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For Carroll County voters who may have been considering writing in Thomas Hickman's name for state's attorney next week, two recent developments offer ample reason for them to reconsider:Maryland's Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, upheld the acquittal of James Howard Van Metre III, and Mr. Hickman admitted he turned down a plea bargain that would have put this confessed murderer behind bars for 10 years.The Court of Appeals' refusal to even hear the Van Metre appeal confirms our earlier judgment that Mr. Hickman made a series of legal blunders that fairly call into question his competency as a prosecutor.

Graduates of the Johns Hopkins University's master's program in science writing have explained the prospects of life on Mars, the promise of neuroscience research and the ethics of animal testing on the pages of Scientific American, Nature and Popular Science, on the airwaves of NPR and in books. But after 30 years among a small tier of similar programs across the country, the tiny one-year program has trained its last writers in the art of translating science for the layman. Hopkins officials discontinued it this month, citing a decline in applications that rendered it not selective enough.

When Harford County newspaper publisher Maureen Jones plans a staff meeting, she asks all her writers, editors, artists and ad designers to finish their homework before they arrive."

Of course the president deserves some of the blame. Yes, it's extremely unlikely he ordered the IRS to discriminate against tea party, pro-life or Jewish groups opposed to his agenda (though why anyone should take his word for it is beyond me). And his outrage now -- however convenient -- is appreciated. But when people he views as his "enemies" complained about a politicized IRS, what did he do? Nothing. Imagine for a moment if black civil rights organizations, gay groups or teachers unions loudly complained to members of Congress and the press that the IRS was discriminating against them.

We could not help noticing a recent report that "Hal," the super-intelligent but malevolent computer in Stanley Kubrick's '60s-vintage sci-fi film "2001," may become a best-selling author in the 1990s. Actually, the modern-day "Hal" is a souped-up Macintosh personal computer whose hacker owner, 43-year-old Scott French, has programmed it to churn out steamy novels based on the example of the late author Jacqueline Susann's trash-to-the-max "Valley of the Dolls."It took Mr. French nearly eight years to write the intricate computer instructions that allowed his Mac to spew out such lines as "Her heart leapt into her throat and she jumped involuntarily as the stranger appeared in front of her."

Like it or not, we are writing more than ever at work these days. Faxes often require written responses. Computers, which many people thought would lead to the paperless office, have just made it easier to churn out reams and reams of memos. Even e-mail, a chat in cyberspace, depends on the written word.Much of what comes across our desks (and computer screens) is aimless, wordy and boring. To help you look better in writing, follow these 10 commandments:1. Be brief. Whether you're sending an official memo or --ing off a quick e-mail message, start with a clear statement of why you're writing.

While many of us prepare to celebrate Halloween this week with thoughts of parties and trick-or-treating, a group of Brooklyn Park Elementary School students are sharing their feelings with our soldiers in Saudi Arabia.Evon Lindsey's third-grade class has sent letters to the American men and women stationed in the Persian Gulf. Some of the students have relatives and friends there.Lindsey got the idea of writing the letters after the students read "Dear Aunt Helen," a story that showed the importance and significance of writing letters to those far from home.

I was a sportswriter when my bosses asked me if I wanted to be a family-life columnist. That was years ago. I had a pretty good idea of what a family-life columnist was, and I'd certainly never aspired to be one. They wanted me to write about my life as a wife and the working mother of school-age children. That was not anything any journalist who came of age in the Watergate era wanted to write about. "But I don't have a life," I objected. "My career is in the Dumpster. My home life is chaos.

It was the year Charles Manson went to prison, the voting age was lowered to 18, the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, and I wrote my first full-time newspaper column.Today, I write my 3,000th.People often ask me the secret to lasting so long in the column-writing business.Sincerity, I tell them. Once you can fake that, you've got it made.Which is typical of people who work for newspapers. We use sarcasm to avoid revealing genuine emotion.We don't like to admit the truth: That this is an incredibly romantic profession.

I am not jealous of the woman who writes the Harry Potter books. It does not bother me that her most recent book, "Harry Potter and the Enormous Royalty Check," has already become the best-selling book in world history, beating out her previous book, "Harry Potter Purchases Microsoft." It does not make me bitter to know that this woman's books are selling like crazy, while my own books -- some of which took me hours to write -- have become permanent nesting grounds for generations of bookstore-dwelling spiders.

