Uncovered

On a September day in 1939, a Baltimore man poured money, a lot of hope and one regrettably unprotected box into a city block he had fallen in love with. Yesterday, the man's son and grandson, who inherited his passion for the 1700 block of N. Charles St., dug into the concrete to unearth the time capsule that adman Louis Shecter had buried there and to maybe solve what's been something of a family mystery for nearly 70 years. Like any respectable time-capsule burier, Shecter intended his bounty to lie dormant for a century.

ign.com What's the point? -- IGN is practically an entertainment database. Focusing primarily on video games, the site offers news, reviews, previews, videos, etc. in the categories of movies, TV, games, music, sports and cars. What to look for --All that you would expect in an entertainment site for teenage through young adult males can be found. The video game features are extensive, to say the least, but virtually no aspects of lazy male enjoyment are left uncovered.

Under blue tents in Cockeysville, archeologists scrub shards of pottery with toothbrushes. Nearby, small flags jut from the grass and a hole reveals a stone foundation and steps. It might seem an unlikely place for an archaeological project, just a short distance from Interstate 83 and a light rail stop. But it's where a team of archaeologists working with the Maryland State Highway Administration is unearthing the remnants of a small plantation where slaves, free blacks and European immigrants once labored side by side, an arrangement historians say was more common in Maryland than in other slave states.

Gardening gloves, hedge clippers, hoes and rakes were in abundance. And so were the volunteers who gathered yesterday at a small Federal Hill park for the second consecutive day of sprucing up the neglected landscape. Robert Baker Park, a small, grassy rectangle surrounded by a 4-feet-high brick wall at Light Street and Key Highway, is "like a jungle," said Kathie McCleskey, the beautification committee chairwoman of the Federal Hill Neighborhood Association. She had joined with the youth ministry from a church in Delaware to clean the park, overgrown with weeds, vines and bushes.

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Attorneys representing three Duke lacrosse players didn't believe what they had found when one of them discovered favorable DNA test results buried in prosecutor Michael B. Nifong's files. Testifying yesterday in Nifong's misconduct trial, a lawyer for one of the accused players described how he had locked himself in a conference room for more than 60 hours with a textbook and 1,844 pages of technical documents. The defense team had pried the documents from Nifong and a DNA lab. Lawyer Bradley Bannon, who is not a DNA expert, found previously undisclosed test results showing that DNA from unknown men had been recovered from Crystal Gail Mangum's body and underwear.

WASHINGTON -- A couple of new studies about race and gender bias got me to thinking about an age-old question: Is it possible to think in a racist way without being consciously racist? How about sexist? Stephen Colbert indirectly raises such questions when he declares on his Comedy Central show The Colbert Report that "I don't see race." Unless you are pitifully tone-deaf to irony, you can tell that Mr. Colbert is putting us on with his flip certainty. I don't care what race you are - asserting too casually that race isn't important is a risky invitation to be fooled by how differently the world looks to people of different races.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Seventeen North Carolina Central University undergraduates in a communications class were asked to think like a jury: Raise your hand if you believe the accuser in the Duke lacrosse sexual assault case fabricated her story. The students in the cramped cinderblock classroom looked at each other and at the reporter posing the issue. Not a single hand was raised. Students at the historically black state university, where the accuser is enrolled, mostly support the 28-year-old student, mother and exotic dancer whose allegations against three former Duke lacrosse players have been widely discredited in court and the media.

Archaeologists working near Stonehenge in England have discovered what appears to be an ancient religious complex containing a treasure trove of artifacts that might finally illuminate the lives and religious practices of the people who built the mysterious monument 4,600 years ago, British archaeologists said yesterday. The circle of massive stone blocks on England's Salisbury Plain southwest of London is one of the best known archaeological sites in the world, but researchers know surprisingly little about the people who built it and lived in the region.

The officers strapped on body armor, grabbed a few battering rams and jumped into a dozen unmarked cars shortly after noon yesterday. Using a handheld radio, a sergeant issued crisp orders to the plainclothes officers in the cars, commanding them to line up in the Northern District station house's parking lot on Coldspring Lane. Then they rolled out, west along Coldspring, and then north, heading into the city's Park Heights neighborhood. Their cars separated into small groups and abruptly stopped before three rowhouses on or near Oakley Avenue.

. Investigations led by a Republican lawyer, Stuart W. Bowen Jr., in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies such as Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces. And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Bowen's supporters believe is his reward: a pink slip.