Whitewater

WASHINGTON -- This week could bring the stormiest Whitewater weather the Clinton administration has encountered so far.Hearings before the Senate Whitewater Committee will heat up with the long-awaited testimony of Bernard W. Nussbaum, the former White House counsel who is the key figure in the events that followed the 1993 suicide of deputy counsel Vincent W. Foster Jr. and who will likely be roughed up by Republicans on the committee.At the same time, the House enters the fray. The Banking Committee will examine the tangle of Arkansas money and politics that is at the heart of the expanding Whitewater controversy and that has already led to numerous indictments.

The 2014 Canoe Slalom World Championships will be held Sept. 16-21 in Western Maryland. The International Canoe Federation has awarded the event to Adventure Sports Center International over competing entries from Vienna, Austria and Krakow, Poland. ASCI, located in Deep Creek Lake in Garrett County, is home to the world's only mountaintop man-made whitewater course and has taken more than 44,000 people paddling since it opened in 2007. The championships will return to the United States for the first time since 1989, when they were held on the Savage River, also in Garrett County.

Washington. -- Now that the spreading stain of Whitewater has oozed into the White House, no one can say for sure how this affair will end.But let's make one thing perfectly clear: Whitewater is no Watergate.Certainly, there are parallels, superficial and otherwise, between the scandal that ended Richard M. Nixon's presidency and the mess Bill Clinton's in.Echoes of Watergate can be heard in the cries alleging a White House cover-up and potential abuses of power, in the growing demands for hearings on Capitol Hill and the spectacle of White House aides dragged before a grand jury by a vigorous special prosecutor.

A river runs through America's elite whitewater paddling triumphs, from Olympic-medal performances to countless world championships, from the Summer Games of 1972 to Beijing. Paddlers from around the country have come to the Potomac River, some relocating to Maryland for years at a time, to join home-grown talent to train and race on the only warm-water slalom course in North America. At the halfway point before the 2012 Olympics, athletes are gathering at the river this weekend for the U.S. National Championships, where coaches and U.S. team officials will look at the veterans and gauge the progress of the next generation.

WASHINGTON -- Robert B. Fiske Jr., the Whitewater special prosecutor, questioned President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton under oath Sunday about Whitewater-related events, White House officials revealed yesterday.Testimony by a sitting president is rare but not unprecedented in rTC American history. Sunday's testimony concerned two separate areas of inquiry that stemmed from the spiraling controversy, officials said:* The events surrounding the death of Vincent W. Foster Jr., the deputy White House counsel who was found dead in a park beside the Potomac River in July.

You've got to hand it to Bill Clinton: When the going gets tough, he gets going. Put him in a hostile, campaign-like environment, and he displays a master's touch.Take his press conference performance Thursday night. It came in the wake of very serious Whitewater-related charges made on the House floor by Rep. Jim Leach, R-Iowa. The Washington press corps focused like a laser beam on Whitewater (17 of the 22 questions were about it). The president's popularity has been falling as fast as it did on the primary campaign trail two years ago in the wake of the Gennifer Flowers and draft-dodging allegations.

CLEVELAND -- For Democrats gathered on the frozen shores of Lake Erie this weekend, the Whitewater affair could hardly have come at a worse time.The semiannual meeting of national party leaders was intended to be an upbeat kickoff to the 1994 election campaign. Instead, the Democrats' pep rally is serving mainly as a focus for questions about the dangers that Whitewater may pose to their party's prospects in November and beyond.One indication of that change: Party officials are now billing as the meeting's highlight a speech this afternoon by the Democratic National Committee (DNC)

AS NEWS of Whitewater crosses the Atlantic, we Europeans search again for the answer to the central question: Just what do you guys think you're doing?This looks like the third presidency in the last six to be severely damaged -- perhaps crippled -- by a major scandal.The other three, Ford, Carter and Bush, suffered from minor scandals, but you got rid of them anyway, at the first opportunity.The received wisdom appears to be that it's not the details of Whitewater that count; what's important is the cover-up.

WASHINGTON -- The independent prosecutor investigating the Whitewater affair plans to announce today that no criminal charges should be brought against White House or Treasury officials for their discussions about an inquiry into a savings association linked to the Clintons.Lawyers and administration officials said yesterday that, because the findings relied extensively on grand jury testimony, the counsel, Robert B. Fiske Jr., believed that most of the details about the discussions of the handling of the earlier inquiry by savings regulators into Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan Association must remain secret.

