Young Boys

Annie McCann's parents desperately want information about the death of their 16-year-old daughter, whose body was found behind a Baltimore trash bin last year after she ran away from her Alexandria, Va., home. But the father of a teenage boy recently charged with stealing the McCanns' car on the day the girl died says his son can't provide it. "This is a dead end for what they want," Bryant Woodley Sr. said in an interview. "The boys don't know nothing." He asked that his son, 16, not be named.

Here's an idea for the 2009 Orioles and beyond. It's one you heard back in 2005 - in both July and November. It's time to float it again A.J. Burnett coming home as a member of the Orioles' rotation. Could it happen? Sure. Will it happen? Most likely not. Should it happen? The jury is definitely out on that one. It depends whether you like to roll the dice, whether you'd rather gamble on stunning talent than boring mediocrity. It matters whether you could stomach another, slightly shorter, version of Daniel Cabrera, dominating one start, imploding the next.

Ex-chorister sentenced for photographs of boys A former organist and choir director of a Timonium church was ordered yesterday to serve three years of probation for possessing photographs that depicted young boys as the subjects of sadomasochistic abuse. David R. Riley, 59, of Roland Park was granted probation before judgment on one count of possession of child pornography. He resigned his position as organist and choirmaster of the Choir of Men and Boys at St. Stephen's Traditional Episcopal Church after a plea hearing in April.

CAMBRIDGE -- They came from Virginia, New Jersey and as far away as Hawaii yesterday to prepare to bury two young boys - 8-year-old Jarris Robinson, who fell through the ice on a neighborhood pond Sunday afternoon, and his brother Aaron, 12, who died trying to save him. Relatives and friends gathered inside the red-brick house with Jenise Robinson, who had warned her sons not to climb the fence around the pond. Neighbors and schoolmates, struggling with disbelief, spoke of two vibrant, energetic kids.

The man who attacked a Sun reporter in downtown Baltimore and fled in a shuttle-service van operated by a Southeast Baltimore strip club was accompanied by another man and a young boy, city police said yesterday. Col. Fred Bealefeld, chief of detectives, said that police still believe one man attacked Carl A. Schoettler, a 73-year-old features reporter who had stopped his car a block from City Hall to talk to the van driver after a minor crash involving their vehicles. But additional information from witnesses has led police to conclude that the assailant, another man and the child were waiting together at a bus stop near East Fayette and North Calvert streets before Schoettler was attacked Saturday.

It's 4 p.m., twilight's witching hour, and children all over America are starting to get restless. Here in my house it's fairly quiet. I'm making dinner with one son, age 4, who is whisking the oil and vinegar for a salad dressing. My other two boys, ages 5 and 2, are in the family room. One is playing with Legos; the other is listening to a CD and reading a comic book. There is no television blaring in the family room, no Sesame Street video teaching them their letters. There never is. And five years into this "zero-TV experiment" my husband and I embarked on, there never has been.

SANTA MARIA, Calif. -- Michael Jackson's former maid, who changed his sheets, washed his laundry and even cleaned up after his chimpanzee, testified yesterday that she once saw him showering with a 7-year-old boy. The woman, whose son told jurors Monday that Jackson fondled him three times when he was young, said she walked into the star's bedroom suite at Neverland one day in 1989 and heard laughter and running water. She said she peeked inside the bathroom and, through a foggy shower door, saw an image of Jackson and what appeared to be a young boy. On the floor outside the shower door, she said, were Jackson's underwear, white briefs, alongside "little green underwear.

Any day now, hordes of cicadas will emerge from 17 years underground to begin their noisy mating ritual. Most of us are not "bug people," so we're not looking forward to having thousands of cicadas everywhere. We may be disgusted or even afraid. The last time the cicadas were here, in 1987, Betty West of Elkridge was intrigued enough by what she calls the "benign plague" to keep a written record. The reason was her 4-year-old grandson, James. The cicadas "were totally engrossing for him," says West, 69, who now lives in Berlin, on the Eastern Shore.

A former Baltimore man accused of molesting young boys while he was a tourist in Cambodia pleaded not guilty yesterday to federal charges that could bring as many as 60 years in prison. Richard Arthur Schmidt, 61, a one-time teacher with previous arrests for sexually abusing children, is charged under a new law that allows U.S. authorities to pursue American child "sex tourists" overseas. Authorities said Schmidt made efforts to seduce at least four young boys while in Cambodia, including two brothers who shined shoes to support their family.

MAKOABATING, Lesotho - High in Lesotho's Maluti Mountains, Bokang Letsoela wakes at dawn in a stone hut, pulls a woolen blanket around his shoulders and steps into the thin, frosty morning air to begin another day as a sheepherder. Bokang cannot read or write, add or subtract. He has never set foot in a school. But like any shepherd managing a flock, he has learned how to count. These are some of the numbers his life has taught him: Five: The number of sheep he guards on a windy mountainside, where snow can fall even on summer days, where snakes populate the tall grass and where armed bandits are always a threat.