Vast

WASHINGTON -- Following fast on the heels of armor thrusting into Kuwait and Iraq, a vast logistical train must head into the desert to feed, fuel and arm the immense attacking armies of the alliance.Without this effort, the rapid progress reported from the war zone would quickly bog down as troops ran out of supplies, beginning with the fuel guzzled by tanks, helicopters and other heavy weapons.The logistical plan, set up and rehearsed in detail for many weeks, has been made easier to carry out because the advance has met minimal initial resistance.

I'm not big into conspiracy theories. I never bought into the grassy knoll in Dallas or the anti-Obama birther movement. And it will take a lot of convincing for me to believe Oakland Raiders coach Bill Callahan took a dive in Super Bowl XXXVII to please his friend (and opposing coach) Jon Gruden. But I do believe that America's political tilt toward progressivism is the product of a lot of grassroots work by very liberal groups intent on remaking the American economy and culture.

GROVER, Colo. -- The sun rises softly on the plains, spreading light evenly across golden wheat fields and the timeless prairie. There are stretches where there is little to see but the land and the sky and, through the eyes of the Rev. Gertrude Horn, the love of God.This is the not the Colorado that most people visualize. From here, the Rockies are but a faded blue wrinkle on the western horizon, visible primarily by the contrast of lingering patches of long-ago snow. The closest city is Cheyenne, Wyo., about 60 miles to the northwest.

A pair of side-by-side brick townhouses might be two of the most lovingly restored homes in the historic neighborhood of Federal Hill. They sit off a wide, brick-lined street. Separated on the ground level by a sally port (a narrow, open passage way), each has a door painted soft gold, each features third-floor garrets and each has windows cloaked in black shutters. These are the homes of Dr. John Hawkins, a dentist who practices in Federalsburg, a small town on Maryland's Eastern Shore, where he lives in another home during the week.

Over a series of recent visits, Sun photographer Algerina Perna documented life inside the Bethlehem Steel plant in Sparrows Point, recording its final days under that legendary name before a new owner took over this past week. In doing so, she says, "I had a sense of seeing the great Industrial Revolution now faded before me. The vastness of the place was accentuated by the lack of people. Yet, I could almost see the hordes of men from an era gone by, walking under huge overhead pipes, carrying empty lunchboxes, on their way home after a hard day's work."

BOUGARA, Algeria -- Tucked into vast orange plantations at the foot of the Atlas mountains, the town looks peaceful. Robed men congregate for an afternoon discussion in the shade of the cypress trees. Barefoot children play soccer on a dirty patch of open space. Women line up at the bakeries for fresh baguettes.But the tranquillity is a facade. Less than a mile away is a farming commune where the breeze is passing through the smashed-out windows of the houses. Overturned furniture and broken pottery still cover the floors.

Abortion has dominated most of the news about the United Nations' International Conference on Population and Development. But for the vast majority of delegates and observers, the contentious negotiations on one paragraph of a 113-page document have been a distraction to much bigger news.Sara Engram is editorial-page director of The Evening Sun.

What's the best way to critique President Bush? For Eleanor Vast-Binder and her colleagues, it's with facts, sarcasm and a whole lot of skin. The former construction worker is an organizer of Babes Against Bush, which has put together a Web site (www.babesagainstbush.com) and pinup calendar in hopes that viewers will come for the cheesecake and stay for the political commentary about the administration and the war in Iraq. But isn't a girlie calendar too sexist and politically incorrect for a group with a liberal agenda?

Only 33 of 216 callers to SUNDIAL (15 percent) think the candidates in the city primary election have articulated their positions well enough for the electorate to vote intelligently. The vast majority of the callers, 183, or more than 84 percent, said the candidates have not done so."It's Your Call," represents a sampling of opinions for certain segments of the community, but it is not balanced demographically, as would be done in a scientific public opinion poll.

BOSTON -- The experts are parading across my television screen again. A full entourage of authors and researchers and professors are there, following the psychic bread crumbs, the clues that led 39 people from their separate lives to their Rancho Sante Fe deaths.We are far now along the familiar media route. Last week's tragedy becomes this week's analysis and then -- as surely as black humor survives horror -- next week's entry in some David Letterman routine.Surfing across the channels now, I can put together a collage of such experts trying to explain why some three dozen souls would willingly, maybe even eagerly, leave their "containers."

Edna Goldberg, who was the mainstay of The Baltimore Sun's Harford County bureau for nearly two decades, died Wednesday of cardiac arrest at Courtland Gardens Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Northwest Baltimore. The Bel Air resident was 91. "Edna had no journalism experience and was the best natural reporter I've ever known. She was very aggressive, and I mean that in the best sense of the word," said James S. Keat, a retired Sun assistant managing editor. "They weren't used to having someone like Edna in Harford County who didn't like being shut out of things," recalled Mr. Keat.

