Spirit

Low-cost carrier Spirit Airlines will be starting daily nonstop service between Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport and Las Vegas on April 25. The flight, announced Wednesday, will leave BWI at 7:30 p.m. and arrive in Las Vegas at 9:22 p.m. The return flight departs Las Vegas at 11:47 p.m. and lands at 7:20 a.m. Spirit, which shifted its operation to BWI from Reagan National Airport outside Washington last September, also...

Low-cost carrier Spirit Airlines announced Tuesday that it will be adding daily nonstop seasonal service from Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport to Myrtle Beach International Airport beginning April 25. Spirit, based in Florida, operates Airbus A319 and A320 jets on its routes, with 145 to 178 seats each. The flight from Baltimore will depart at 10:45 a.m. The return from Myrtle Beach will depart at 5:20 p.m. Paul Wiedefeld, executive director of BWI Marshall, welcomed the addition, noting that the Myrtle Beach route opens a new nonstop market and gives Florida vacationers another option for low airfares.

There is a whole generation of Baltimoreans who have grown up without knowing that, somewhere deep in its DNA, this is a baseball town. The Ravens, yes; the Colts, certainly - they occupy a big chunk of the municipal imagination. But for so long, there were Brooks, Frank, Eddie, Palmer, Cal and Earl, with Wild Bill in the stands on 33rd Street. The Oriole Way was the Baltimore Way: Show up, do your job. Not flashy, just good, year in and year out. For 14 miserable, losing years, we locked that away.

What people go through to live their lives — war and terror, disease and pain, poverty and hunger, long journeys across continents and oceans, loss and heartbreak — always leaves me awed and humbled. You hear a story, like the one I'm offering this Christmas, and you want to raise a glass to that thing we call human spirit. Milla Dawt Hniang, who travels with crutches and guitar, has it in bunches. It has taken her 20 years past the age when her parents thought she would die. She's a Burmese-born singer-songwriter about to release her first CD and send more music of the American country-pop variety — think Taylor Swift — into the world.

I got lost on the way to the church. A few weeks ago, I was heading down Wolfe Street into the complex that is Johns Hopkins Hospital when I drove past Ashland Street. I had to stop at a Citgo station for directions to get back on track. There it was - the City of Hope Missionary Baptist Church - a two-story building that shared a block with some of the vast medical encampment that is both swallowing and saving East Baltimore. Just beyond the church were abandoned rowhomes, some of them roofless, all of them boarded up. This particular weekend marked City of Hope's fifth anniversary.

John Ragan concedes that he is neither computer-savvy nor very much interested in using the Internet. "I'm not an Internet-surfing kind of guy," the 30-year-old carpenter said recently. But it was his occasional foray onto MarylandWhitetail.com that prompted Ragan to put a classified ad on the hunting-based website, offering to sell all of his bowhunting equipment for the $600 he figured he needed to buy Christmas presents for his family. Ragan, who grew up in Baltimore and now lives in Westminster with his wife and their two children, 12-year-old son Trenton and 9-year-old daughter Hayley, needed the money after he was laid off from a few sub-contracting jobs in recent months because of the economy.

Josephine Grace "Joey" Gay, a 7-year-old child born in Columbia who died Dec. 14 in the Newtown, Conn., elementary school shooting, was recalled by her family for her "indomitable" spirit, love of the color purple and her generosity. In a statement released Thursday, her father, Robert "Bob" Gay, and her mother, the former Michele Hartman, acknowledged the "love and kindness pouring in. " They said, "We see how evil is defeated. " They said their daughter was "autistic and severely apraxic.

Europeans would have a laugh at our expense over what we consider an old structure. Nevertheless, Monkton's Stone Haven Farm, owned by Dan Saffer and his wife, JoAnne Duffy, had been standing for eight years when Handel's "Messiah" was first performed. The home's rugged stones braved winter two decades before the signing of the Declaration of Independence and years before Baltimore City became incorporated. By American standards, it's really quite old. A long narrow lane off a main road in northern Baltimore County leads to a circular stone wall, inside of which are a fountain, trees and myriad poinsettias.

Women's pro soccer Newly unveiled Spirit names Jorden first coach The Washington Spirit, the area's entry in the new U.S. league, revealed its identity Tuesday afternoon and announced that Mike Jorden will be its first coach. The club's website is WashingtonSpirit.com and its Twitter handle is twitter.com/WashSpirit. Season tickets are on sale, including early-bird holiday season specials. Jorden is one of several figures from D.C. United Women who will lead the Spirit, one of eight teams in the new league, joining Boston, Chicago, Kansas City, New Jersey, Portland, Rochester and Seattle.