WASHINGTON -- An extraordinary all-star lineup from the White House went before the House Banking Committee yesterday, with all the president's men and women declaring their actions in the Whitewater matter legal, ethical and proper."

Ten years ago, if you were to ask people my age if they liked their beverages on the rocks, they would assume you were taking their cocktail order. They would never think you were offering them a water bottle to enjoy while coursing down the Potomac River rapids on an inner tube. My, how times have changed. And not necessarily for the better. Admittedly, it was my idea to go whitewater tubing to celebrate America's birthday. I felt certain that our forefathers would have approved, because tubing is the sort of adventurous activity that George Washington would have embraced had he not been concerned with jettisoning his powdered wig and shattering his remaining teeth.

Freshman Austyn Carta-Samuels threw three touchdown passes, the last a 13-yarder to David Leonard in the second overtime Saturday, and Wyoming beat Fresno State, 35-28, in the New Mexico Bowl in Albuquerque. The first of 34 bowls was a high-scoring matchup that was decided by defense. Wyoming (7-6) stopped the nation's leading rusher, Fresno State's Ryan Mathews , on three rushing attempts from the 1 in the first overtime. The Bulldogs (8-5) tried a quarterback sneak on third down, and Mathews came up short again on fourth down.

SATURDAY'S TELEVISION HIGHLIGHTS M. bask. Michigan@Kansas ESPN Noon Howard@Loyola MASN 1 UCLA@Notre Dame 13, 9 2 North Carolina@Texas ESPN 2 Xavier@Butler ESPN2 2 West Virginia@Cleveland State MASN 3 Duke vs. Gonzaga 13, 9 4 ...

Hanna M. Crafton, an outdoorswoman, writer and Celtic musician, died March 12 after being injured in an automobile accident near Laurel. The former longtime Reisterstown resident, who recently moved to Severna Park, was 20. The auto in which Ms. Crafton was a passenger was traveling near Laurel when it drifted off Route 198 and struck a tree. She was pronounced dead at the scene. Ms. Crafton was born in Baltimore and raised in Reisterstown. During her seven years at Notre Dame Preparatory School in Towson, she made a lasting impression on teachers and students.

GRAND CHUTE, Wis. -- For nearly six weeks this season, Johns Hopkins shortstop Jonas Fester sat on the bench while recovering from a torn medial collateral knee ligament. And after collecting just two hits in his first 13 at-bats in the NCAA Division III baseball championship series, the former All-American finally found his swing. The senior had five hits in six trips -- including a walk-off single in the ninth inning -- as the Blue Jays beat Wisconsin-Whitewater, 12-11, in an elimination game yesterday at Fox Cities Stadium.

Melissa Lynn "Stanley" Cohen, a Baltimore film production coordinator who worked on movies including Failure to Launch and Ladder 49, died of breast cancer Wednesday at Mercy Medical Center. She was 36. Cohen, who grew up in Ellicott City, graduated from Mount Hebron High School in 1989. She attended classes at Catonsville Community College but quit to follow her mother, a hair and makeup artist, into the film industry. She moved to Los Angles when she was 18. After finding she wasn't getting her calls returned in the male-dominated film world, she borrowed her dad's name and began sending out resumes as "Stanley Cohen."

WASHINGTON -- White House officials, concerned that Whitewater will remain a vexing issue, have launched a public relations blitz to defend President Clinton and the first lady and to keep the controversy from interfering with the president's congressional agenda.The Clintons feel an obligation to continue responding to questions about Whitewater and plan to take a leading role in the campaign after returning to Washington from vacation this weekend, senior White House aides said yesterday.

McHenry-- --To whitewater rafters and kayakers, the sound of music whooshes down the narrow gorge, roars over rocks and slaps against the shore. Water, millions of gallons of it, creates cascades and holes perfect for both vacation play and practice of the highest caliber. Set snugly in mountaintop trees and framed in boulders, Garrett County's $24 million artificial whitewater course opened last weekend, 18 years after someone first asked, "What if?" Adventure Sports Center International is a public-private partnership to bring more tourism to Western Maryland and cement the region's position as an outdoors lover's paradise.