Baltimore Md

A Baltimore cab driver was charged in a criminal complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan with conspiring to provide material support to the Lashkar-e-Taiba organization, which the U.S. designated a terrorist group in 2001. Mahmud Faruq Brent, 30, of Gwynn Oak, Md., described the time he spent at a terrorist training camp in Pakistan as "one of the better decisions in my life," prosecutors said.

The first sign was the Massachusetts license tags. Then all those people camping out in suburban fields or crowding into apartments. And finally, residents of this Baltimore suburb spotted Pastor Carl Stevens himself. Years ago, he moved his church out of Maine after a confrontation with angry townspeople. This summer, a federal bankruptcy judge blamed him for "an astonishing saga of clerical deceit, avarice and subjugation" and ordered him to sell his Massachusetts chapel and Bible college.

Along the piers and cobblestone streets of Fells Point, the people living in the 150-year-old brick row houses that line the waterfront thought they had survived Hurricane Isabel in surprisingly good shape. Then they got sucker-punched. Hours after the storm had passed on to the northwest and high tide had brought only moderate flooding in the predawn hours of Friday, a new wall of water -- driven by southerly winds that trailed behind Isabel -- surged unexpectedly up Chesapeake Bay.

A freight train laden with hazardous chemicals derailed Wednesday in a tunnel beneath a section of downtown Baltimore, spreading dense smoke, severing water mains and forcing safety officials to shut down an Orioles baseball game and sections of the city's highways and harbor.

The Cone Collection of early 20th century French masterpieces at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the treasures of antiquity at the Walters Art Museum have long been indelible parts of the city's cultural fabric. Now cost is not a barrier to seeing them. The museums began offering free admission to everyone on Sunday, and they hope never again to charge entrance fees.

In another setback for the tobacco industry, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for Baltimore to enforce a citywide ban on billboards advertising cigarettes or beer. The move, while not a final ruling on the matter, is likely to encourage other cities, including Los Angeles, to ban public ads for tobacco products. It also suggests that the Clinton administration may not face a 1st Amendment barrier in seeking to restrict cigarette advertising directed at minors.

Murder charges against 34 people were dropped in the last 19 months because evidence didn't support the charges, a review of Baltimore police records showed. Some of the dropped cases involved claims of self-defense, later proved to be valid, and two cases involved armed robbers who were slain by their victims, the Baltimore Sun reported Sunday. In one case, detectives charged a man who died a year before the murder occurred.

As a get-out-the-vote event, President Clinton's nationally televised appearance at a Baltimore church on the eve of the November elections was deemed a great success: It helped Democrats in Maryland and across the country fare better than expected at the ballot box. But the gathering, which included Clinton urging the more than 2,000 African American parishioners to vote, has left considerable controversy in its wake.

The pope has appointed the head of the U.S. military archdiocese to succeed retiring Cardinal William Keeler as archbishop of Baltimore, the Vatican said Thursday. Archbishop Edwin F. O'Brien will be taking over the nation's oldest Roman Catholic diocese. Keeler turned 76 in March, making him a year past the normal retirement age for bishops. O'Brien, 68, has extensive experience training priests. He served as head of his alma mater -- St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, N.Y.

A security guard at an upscale housing development was arrested Thursday on arson charges in a series of fires that did $10 million in damage to homes being built at the subdivision, prosecutors said. Aaron L. Speed, 21, will appear today in federal court, the U.S. attorney's office said in a statement. The motive was not immediately known, and a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office said she did not know how many arson charges Speed faced.