When the storm of administration scandals first hit President Barack Obama, he offered a good impersonation of Claude Raines in "Casablanca," expressing shock that gambling was going on in Rick's saloon. His verbal outrage at the snooping of the IRS and his Justice Department was intense, but not very reassuring. That's why the next day he announced the dismissal of the acting IRS director as a quick response to the disclosure of the tax agency's intrusion, which was reminiscent of the Watergate era. But on Thursday, Mr. Obama declined to apologize for his administration's reactions to the Benghazi terrorist attacks and for the secret scrutinizing of Associated Press reporters' phone calls.

Well, this is a fine mess. After years of moaning about various "conspiracies" against them, conservative activists finally have a real (i.e., not manufactured by Fox or inflated by Rush Limbaugh) piece of evidence to take before the court of public opinion. Meaning, of course, last week's revelation that the Internal Revenue Service has been giving extra scrutiny to groups with the words "tea party" or "patriot" in their names. Extra scrutiny from the IRS is about as welcome as extra scrutiny from the proctologist, so one can hardly blame conservative groups for complaining, as they've done since last year.

Congratulations to Tim Marcin, winner of Washington College 's Sophie Kerr Prize, worth $61,192 this year. The 22-year-old  from Wilmington, Del., who is headed to Northwestern University, plans to pursue a sports writing career. That's a worthy goal -- to follow in the footsteps of luminaries such as Ring Lardner and Roger Angell. (I'd even toss John McPhee into the crowd.) According to the college, he submitted "poems whose subjects included teen romance, the music of Bob Dylan, and up-close perceptions of his father's well-worn coat, and the red stitches on a baseball.

My mother went into paid work soon after my father's clothing store was flooded out in a hurricane, almost wiping him out. She had no choice. We needed the money. This was some two decades before a tidal wave of wives and mothers went into paid work. For the relatively few women with four-year college degrees, this change was the consequence of wider educational opportunity and new laws against gender discrimination that opened professions to well-educated women. But the vast majority of women entered the paid workforce because male wages were dropping.

"Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night and decided they'd go kill some Americans? What difference -- at this point, what difference does it make?" That was how then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously brushed off the question of when she knew that the attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11 that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were, in fact, a terrorist assault and not a "protest" of an anti-Islam video that got out of hand.

In Hillary Clinton's farewell remarks in February on stepping down as President Barack Obama's secretary of state, she echoed one of her predecessors, Madeleine Albright, declaring America to be "the indispensable nation. " "We are the force for progress, prosperity and peace," Mrs. Clinton elaborated. "And because we have to get it right for ourselves. " Ms. Albright had put it this way: "If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation.

LOS ANGELES -- The news that President Bush would be campaigning in California over the weekend raised some eyebrows among the politicians here. This is, after all, a state in which Mr. Bush is running so far behind Democratic nominee Bill Clinton that the operative question seems to be whether the president is "writing off California."In fact, Mr. Bush's campaign has committed itself to no fewer than six incursions into the state in the final eight weeks of the campaign. That is a schedule that could be reduced radically if it becomes apparent by, say, Oct. 1 that he is a sure loser here.

Under the guidance of a playwright, a puppeteer and a drama teacher, county children can turn idle vacation hours into dramatized fantasies this summer.Carroll Community College will tap children's imaginations for a series of programs at its Kids College Progressive Arts Workshop. Through four 20-hour workshops, participants 10 to 13 years old will write their own stories and bring them to life on stage.Kathy Menasche, coordinator for community services programs at the Westminster college, said the program "lends itself to kids' imaginations.

The chemical and fertilizer plant in the town of West, Texas, where at least 15 were killed and more than 200 injured a few weeks ago hadn't been fully inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 1985. (A partial inspection by a different agency in 2011 resulted in $5,250 in fines.) OSHA and its state partners have a total of 2,200 inspectors charged with ensuring the safety of more than 8 million workplaces employing 130 million workers. That comes to about one inspector for every 59,000 American workers.

It should've been the shot heard around the world. Chances are, you didn't hear it. An ominous sort of history was made last week near Austin, Texas, but it seems to have largely escaped notice. There was some media coverage, yes, but less than, say, Lindsay Lohan's latest stint in rehab, certainly less than you'd think for something whose ramifications will likely shadow us for years. On May 2, you see, a group called Defense Distributed, led by law student and self-described anarchist Cody Wilson, accomplished what was apparently the first successful firing of a gun "printed" entirely by a 3-D printer.