Warden

In the wake of a raid last weekend at the Maryland House of Correction in Jessup, state officials have fired four corrections officers who failed drug tests and another officer has quit after refusing to take the test.Three other officers, who failed preliminary tests during a raid at the prison Feb. 13, have been placed on administrative duty pending the results of follow-up urine tests, authorities said.Officials have also overhauled the prison administration, transferring the warden, Thomas R. Corcoran, and naming one warden to run the House of Correction and another to run the annex next door.

WASHINGTON -- Stinging from the government's opening statement, a defiant Microsoft Corp. forcefully defended its chairman, Bill Gates, in federal court yesterday, asserting that the no-holds-barred tactics of his company are not only common in the computer industry but also good for the economy.Microsoft's opening salvo in the sweeping antitrust lawsuit was crafted as much for public opinion as for the court. The company faces weeks of being portrayed as an alleged commercial predator.The government's case, which opened Monday in U.S. District Court in Washington, amounts to a litany of episodes of Microsoft's having used its market power to bully and bend competitors, partners and customers to its will.

SKUKUZA, South Africa -- Kruger National Park, celebrating its centenary this year, is the newest vehicle for dramatic change post-apartheid South Africa.Under its first black warden, the park's days as a bastion of white male conservationists and rich white tourists are numbered."Kruger cannot be seen outside the context of the rest of the country," says David Mabunda, a former schoolteacher and land manager who was appointed four months ago to turn the 19,000-square-mile park -- bigger than Maryland and Delaware combined, and one of Africa's first game reserves -- into a park for all South Africans, black and white.

David James Smith, a former game warden and wildlife filmmaker, died Sunday of kidney failure in his 18th-century Harford Furnace home, which he spent 40 years restoring. He was 81.In the mid-1940s, while working as a district warden for the old state Game and Inland Fish Commission, Mr. Smith discovered the overgrown ruins of Harford Furnace, a once-bustling iron foundry alongside James Run in Harford County that dated to 1754.At its peak in the 19th century, the foundry, whose actual name was the Bush River Iron Works, grew to 48 buildings, including homes, churches and stores for the iron workers who lived there.

Correctional officers at the Eastern Correctional Institution have handed Warden Earl D. Beshears a vote of no confidence because of problems that they say have turned the prison near Salisbury into a "powder keg waiting to blow."Carl McVeigh, staff representative of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Council 92, said the unanimous no-confidence vote was taken at a union meeting Thursday night in Salisbury.About 100 of the union's 250 ECI correctional officers represented by the union were at the meeting and voted, he said.

Flint Gregory Hunt's last moments were characterized by something new to those close to him -- silence.Hunt always had something to say, but he rarely talked about his impending execution for the murder of Baltimore police Officer Vincent J. Adolfo, his lawyers said. Even as the appointed hour drew near, they said, he worried about how it would affect those who cared about him."He told us not to feel like we failed," lawyer Katy C. O'Donnell said after Hunt's death, carrying a stack of final legal papers and a tear-stained tissue.

Last night Dayton tried to escape, set upa dummy in his cell, hid in the laundry in a stackof sheets. For eight months he had strategized,memorizing guards and their routines, losing morethan 30 pounds to make a light jump to the street.Discovered in an unexpected fire drill. Thenthere's Jackson, armed robbery and assault, foundin the shower last week with a knife in his back.And Wade, already one safe escape. Made the mistakeof coming back to get his brother out. All this ina maximum-security place.

Family members and colleagues of four correctional officers who were seriously wounded in a series of disturbances at the Maryland House of Correction Annex harshly criticized the warden yesterday for failing to lock down the maximum-security prison after a brawl Tuesday.That failure, they said, led to an orchestrated attack the next day that left one officer, 34-year-old Christopher Hill, in Maryland Shock Trauma Center's intensive-care unit yesterday with more than 17 stab wounds in his back and face.

The Carroll County Detention Center is so crowded that officials are converting a portion of the gym to house minimum-security inmates, the commissioners learned yesterday.The county expects to begin construction of a $6 million addition this summer but that space will come too late to relieve crowding, Warden Mason Waters said."We have already reached a crisis," he said, noting the inmate population over the weekend swelled to 174 in a facility designed for 134 people. "We cannot wait until June."

The attempted escape of a condemned inmate has prompted internal criticism of security at the Maryland Penitentiary and may lead officials to move Maryland's death-row prisoners to a super-maximum security prison.In a confidential memorandum on the Dec. 6 escape attempt of Scotland Eugene Williams, made available to The Sun, penitentiary warden Eugene M. Nuth wrote that the prison "is not a good maximum security facility" and that its routines "are too predictable."It is no secret that the maximum security designation of the penitentiary applies to the inmates, not to the ability of the facility to deliver maximum security," the warden wrote in the memorandum dated Dec. 18.Despite the warden's concerns, escapes from the penitentiary are rare.