Union City

Union City's final race ended in a horse ambulance parked on a dusty lot by a maintenance shop some 100 yards from the starting gate of the 118th Preakness Stakes.Inside the white van, a covered 20-foot metal stall, Dr. Dan Dreyfuss prepared the lethal injection that quickly would extinguish the life of the 3-year-old colt, whose right front ankle was bent, broken and bloody. The veterinarian emptied a 100 cc bottle of sodium pentabarbitol into three syringes. He then took a needle and stuck it into the horse's neck, on the left side, finding the jugular vein.

The Baltimore Teachers Union announced Friday that it has reached a tentative 2010-2011 contract with city school officials that is expected to be ratified and approved in the coming weeks. Negotiations have been ongoing for months, and last year's contract had to be extended while officials reached an agreement. The statement included few details about the new contract, but the union called it "landmark" and BTU President Marietta English she was "excited" about the agreement.

The day after the Preakness was a little gloomier than usual yesterday in the stakes barn at Pimlico.Two horses, including fourth-place finisher Personal Hope, bled during the race and will miss the June 5 Belmont Stakes.And the extent of injuries to Union City, the D. Wayne Lukas-trained runner who broke down midway through the backstretch and later was destroyed, were more extensive than originally reported.Lukas reacted angrily to suggestions that the horse should not have started in the race because he had missed a day's training Wednesday and had not had a speed workout or breezed between the Kentucky Derby and Preakness as all of the other starters did."

Baltimore's police and firefighters' unions filed a lawsuit against the city in federal court Thursday, contending that officials "knowingly underfunded" their pension plan over the past decade — ignoring the advice of financial experts hired by the city. The lawsuit threatens to introduce a protracted and costly legal battle into the emotionally charged debate about altering the retirement benefits paid to public safety officers. If officials do not make drastic changes to the pension system by July 1, the city will owe $65 million that it cannot pay. Union leaders, who stress the dangerous and grueling nature of police and fire work, have resisted the pension changes that the city has proposed, saying they constitute a violation of their contract.

BALTIMORE -- Union City was the talk of the Pimlico backstretch all week. And nobody, including the colt's trainer, was saying anything nice.One day, the colt didn't even go to the track to train. That never happens. By Friday, trainer D. Wayne Lukas, who touted Union City so hard and so often in the Kentucky Derby that the colt was way overbet -- proving again that you can fool many of the people much of the time -- publicly admitted he didn't think much of Union City's chances in the Preakness.

Triumph mixed with tragedy at the 118th Preakness Stake yesterday.Prairie Bayou, a chestnut gelding with a heart of steel, won the 1 3/16-mile race in 1 minute, 56 3/5 seconds before 85,495 at Pimlico Race Course.But the bright, beautiful day ended with the announcement that Union City, a bay colt who pulled up after breaking the sesamoid bones in his right front ankle, was humanely destroyed."There was no decision to be made as far as trying to save him," said Union City trainer D. Wayne Lukas, who was near tears.

When trainer D. Wayne Lukas comes to the Preakness, he stays in the same hotel each year.But he never makes his reservations early."You can point for the Kentucky Derby, but you can't plan beyond it," he said. "You never know if you're going to make it to Step 2."But Lukas usually does.Since he ran his first horse in the Preakness in 1980 -- and won the race with Codex -- he has had at least one runner 11 of the previous 13 years in the second leg of the Triple Crown and has hit the board 50 percent of the time.

With foal crops, track attendance, betting handles and TV ratings down, the last thing racing needs is a brouhaha about the depressing death of a horse. But D. Wayne Lukas' handling of Union City has stirred a fierce debate.It is an inevitable debate, given Lukas' training tactics. And it is a decidedly unfair debate.Lukas was massacred in the racing press after Union City broke down in the Preakness and became the first Triple Crown fatality in 34 years. The criticism was that Lukas had all but engineered the colt's death by running it when he wasn't sure it was sound.

As a circle of reporters watched shortly after dawn yesterday at Pimlico, D. Wayne Lukas went about the business of washing Tabasco Cat, his entry in tomorrow's Preakness."

Mrs. Dorothea Quick, September 4, 2009. She is survived by numerous nieces and nephews. Funeral services will be held Tuesday, September 8, 2009 at 4 o'clock in the Christian City Welcome Center Chapel with Rev. Daniel Schepman and Minister Carl Ryden officiating. Interment will be held at Parkwood Cemetery in Baltimore, MD at a later date. Those wishing may send an online condolence at www.parrottfuneralhome.com. In lieu of flowers those desiring may make donations to St. Paul Lutheran Church, 700 Ardenlee Parkway, Peachtree City, GA 30269 or Christian City, 7290 Lester Road, Union City, GA 30291.

