Two Sides

Gov. Parris N. Glendening and Attorney General J. Joseph Curran Jr. made peace yesterday with Baltimore attorney Peter G. Angelos, formally ending a bitter, three-year dispute over Angelos' fee for handling the state's tobacco lawsuit. At a joint news conference in Annapolis the three men said a final agreement has been reached to pay Angelos $150 million over the next five years, starting with a $30 million payment this month. Angelos had been seeking to collect $1 billion, or 25 percent of the $4 billion the state is expected to receive over 25 years under the national tobacco settlement.

NEW YORK -- One of George Steinbrenner's proposals for Darryl Strawberry's contract that kept the slugger from joining the New York Yankees, as scheduled, on Sunday would have subjected Strawberry's children to drug tests as beneficiaries of a trust created with his Yankee salary.Another would have given the club the right to release Strawberry if he violated a deal the owner wanted him to make with the Internal Revenue Service.Strawberry's agent rejected those proposals and others, people familiar with the dispute said.

LIKE AN unhappy married couple, the Orioles and the Maryland Stadium Authority are bickering, bickering, bickering. There's more anger and finger-pointing than rational discussion. But in this case, the couple can't file for divorce.The most recent spat is over parking. Orioles management has been unhappy since construction began on the Ravens stadium next door. Overnight, the baseball team had a king-sized parking headache.Oriole officials blame the stadium authority for failing to find alternative parking immediately.

Contract talks for some of the NBA's top free agents -- including Washington Bullets forward Juwan Howard -- will get under way tomorrow after the league yesterday briefly imposed a lockout, only to reverse itself later after finally reaching an agreement with the players association.Yesterday's lockout, coming after both sides initially could not reach an agreement in the dispersal of $50 million in profit sharing, forced the cancellation of talks yesterday between the Bullets and Howard that were to take place at the Chevy Chase offices of agent David Falk.

A Verizon Communications executive said yesterday that "very significant progress" had been made in the talks between the company and its union workers - on the fifth day of their strike - and expressed hope that a new collective bargaining agreement could be reached very soon. Union officials characterized the progress with a bit more reserve. About 87,000 workers from the Communications Workers of America and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers went on strike at 12:01 a.m. Sunday, just after their two-year contracts expired.

Over the years, the relationship between Maryland's agricultural community and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation has been chilly, to put it charitably. The two sides have been on opposite sides of the fence on an array of issues. And it is no exaggeration to say that the foundation and farm groups excoriated each other as recently as the late 1990s during the debate over whom to blame for the outbreaks of toxic Pfiesteria piscicida in waterways flowing into the bay. But more recently the relationship has been undergoing a thaw, and many in the farm community are attributing it to the efforts of Kim Coble, the foundation's Maryland executive director.

WASHINGTON - Deepening his personal involvement in the India-Pakistan conflict, President Bush telephoned the leaders of both countries yesterday and urged them to "choose the path of diplomacy" and to pull their nuclear-armed nations back from the brink of war. The president placed back-to-back calls to President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India on a day of relative calm. Still, more than 1 million troops combined from both sides remain massed along their border in Kashmir, a Himalayan region that both nations claim.

United Nations peacekeeping is a frustrating exercise.Getting the forces together is messy and sometimes ill-coordinated. Finding the funds to pay for the deployment and maintenance of the troops is even more trying. The generous, like Canada, get hit harder.Military officers themselves are often very ambivalent about peacekeeping because it is akin to police duty rather than to regular combat duty for which armies are trained. Peacekeeping is therefore sometimes regarded as a distortion of the primary military role.

When is a lawsuit a lawsuit, and when is it a publicity stunt?In the soap opera that the Battle of Baltimore Bancorp has sometimes resembled, it's an interesting question. For about six weeks now, incumbent managers led by company Chairman Harry L. Robinson and dissident shareholders led by Edwin F. Hale Sr. have taken their battle to different courts, the state ethics commission, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.At each twist and turn, the two sides have claimed terrible injury and accused the other of callous law-breaking, even law-trampling.

A murdered screenwriter who narrates from the grave. An idealistic script reader who thinks she can work her way up in a studio on smarts alone. A producer who would push a baseball project if he could turn it into a musical for a female star. Those are just the "normal" characters in "Sunset Boulevard," the anchor of the opening-day bill for "You Be Cinema," the University of Baltimore's new film series at UB's Student Center Performing Arts Theater, 21 W. Mount Royal Ave. Billy Wilder's coruscating pop tragedy, streaked with horror and black comedy, is still the ultimate Hollywood movie, 60 years after its premiere.