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This feature appears every week on the Baltimore Sports Blitz. It's just like “What They're Saying About the Ravens,” but it includes blogger Matt Vensel saying something about what those people are saying. Got it? --- ESPN's Jamison Hensley doesn't see the need for injured linebacker Ray Lewis to rush back to the field . “Do the Ravens really need Lewis to rush back? The play of the Ravens' defense says no,” Hensley wrote. “With Lewis, the Ravens went 5-1 and allowed 19.6 points per game.

Pregnant women who smoke run into the risk of their children have reading problems later in life, a Yale School of Medicine study has found. The reserachers looked at the reading tests of 5,000 students and found that many whose mothers smoked while pregnant struggled on reading comprehension and other tests. The findings are published in The Journal of Pediatrics. Lead author Dr. Jeffrey Gruen, a Yale professor of pediatrics, and his colleagues compared performance on seven specific tasks - reading speed, single-word identification, spelling, accuracy, real and non-word reading, and reading comprehension.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says he was planning this even before the recent scandals in the top ranks of the Pentagon and CIA, but he's ordered the military to double down on ethics training for its senior officers. In a memo to Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mr. Panetta didn't reference Gen. David Petraeus' affair with his biographer or Gen. John Allen's mountain of "inappropriate" emails to a Tampa socialite - but he didn't have to. And they are not the only brass behaving badly.

Carolyn Rosenstein, a retired McDonogh School reading specialist recalled as a nurturing faculty mentor who also served on the Women's Board of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, died of cancer Oct. 27 at her Pikesville home. She was 75. "She was a great gal, very irreverent. She called it just as she saw it," said Barbara Dover, a fellow member of the Hopkins' Women's Board. "She did it with a smile and a chuckle. " Born Carolyn Stein in Jersey City, N.J., and raised in Teaneck, N.J., she was a Teaneck High School graduate.

During this election cycle, it is increasingly popular in some circles to condemn government as wasteful, inefficient and incompetent. While there are thousands of federal, state and local government programs, each with its own index of success or failure, it might encourage those who believe government is a force for good to consider a number of interventions by the Baltimore City government (with federal and state assistance, in some instances)...