against the defending American League champion Oakland Athletics."People are just finding out about it now, but the buzzing is as great as we've ever had it here for a visitor, I can tell you that," said Orioles spokesman Rick Vaughn.

GRAND TURK, Turks and Caicos Islands -- You'd think being the British governor of a tiny Caribbean island colony would give life a certain goofy glory.Being called "Your Excellency" pays $84,000 a year. The job comes with a lovely old residence called Waterloo, with magnificent seascapes and shady gardens tended by local convicts. But for Martin Bourke, the queen's man here, this paradise is, alas, turning into hell."Bourke Must Go" scream inch-high red headlines in the local paper. "Bourke must go!"

It wasn't just a 425-acre swath of one of the prettiest sections of Baltimore County. The place pulsed with history. Its red-roofed barns had housed some of the 20th century's greatest thoroughbreds. The remains of Native Dancer, the genetic link between many modern champions, lay beneath a tombstone at its center. Sagamore Farm fit the ambitions of Under Armour founder Kevin Plank. When he plucked his high school buddy, Tom Mullikin, from a Kentucky farm to start a racing and breeding outfit, Plank said the only goal was to win a Triple Crown.

Herman G. "Hank" Tillman Jr., a retired Air Force colonel and pilot who flew in World War II, Korea and Vietnam and was one of Maryland's most decorated veterans, died Sunday of liver failure at his Chester home. He was 89. He was born in his immigrant grandparents' Anne Arundel County farmhouse, and later moved with his family to a home at Pontiac Avenue and Sixth Street in Brooklyn. After graduating from Polytechnic Institute in 1940, he attended the Johns Hopkins University at night and worked at Baltimore Gas and Electric Co.'s engineering department during the day. "As a kid, he was fascinated with flying.

Maybe it's not quite as elegant as it once was. But it is still the Queen Elizabeth 2, the benchmark for luxury liners.On a blustery day, with winds whipping at 35 knots, the legendary passenger ship returned to the United States yesterday after three months at sea, stopping briefly in Baltimore yesterday on its way to Fort Lauderdale, Fla. It was the QE2's second trip here since 1995.Five tugboats nudged the 67,000-ton vessel through the harbor's sharp curves into Dundalk Marine Terminal.

ABOARD THE QUEEN ELIZABETH 2 - The last two weeks of Robert Muller's journey aboard the world's most famous ocean liner he was dead. Which is just the way he wanted it. And that is just the way his widow, Beatrice Muller, hopes to go, too. Her husband died at age 85 aboard the QE2, as it is known, as it sailed off Bermuda in 1999, then was transported in the ship's mortuary to Southampton, England, where he was cremated and, eventually, buried at sea....