Ravine

There is a ravine outside the Ukrainian city of Kiev, a ravine called Babi Yar, that holds within its soil the traces of a hideous crime. The place also stands as a weighty indictment against hate. No wonder so many people have wanted to make Babi Yar disappear. The first attempt came in 1943, when the retreating Germans tried to destroy all traces of nearly 34,000 Jews murdered there in the course of two September days in 1941. In the late 1950s, Soviet authorities, annoyed with calls for a memorial to Babi Yar's victims and with the implication that the Germans had plenty of Russian helpers in their effort to exterminate Jews, ordered the ravine turned into a lake.

An underground fire that has been smoldering since Dec. 7 at a dump site in Bruceville apparently poses no serious environmental threat to county residents, County Commissioner Donald I. Dell said yesterday.The county commissioners and Carroll County health officials visited the dump on Bruceville Road near Keymar yesterday and left with the impression that using bulldozers to uncover the fire's source could make matters worse, Mr. Dell said.Residents apparently have used the ravine -- about 75 feet long and 20 feet deep -- as a dump yard for waste for many years.

Shrugging off a chilly morning drizzle, hundreds of volunteers slogged yesterday along the muddy fringes of waterways in central Maryland packing trash bags with debris in the annual spring stream cleanup. "You can give as much money to environmental groups as you want, but the way you really make a difference is to go out and get your hands dirty," Towson University sophomore Jenny Green proclaimed as she and her brother, Ryan, harvested food wrappers, bottles and other debris strewn along the steep banks of a campus ravine.

The upscale golf boom is continuing, with The Links at Gettysburg (Pa.), Hampshire Greens in Ashton and P. B. Dye Golf Club near Frederick now open. Each of those is within easy driving distance of the Baltimore Beltway. Newcomers near the beach are the Bay Club East course in Berlin and Bear Trap Dunes near Bethany Beach, Del.The Links at GettysburgThis Scottish-influenced course is a mix of rolling hills and open valley holes, red rock cliffs, mature hardwoods and 10 man-made lakes that stand ready to drown errant shots.

The Ukrainian government's official commemoration this week ofthe 50th anniversary of the massacre at Babi Yar formally recognizes for the first time that the atrocity's first and most numerous victims were Jewish. A triumph, however belated, for truth-telling? Yes, but there is more to it than that.Although the Babi Yar massacre was only one of many mass murders committed by the Nazi mobile killing squads, the sheer scale and brutality of the event retain the power to shock. For before the Nazis discovered the efficacy of gas chambers and crematoria, they murdered people the old-fashioned way -- by shooting them.

On a chilly January morning six years ago, Lisa Kathleen Haenel was slain on her way to high school. Her nude body -- ravaged by a knife -- was found next to the teen-ager's blue Old Mill High School band jacket in a wooded ravine.Anne Arundel County police are using advancements in forensic technology to extract better DNA evidence from Lisa's clothing and other items found near the crime scene, reinvigorating detectives who have interviewed hundreds of suspects in the years since the killing.

The whole thing started when we were watching TV and I said the key ingredients to any good movie are car chases, serial killers and sex. Maybe a helicopter crash, too."What about plot?" she said. "What about character development?"Matter of fact, I said, I'm working on a film script myself."What about dramatic tension?" she said.This is how I see the film opening, I said.I see a high-speed chase on a lonely stretch of road in the High Sierras. There's a dope dealer with 200 pounds of cocaine in the back seat of his fire engine red Toyota Supra being hotly pursued by a hard-bitten private detective in a '79 Dodge Daytona.

You weren't struck by the Cobras, or flattened by the Bombers, so how about the Ravens?It's the latest entry in the effort to name Baltimore's prospective football team.Baltimore is one of five cities vying for two NFL expansion teams scheduled to be awarded in October. At the request of the league, prospective owners have prepared trademark applications to protect names from poaching in case they win the teams.Late last year, Florida investor Malcolm Glazer filed for the Cobras, one of the few menacing animals not already stalking the sports world.

A Baltimore County jury convicted former UMBC student John C. Gaumer of murder and rape yesterday in the beating death and sexual assault of a woman he had met online, capping four days of evidence and testimony that a prosecutor acknowledged to jurors was as shocking as it was graphic. The verdicts - announced to a packed courtroom about 4:30 p.m. after jurors deliberated for less than five hours - set up a capital sentencing hearing scheduled to begin Monday. With the jury convicting Gaumer of both first-degree murder and first-degree rape - a charge that serves as an "aggravating circumstance" under Maryland's death penalty statute - prosecutors will seek a death sentence.

They live behind enemy lines, in places like Fells Point, Federal Hill and Canton - otherwise ordinary people with ordinary jobs and ordinary allegiances. Until Game Day. That's when they put on their Sunday best - a football cap here, a jersey there - and head for the local sports bars to watch their charges and flaunt their true colors. Paint them burgundy and gold, not purple and black. They are Redskins fans in Ravens country. Tonight, their worlds collide as Washington hosts Baltimore at FedEx Field in Landover.