University Of Massachusetts

In 1934, Enrico and Maria Velleggia opened Enrico's Friendly Tavern in Little Italy. It was the beginning of a restaurant dynasty.Today, there's still a Velleggia's Restaurant in Little Italy, but after 22 years, Dici Naz Velleggia closed his Towson restaurant. Naz says, "It was time for a change." And change it did! When the new restaurant, Enrico's, named for his father, opened several weeks ago, his two sons Enrico, the chef, and Mark, were running the show. The place looks great after a coat of salmon-colored paint and the installation of a newsalmon-and-green carpet.

John D. Strong, taught astronomy at HopkinsA Mass of Christian burial for John Donovan Strong, an astronomer who was a professor at the Johns Hopkins University before moving to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, will be offered at 11 a.m. tomorrow at St. Brigid's Roman Catholic Church in Amherst.Dr. Strong died of cancer Saturday at age 87 at a nursing home in Amherst.He retired from the University of Massachusetts in 1975, when he was named a professor emeritus. He had been director of the Laboratory of Astrophysics and Physical Meteorology there since From 1945 to 1967, he was a professor and laboratory director at Hopkins.

Five years ago, the NAACP faced the specter of irrelevancy. Then a conservative political tide started washing away civil rights gains. The NAACP again seemed relevant.Two years ago, the NAACP was on the brink of insolvency. Then new leaders, Chairwoman Myrlie Evers-Williams and President Kweisi Mfume, swept away the debts. The NAACP again was solvent.Now the NAACP confronts the threat of inefficacy. How can an understaffed, meagerly funded organization that relies on volunteers for almost everything defend affirmative action, majority-black congressional districts and other liberal policies from a Republican Congress, a conservative judiciary and a largely unsympathetic public?

Mike Waddell, whose 2 1/2-year tenure as Towson's athletic director was marked both by the tremendous growth in its football and men's basketball programs and by the controversy surrounding the elimination of men's soccer and the proposed dropping of baseball, is leaving to become a senior associate athletic director at Arkansas. Waddell's departure comes a few months before the school is scheduled to open Tiger Arena and several months after Waddell found himself embroiled in an often nasty debate that ultimately reached the state legislature and was - at least temporarily - resolved with extra funding for the baseball program.

Elmer George Worthley, a Maryland botanist whose discoveries around the world bear his name, died of cancer June 19 at his home in Finksburg. He was 80.Dr. Worthley worked for the U.S. Army for 29 years and retired in 1981 as a civilian research biologist at the Edgewood Arsenal. He also was an adjunct professor and taught a course on taxonomic botany at his home, where he planted thousands of specimen plants under the sponsorship of the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy.Although he was interested in all forms of trees, shrubs and flowers, he was particularly fascinated by such plant forms as grasses, mosses, liverworts, fungi and lichens.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger of the two brothers accused of perpetrating the Boston Marathon bombing, is the baffling mystery man in this crime. His older brother, Tamerlan, who died in a shootout with police in the dark early hours Friday morning, better fits the stereotype of a disaffected, nascent terrorist. He was nearing adulthood when he came to this country from Russia's predominantly Muslim central Asian region. He talked of having no American friends. He had openly disdained the immorality of American society and adopted a zealous brand of Islam.

The arrest of three friends of the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing reminds us of the consequences of withholding information from investigators, lying or being an accessory after the fact for a friend or loved one. In other words, if the authorities are correct, "snitching" could have saved these three young men from facing criminal charges, international notoriety, and a future scarred by the cover up of their friend - a suspected terrorist....

In-patient units at Spring Grove Hospital Center in Catonsville have become troubled environments where serious assaults on hospital staff are common, according to a scathing new report from a consultant for the Maryland health department. The chaos at the state's largest psychiatric hospital, the consultant found, is fueled by a few patients who "prey upon patients and staff with relative impunity" after being ordered by courts to the hospital for psychiatric evaluation - sometimes with dubious symptoms.

The Ravens have re-signed running back Matt Lawrence, according to the team's Web site. Lawrence, who played collegiately at the University of Massachusetts, spent most of 2008 on the Ravens' practice squad after being released by the Seattle Seahawks. He made the team's regular roster last season and played special teams until injuring his knee in Week 12. Lawrence made 16 special teams tackles before being injured. The Web site said the deal with Lawrence was reached Thursday.

A Mississippi infant born with HIV has become the first child cured of the deadly virus, leaving hope that the disease can be eliminated in the youngest patients, scientists from Johns Hopkins Children's Center and other institutions said Sunday. The infant, who was born to an HIV-infected mother, was given antiretroviral treatment beginning 30 hours after birth. Scientists believe the early intervention may have proven key to curing the child, who is now 2 1/2 years old. The infant has been determined “functionally cured,” said the scientists, some of whom are from the University of Mississippi Medical Center and the University of Massachusetts Medical School.