Maryland

Catching his breath every few moments, Jim Adenhart explained to the hushed crowd that the greatest day of his life was when his nine-pound, three-ounce baby boy was born. Then, in detail, he relayed his final conversation with his son last week, after Nick Adenhart had pitched the best game of his brief major league career.

Police found a map of Camp David marked with a presidential motorcade route inside the Bethesda, Md., home of a teenager at the center of a bomb-making probe, along with a document that appears to describe how to kill someone at a distance of 200 meters, a Montgomery County, Md., prosecutor said Tuesday at a court hearing.

Mayor Cheye Calvo got home from work, saw a package addressed to his wife on the front porch and brought it inside. Suddenly, police with guns drawn kicked in the door and stormed in, shooting to death the couple's two dogs and seizing the unopened package. Inside was 32 pounds of marijuana that evidently didn't belong to the couple.

Inside Ft. Detrick's cloistered high-security laboratories, Bruce E. Ivins was regarded as a seasoned researcher and an affable, if slightly odd, colleague. He showed up for work in thrift-store clothes, gobbled down powdered milk and foul-smelling lunches of fish and other foodstuffs layered in jars. Sometimes he abruptly dropped to the floor to juggle balls while lying on his back. That was "just Bruce," colleagues would say, shaking their heads.

The pilot of a medical helicopter twice radioed for help in foggy weather before crashing, killing four of the five people on board in the latest of a growing number of air ambulance accidents, authorities said Sunday. The helicopter was carrying victims of a traffic accident when it went down in a suburban Washington park about midnight Saturday.

The most disturbing Halloween accessory this year may not be the spider webs hanging off the shrubbery or the door sensor that emits ghostly screams, but a lone jack-o'-lantern displaying the words: "No candy at this residence." About 1,200 violent or child sex offenders on probation or parole in Maryland have been ordered to hang these orange pumpkin signs -- or plain ones reading, "No candy" -- at their residences today. If they don't, the knock at the door will be from an officer of the law.

To friends in the protest movement, Lucy was an eager 20-something who attended their events and sent encouraging e-mails to support their causes. Only one thing seemed strange. "At one demonstration, I remember her showing up with a laptop computer and typing away," said Mike Stark, who helped lead the anti-death-penalty march in Baltimore that day. "We all thought that was odd." Not really.

Every few weeks for nearly four years, the Secret Service screened the IDs of employees of a Maryland cleaning company before they entered the house of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the nation's top immigration official. The company's owner says the workers sailed through the checks -- although some of them were actually illegal immigrants. Now, owner James Reid finds himself in a predicament that he considers especially confounding.

This, Marcia Espinola thought, must be what a tsunami is like. One minute, the road was as dry as the 17-degree air outside. The next, a wall of water carrying rocks and branches rushed toward her, crashing over the roof of her Honda CR-V. Trapped, Espinola thought about trying to wade to safety, she recalled. But what if the water swept her away? She doesn't know how to swim. "I don't want to die here," she prayed. "My husband needs me."

A fast-moving house fire killed five people, including an infant girl, and left their Abingdon home a blackened shell. The victims were believed to be members of the same family. Four were found immediately, and a fifth later was found in the ruins of the second floor, Deputy State Fire Marshal W. Faron Taylor said.