Unchanged

Washington. -- In the hectic year of 1974, when Ted Agnew was out but Dick Nixon was still in, the venerable Gridiron Club of Washington satirized the domestic climate of the time with words sung to the tune of "America the Beautiful":Oh beautiful for Tel & Tel,Du Pont and Sperry Rand,For U.S. Steel and HoneywellAnd Continental Can;American Cyanamid,Three-M and A&PAnd Standard Brands and Ho-Jo standsFrom sea to shining sea!The kicker paid tribute to the man of the hour, whom everyone suspected would be president soon:Americard and Diner's Club,Sears and Montgomery Ward,And Pontiac and CadillacAnd good old Jerry Ford!

Raleigh D. Lemon Jr. should not be dead.So say two witnesses who testified yesterday in Baltimore Circuit Court, where the family of Mr. Lemon is suing a city police officer for shooting the 32-year-old construction worker and father of three in the back and killing him.The witnesses were a former Washington police chief testifying as a paid expert for the plaintiffs and a security guard who saw Officer Darlene Early pull the trigger.The former chief said lax policies and lapses in judgment by Baltimore police commanders created a situation that was ripe for disaster long before the fatal shot was fired.

Baltimore's decision yesterday to cancel its contracts with Education Alternatives Inc. ends its nationally watched partnership aimed at improving educational quality but does little to resolve the school system's immediate financial crisis.Ending the contracts will save the school system an estimated $2.8 million this year -- far less than the savings sought during weeks of futile negotiations with EAI, city officials said.Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke said yesterday that it was EAI's unwillingness to accept a $7 million cut in fees that forced him to void its deals with the city.

Lately, strangers have been coming up to David Graham, wanting to shake his hand and thank him. That wouldn't be unusual if he were a rock star or an actor. But he's neither. He's a career government scientist, a self-described "big-time introvert" who likes poetry and hiking. Over the past few weeks, the 50-year-old epidemiologist has become an accidental celebrity. He has testified before Congress and appeared on the CBS Evening News, Nightline, and the front pages of newspapers around the country.

Fall means that kids go back to school. It also means that films for adults are in the offing -- from Martin Scorsese's disturbing sexual thriller "Cape Fear" to John Sayles' drama of smoldering ethnic tensions, "City of Hope."The exception that proves the rule is that the first movie of the fall is really the last movie of the summer: "Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare," which opens here Friday the 13th and will be the sixth -- and supposedly final -- installment of the "Nightmare on Elm Street" series featuring dream slasher Freddy Krueger.

TWO YEARS AGO, in an editorial called "Getting Away with Murder," we urged Gov. Parris N. Glendening, Court of Appeals Chief Judge Robert M. Bell and then-Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke to lead corrective action in Baltimore's broken criminal justice system. But our repeated calls for high-level intervention fell on deaf ears. Those leaders shuffled their responsibility off to a Criminal Justice Coordinating Council that had no legal authority and was given no clear direction. The council tinkered around the edges of the problems, reducing backlogs at Baltimore Circuit Court and convincing the heads of the local criminal justice bureaucracies to settle some of their worst turf fights.

Johns Hopkins scientists have found a way to screen for hard-to-detect endometrial and ovarian cancers in women using a routine Pap smear, a discovery they hope eventually could reduce the number of deaths caused by the deadly malignancies. The researchers from the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center hope the Pap smear, a procedure in which cells are scraped from the cervix and examined under a microscope, can catch the two cancers in early stages and allow for earlier treatment. The Pap test has dramatically improved detection of cervical cancer over the years, curbing deaths by 75 percent among those who are screened.

The Johns Hopkins men's lacrosse program plans to surrender its status as an independent and join a conference, the university announced Friday. The Blue Jays have competed independently for 130 years, winning nine NCAA championships and qualifying for 41 consecutive NCAA tournaments before getting left out of the postseason earlier this month. In a letter to the Johns Hopkins community and posted on the school's website, president Ronald J. Daniels said he accepted the recommendation of a seven-member special committee that proposed that the program pursue a conference affiliation.

WHAT DOES it mean when you hear that a dear friend has had a heart attack and is in the hospital in critical condition? Just how bad is critical? You might call the hospital the next day and be told his condition is stable. Does that mean he is out of danger now?Perhaps you read about an accident on I-95 in which three local teen-agers are hurt. The paper says one of the passengers was hospitalized in critical condition. The next day you read that the teen's condition is guarded. Does that mean he is getting better or worse?

In June 2009, my husband Sam and I slammed down the hatchback of our Honda CRV, the interior bulging with containers of Legos and books, school supplies and board games, and a box of shoes, a tin of Old Bay in the glove compartment. On the roof was a plastic carrier with as much clothing as we could stuff into it: the necessities of five soon-to-be expatriates. Everything else was in the basement of our Lutherville home, with a new family moving in at the end of the month. Our mission: to give our three children a taste of life in a foreign country, where the language, food, and culture would be vastly different from suburban Baltimore.