Rationing

The anticipated arrival of perhaps tens of thousands of workers in Maryland as part of the U.S. military's base realignment and closure plan may severely test the state's commitment to protect increasingly scarce water supplies. At issue, particularly in Harford and Cecil counties, where much of the growth is expected, are the availability of drinking water and the capacity for treating wastewater and sewage while meeting strict new pollution limits intended to reverse the degradation of the Chesapeake Bay. What's required to meet this challenge is a highly coordinated, cooperative campaign involving state, county and municipal governments to plan, share resources, protect rural areas and produce innovative tactics for conservation and water reuse.

HOUGHTON, Mich. -- In the land of big snow, where college students jump harmlessly out of third-story dormitory windows into snow banks, the longest season of the year sure isn't what it used to be. Snow that was dependable as a sunrise - and last year tallied higher than 20 feet - is being rationed in the city of Houghton, which this week canceled a downtown inner tube race - the Yooper Luge - to save snow for the annual winter carnival, the biggest tourist...

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A bomb exploded yesterday in an alleyway of a vast Shiite slum where women and children had gathered to collect fuel rations on the eve of the holy month of Ramadan, peppering victims with ball bearings and engulfing them in an inferno that killed at least 35. Rescuers entering the alley, which is squeezed between two walls, wrapped themselves in wet blankets as they attempted to reach victims whose clothes had been set ablaze. "We were choosing those who we thought were still alive to carry them out," said Hassan Moosawi, 26, one of the rescuers.

Fry bread is a simple food with a complicated past. For some, a bite of the Native American flatbread brings back fond memories of powwows and roadside stands out West. The comfort food is a staple at the Baltimore Powwow, where several vendors will be selling it this weekend. "It's become an icon," said George P. Horse Capture, a retired adviser at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian who grew up on a reservation in Fort Belknap, Mont. He's written that fry bread is a divine gift in exchange for hardships such as racism and disease that native people have endured.

Low-level, nonviolent drug offenders in Maryland are often imprisoned when they would be better off in treatment, and they are often locked up for longer periods than those who commit more violent crimes. Such disparities are costly - to the state and to the offenders - and ought to be addressed more aggressively by the state's Commission on Criminal Sentencing Policy, which meets today. Created by the General Assembly in 1999, the commission establishes sentencing guidelines for serious criminal cases that are handled in the state's circuit courts where jury trials are held.

The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion Alfred A. Knopf / 219 pages. The acclaimed essayist Joan Didion chose a title at once misleading and precisely apt for her extraordinary memoir of loss, The Year of Magical Thinking. No, this is not a book about sorcerers aimed at the Harry Potter set. But it does have very much to do with a particular fantasy that is especially widespread among those recently bereaved: that if only we could turn back the clock, undo some hitherto unseen, fatal flaw, we could make our dead return to the living, and to us. The moment Didion seeks to isolate - and retract - was the evening of Dec. 30, 2003.

HARRISBURG, PA. -- A Pennsylvania biochemist testified in federal court yesterday that "intelligent design," a view critical of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, is a scientific theory that doesn't require involvement of a supernatural agent, although he said he believes the intelligent designer was God. With Matthew Chapman, a great-great-grandson of Darwin looking on, Lehigh University professor Michael Behe testified as the first witness for...

ATLANTA - If you pay attention to the spew on immigration coming from conservative talk radio and Web logs, you can easily get the impression that most of the 9/11 hijackers came from Mexico. Verbal broadsides against Muslim terrorists mix easily with derisive comments about Latinos who sneak across the border seeking work. The growing backlash against immigrants doesn't distinguish between jihadists and would-be janitors. So it doesn't matter much that House Republicans, who passed a bill last month that effectively bans driver's licenses for illegal workers, keep proclaiming that their legislation is not anti-immigrant.

The supplier of half the country's influenza vaccine stunned public health officials yesterday by announcing it would provide no doses this year, prompting immediate fears of a shortage and a scramble to ration the available shots - just weeks before the flu season begins. Chiron Corp. will provide none of the 46 million to 48 million doses it had expected to ship this month to the United States; a British regulatory agency unexpectedly yanked the company's production license and blocked it from releasing the vaccine.

"Rational" was one of James W. Rouse's favorite words. It was only rational, he felt, that neighborhoods be a place where neighbors to bump into one another on the street or in the nearby supermarket. And it was only rational that shopping malls be for more than just shopping, that they be used for eating and wandering and gathering with friends. He had a vision for "a more rational human environment," said his son, James W. Rouse Jr. With that vision, the senior Rouse became a pioneer in communities and shopping mall development around the country, creating Columbia as one of America's first planned communities and developing malls and waterfront marketplaces from Baltimore's Inner Harbor to Boston's Faneuil Hall.