The police union and City Hall are preparing for arbitration after attempts to reach an agreement to trim $5.1 million from the police budget failed. "Despite our best efforts, we have not been able to reach a consensus," said Scott Peterson, a spokesman for Mayor Sheila Dixon. The Fraternal Order of Police submitted a final offer this week, which city officials say does not meet the targeted cuts. But union President Robert Cherry disagreed, saying, "We've given them a number of offers that would not only meet the $5.1 million goal but exceed it."

Mrs. Dorothea Quick, September 4, 2009. She is survived by numerous nieces and nephews. Funeral services will be held Tuesday, September 8, 2009 at 4 o'clock in the Christian City Welcome Center Chapel with Rev. Daniel Schepman and Minister Carl Ryden officiating. Interment will be held at Parkwood Cemetery in Baltimore, MD at a later date. Those wishing may send an online condolence at www.parrottfuneralhome.com. In lieu of flowers those desiring may make donations to St. Paul Lutheran Church, 700 Ardenlee Parkway, Peachtree City, GA 30269 or Christian City, 7290 Lester Road, Union City, GA 30291.

The Annapolis Police Department's union and the city will head back to the bargaining table, after union members overwhelmingly rejected the city's first salary and benefit proposal. "We are tired of working shorthanded! We are tired of the lack of recruiting efforts by the city! We are just tired!" read a flier distributed by the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400. On Thursday the union turned down the city's offer of a 2 percent cost-of-living increase. It is seeking 8 percent.

In one of the first major endorsements of this year's mayoral race, Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon picked up the support a powerful health care union yesterday. The union, 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, has about 4,500 members in the city and was a prominent backer of Martin O'Malley during his gubernatorial campaign last year. The group paid for a media blitz - including television commercials - that criticized then-Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. Not only was the endorsement the first by any large union in this year's election, its announcement marked Dixon's first public campaign event leading up to the Sept.

Some of the city's top black leaders and the head of Baltimore's police union accused each other yesterday of trying to use Police Commissioner Kevin P. Clark's apparent domestic troubles to further their own racial agendas. Led by Sen. Nathaniel J. McFadden, Del. Salima S. Marriott and G.I. Johnson, the local head of the NAACP, about 30 people demonstrated outside of police headquarters, saying the union was trying to take Clark down because he is black. "You have the good ol' boy racist network unhappy with the black commissioner," said George W. Collins, 78, a community activist from Cross Keys.

Sheila Z. Kolman, a retired school principal who was president of the Public School Administrators and Supervisors Association of Baltimore City, died in her sleep Monday at her Northwest Baltimore home. She was 63. In a career spanning nearly four decades, Miss Kolman was a tireless advocate for schoolchildren and administrators. "She was one of those people who never lost sight of the kids. She was also a big proponent of staff development and trained a million people who have gone on to principalships and other leadership roles in education," said Ruth N. Bukatman, a longtime friend who is principal of Booker T. Washington Middle School.

"What I Lived For" is a novel that, by its own bravado and conceits, first soars and then plummets. I was utterly taken by the first hundred pages, only to yearn for the book to come to a merciful conclusion. This was one frustrating book.It is a novel about an Irish-American pol in upstate New York named Jerome "Corky" Corcoran. When Corky was 11 -- "a scrawny undersized kid" -- his father was gunned down at the doorstep of their posh home on Christmas Eve, 1959.Tim Corcoran had been a brawling, blustering owner of a construction business in Union City, a heavily ethnic industrial city that sounds a lot like Buffalo.

Prairie Bayou escaped a near brush with disaster yesterday and won the first Preakness Stakes in modern times in which a horse suffered a fatal injury.The death of Union City, who had to be humanely destroyed after fracturing sesamoid bones in his right front ankle, shrouded the achievement of Loblolly Stable, which seems jinxed in the Kentucky Derby, but won the Preakness for the second time in two years. The race also marked the defeat of Kentucky Derby winner Sea Hero, who finished fifth and squelched any chance of a 1993 Triple Crown winner.

A group of residents and their union backers filed a lawsuit against the city yesterday, charging that officials are breaking their own rules to hand out millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies to a hotel developer. The developer, Donald J. Urgo and Associates, plans to build a Marriott Residence Inn downtown on Light Street, and the city is close to approving a $3.2 million, 10-year tax break called a PILOT, or payment in lieu of taxes, to support the project. But the lawsuit charges that the developer will not hire enough workers or invest enough money to meet city and state thresholds for public subsidy.

HACKENSACK, N.J. - The framed artwork has come down, the posters are rolled up. The Cuban flag that sat on the mantel is stored away. Rolando Brito is leaving New Jersey for a warmer climate, extended family, and job opportunities in South Florida. When he drives down I-95 in his new black Nissan Altima, Brito will become another of the thousands of Cuban-Americans who have left New Jersey in the last decade. The reasons for the exodus range from relatives and job opportunities in other states to retirement in Florida - the closest that graying Cubans believe they'll ever come to their native island.