Art Shapiro was motoring south on Eutaw in his maintenance truck when the call came across his radio: Head to Lombard and Light streets, where a water leak needed attention. Baltimore's chief of utilities maintenance figured the call, around rush hour Monday, was for just another of the dozens of ruptures he and his crew of nearly 500 deal with every day in their effort to keep the city's complex and aging water-delivery system running. As he rounded a corner, though, he saw snarled traffic, police tape and a sure sign he was dealing with something bigger - a gash in an artery that supplies much of downtown.

A cocaine trafficking ring that for years distributed "vast amounts" of Honduran cocaine throughout the mid-Atlantic region has been busted, and three Maryland residents and 25 Virginia residents involved have been arrested, according to federal prosecutors. The drug ring, based in Northern Virginia, routinely paid couriers to fly into the United States from Honduras with cocaine stashed in shoes, decorative wooden frames and other "innocuous items" that would blend in with their luggage, according to a statement on the bust released Thursday by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Baltimore's Afro-American newspaper has a rich photo archive - 1.5 million images dating from the Depression, World War II and the civil rights era up to today. But one of the nation's oldest African-American newspapers didn't have the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to digitize its historic images for the Internet age. Now, thanks to a little robot built by a former Johns Hopkins student, the effort has gotten a lot cheaper. Using off-the-shelf electronics, Thomas Smith, a 2011 Hopkins graduate, built Gado, a swiveling, motorized arm with a nozzle that uses vacuum suction to "grab" photos and place them on a scanner.

Our lawmakers in Annapolis have an opportunity to eliminate a significant disparity in access to chemotherapy for the thousands of Marylanders treated for cancer each year. The access issue is one of cost and the difference in how much insurance companies require patients to pay for intravenous chemotherapy vs. oral chemotherapy. Simply put, when cancer patients are treated with intravenous chemotherapy drugs - which for years were virtually the only treatment option - their share of the costs under most insurance plans is limited to office visit co-pays, usually about $20 or $30 per session.

For decades, Maryland has led the way in promoting volunteer and national service. The first (and still only) state in the nation to require service learning for high school graduation, Maryland has laid the groundwork for an engaged population. U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, who for decades has quietly ensured that programs like AmeriCorps receive funding, has led the Maryland delegation in making service a national priority. And now Baltimore steps onto the national stage as a recipient of a highly competitive Cities of Service grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Rockefeller Foundation, which will enable Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to appoint a "chief service officer" to become part of her senior team.

Timothy Wheeler's Sun exclusive in Tuesday's edition ("Study boosts offshore windmills," Feb. 9) was certainly informative and frightening. What is wrong with this state and this country? We look with the joy of the fanatic on those alleged solutions to our energy problems that will produce minimal results and will despoil this great nation from the oceans to the prairies to the mountains with windmills. Why? The clueless legislators in Maryland would do better to harness the hot air they expend when the General Assembly is in session than to plant thousands of windmills over an 800 square mile stretch of ocean.

Hydration packs you strap to your back are OK for backpacking, long-distance running or biking across vast expanses. However, activities that are a tad less ambitious still require water breaks to keep all systems operating to factory specs. For those times, Camelbak, a leader in hydration packs, has created a better bottle that doesn't squirt or allow water to slop down the front of your shirt. The dishwasher-safe bottle holds .75 of a liter, has a flip-up, bite-and-sip spout and has a useful loop that not only allows you to clip the bottle, but also prevents it from rolling around.

The show about New Orleans musicians and the Baltimore crime drama are vastly different, but their shared DNA does shine through. One of the great joys of the HBO's drama "Treme" is watching the way that Wendell Pierce, known to fans of "The Wire" as Detective William "Bunk" Moreland, makes you come to care about his new character, Antoine Batiste, a struggling trombone player trying to make it in post-Katrina New Orleans. Batiste is our point of entry and a guide into the culture of that city.

Timothy Wheeler's Sun exclusive in Tuesday's edition ("Study boosts offshore windmills," Feb. 9) was certainly informative and frightening. What is wrong with this state and this country? We look with the joy of the fanatic on those alleged solutions to our energy problems that will produce minimal results and will despoil this great nation from the oceans to the prairies to the mountains with windmills. Why? The clueless legislators in Maryland would do better to harness the hot air they expend when the General Assembly is in session than to plant thousands of windmills over an 800 square mile stretch of ocean.