Ripple

For most of its existence, the North Baltimore Aquatic Club was associated with female swimmers driven to Olympic gold by a taskmaster coach. The NBAC's deepest roots, however, involve boys, one who nearly drowned in the stream that bisects Baltimore and another playing alongside it at Meadowbrook, one of the city's favorite summer haunts. Now another has grown into a young man reaching for history at the 2004 Olympics. No swimmer has had as long an uninterrupted run with the NBAC as Michael Phelps.

CHESAPEAKE, Va. -- Preparing for a keep-them-guessing strategy in their Washington-area sniper plot, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo scouted more than 100 potential shooting sites in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, a psychiatrist for the teen-age sniper suspect testified yesterday. "I believe there were over 100 locations in this entire area," Dr. Neil Blumberg told jurors in Malvo's capital murder trial. The plan was to "go to different places and keep the authorities not knowing where the next shooting was going to occur," the psychiatrist said on cross-examination.

On November 23, 2003, BERNARD GREEN; beloved husband of the late Gloria Green (nee Matcher); loving father of Donald S. Tucciarella, Carmela T. Ripple and the late Vincent J. Tucciarella; devoted father-in-law of Michael Ripple and Brenda Tucciarella. Also survived by eight loving grandchildren. Services and Interment in the Hebrew Orthodox Memorial Cemetery, 6820 German Hill Road, on Tuesday, November 25 at 10 A.M. Please omit flowers. Arrangements by Sol Levinson and Bros., Inc.

THE KREMLIN'S shocking and fascinating persecution of the Russian oil giant Yukos dramatically ups the stakes - in Iraq. Who'd want to commit to crucial long-term oil deals with a country that enforces its own draconian laws as capriciously and cavalierly as Russia does? No one. Does Russia still offer the possibility of taking over from the Middle East any time soon as principal supplier of the world's petroleum? No way. The whole sordid, and still unfolding, episode shows that there cannot be any reliable, predictable alternative to Middle East oil for the foreseeable future.

Howard Community College took a hard look yesterday at what it would do if there were a terrorist attack nearby. The college's emergency response team, operations staff and volunteer building monitors gathered in a meeting room at the Columbia campus and walked through a fictional scenario involving a nuclear bomb exploding at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. The college is the second of several county organizations working through simulated disasters. The "table top" exercises are organized by the county's Community Emergency Response Network (CERN)

KFAR MIT EL-EZZ, Egypt - The narrow streets in this village in the fertile Nile Delta are made of mud baked hard under an unforgiving sun. Children play barefoot. Traffic jams occur only when donkey carts, goats and roosters vie for the same bare patch of dirt. But even here, far from the choking exhaust fumes of Cairo, and far from the universities and newspaper headlines that feed anti-war fervor, the American-led invasion of Iraq has taken its toll. The farmers here are hemmed in between the Nile and other villages and thus find it impossible to expand their fields, no matter how large their families become.

Baltimore school officials are considering shutting one of the city's largest and most troubled high schools and dispersing its 2,300 students to other facilities this fall - a decision that would ripple down through the grades in the city's east-side schools. The proposal to close Lake Clifton-Eastern High School in Northeast Baltimore was one of three floated at a board meeting yesterday as a way to break up a school that was considered to be too big and too chaotic. The school has a history of discipline problems, high dropout rates and low attendance.

GREENSBORO, N.C. - Wake Forest, the best team in the Atlantic Coast Conference this season, has all the components for making a long run in March. In senior forward Josh Howard, the Demon Deacons have a national Player of the Year candidate. Freshman guard Justin Gray exhibits the kind of swagger and poise a team needs in hostile NCAA tournament environs. And sophomore forward Vytas Danelius has made a reputation of playing big in big games. The main ingredient Wake Forest is missing is hype.

Corwyn and Cindy Fischer were waiting for a ferry on Lake Chelan in north-central Washington this month. No boats were in sight, no wind, and the lake was calm. Then, without warning, the lake water began rushing up the rocky beach beside the dock. Four or five times the waves retreated, turned and rushed 8 feet up the beach. "We just kind of looked at one another," Cindy Fischer said. Her husband, a veteran ferry captain, turned to her and said, `This is really weird. I've never seen anything like this in all my years on the lake.

Gov. Parris N. Glendening cast his gaze well beyond Maryland in his final State of the State address yesterday, telling legislators that their support for public education and the environment could create "ripples of hope" that might affect problems as far off and intractable as AIDS in Africa. In a nontraditional speech that aides said he partly wrote, Glendening spent as much time recounting a recent conversation with former South African President Nelson Mandela and describing his vision for "an Environmental Marshall Plan" as he did outlining goals for the legislative session that began last week.