Seal

A police officer escorting a marine rescue vehicle containing a rehabilitated harp seal was injured yesterday when his motorcycle was hit by a pickup truck on a Baltimore Beltway off-ramp, authorities said. Officer James Smith, 42, a 13-year veteran of the Baltimore Police Department, was treated at Maryland Shock Trauma Center and released yesterday afternoon, a hospital spokesman said. A city police spokesman said Smith was conscious and talking after the accident but complained of neck and back injuries.

A young harbor seal rescued from the Ocean City beach will be flown to the Maine coast and released tomorrow morning -- a triumph for the veterinary staff, mammalogists and volunteers who cared for the animal during a four-month hospital stay at Baltimore's National Aquarium.The female seal, less than a year old, was captured near 122nd Street April 2 after a week of sightings along the Maryland-Delaware shore. It was heavily infested with parasites, including lungworms that made its breathing difficult, and had open viral lesions on its face and flippers.

A blind harbor seal rescued a decade ago from a beach stranding has taken up residence at the National Aquarium's outdoor pool in Baltimore, accompanied by the pup she gave birth to in June.The story of the blind seal, named Clarisse, illustrates a problem facing aquariums across the country -- finding homes for the large number of seals that are found stranded and injured or ailing.Although only seven stranded seals have been tended so far in the National Aquarium's marine mammal hospital, the New England Aquarium has been helping out with hundreds of seals found stranded each year and providing medical care for many of them.

McDonogh's Andy Seal (160 pounds) got his fifth pin in as many wins, and teammate Joe Rosenbaum (171) improved to 6-0 with his fifth pin as the host Eagles won yesterday's Ray Oliver Tournament for the first time in the event's 26 years.McDonogh freshman Zak Johns (103), a two-time junior league state champ, improved to 6-0 with his fifth pin to become the Eagles' third champ.McDonogh (190.5 points) edged seven-time district champ Hanover (182.5 points). The fifth-ranked Seal earned the title by pinning St. Paul's Lee Penno in 1: 16."

A battle is looming between community activists and the Army over the future of a 55-year-old Edgewood landfill, which the military is hoping to cap this fall without knowing for certain what is buried there.A watchdog group, Aberdeen Proving Ground Superfund Citizens Coalition, says the Army is moving too quickly on its plans to seal the landfill, at a cost of about $1.8 million."We want to know what's in that landfill before we agree to any plan to seal it shut," said Helen Richick, executive director of the coalition.

HOUSTON -- Investigators are looking at new scenarios for how hot gases entered shuttle Columbia's left wing, causing it to disintegrate over Texas on Feb. 1. Contrary to previous analyses, investigators said yesterday that they now suspect that an object seen floating near Columbia on its second day in space was a fragment of a carbon panel that wraps around the wing's edge or a seal from that region. Investigators think the piece came loose after being damaged by a chunk of foam insulation that flew off the external tank and slammed into the wing during launch.

This week's cold snap reminded me that it is time to try to make the house into an insulated bunker, sealing leaks, stopping drafts. There seem to be about 1,000 fronts on this battle. Tactics range from putting another layer of insulation in the attic, to inserting foam-insulating plates on the electrical outlets of outside walls, to putting sweeps on the bottoms of outside doors. They are all pretty boring. The only weatherization procedure that sounds like fun to me is detecting drafts by carrying a lighted incense stick around the house, watching to see where the smoke disappears.

NEW YORK -- Securities firms won only a small victory with last week's dismissal of a state court order sealing details of a former trader's termination, legal experts said.Brokers, they said, are still free to sue their former employers in federal court or in arbitration over the firm's "U-5" report describing why they left.Manhattan's influential state appellate panel ruled Tuesday that a state judge didn't have the power to prevent Nomura Securities International Inc. from filing a federally mandated U-5 disclosure form on Andrew Brenner, a broker who claimed he was wrongfully fired.

At times, Demi Moore's new movie "G.I. Jane" seems more like a Bally's commercial than a feature film.There's Demi doing chin-ups, Demi doing curls, Demi doing one-arm push-ups. "G.I. Jane" often reminded me of those long exercise sequences that were de rigueur in every "Rocky" picture. With Sylvester Stallone having gone to seed for "Cop Land," Demi must have figured someone had to do the Jack LaLanne routine.Of course, she's every bit the physical specimen that Stallone used to be, with her comic-book musculature and rippling abs, all of it glistening in sweat.

An emaciated young harbor seal found stranded and nearly strangled by a fishing net in Bermuda in February has been nursed back to health at the National Aquarium in Baltimore and will be set free this week. The seal, named Hamilton after Bermuda's capital city, has been in the care of the aquarium's Marine Animal Rescue Team since March. On Thursday the team's staff and volunteers plan to set him free from a beach in Delaware. "We're set up to handle [crowds], and we invite the public to see the seal first-hand and learn a little bit about seal behavior," said Jennifer Dittmar, the aquarium's stranding coordinator.