The Baltimore Sun

DALLAS -- First, a reality check: Almost nowhere but at a meeting of the Justin Bieber fan club would a 30-year-old, let alone a 22-year-old, be considered old.

ROCKVILLE, Md. — The fliers first showed up in March, dropped on doorsteps of the big homes in Todd Stave’s quiet cul-de-sac. They compared him to a Nazi.

Two months later and 50 miles away, new anti-abortion leaflets appeared in another peaceful suburban subdivision, this time in Baltimore County. They had the same bloody images. But now, they targeted Stave’s in-laws, asking neighbors to pray for the family and to call or visit their home. Protesters had also showed up at his daughter’s middle school.

But Stave, the son of a doctor who performed abortions and whose office was once firebombed, has decided to fight back. The 44-year-old businessman has responded with an offensive of his own, gathering volunteers to call abortion protesters at home.

BALTIMORE -- When Tamika Morgan developed red irritated eyes in the fall of 2010, she wasted no time heading to an optometrist at a local retail store who gave her drops for pink eye.

Her eyes got worse over the next few days so she went to a local hospital to see an ophthalmologist, but a specialist wasn't available. A weekend passed and she landed in the office of a retina expert at another hospital, and by then she couldn't read the big E on the vision chart.

She was legally blind.

BALTIMORE -- In 26 years as a Marine, Sgt. Maj. Brian Taylor has lost several comrades. But he never forgot that "puny little squiggly kid" from West Baltimore who "just had all of this motivation and no direction."

Taylor had been a mentor to Sgt. Maurice Bease in the late 1990s, when they served together at a Marine Corps air station in San Diego. When he heard later that Bease died in the attack on the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, he was devastated.

Earth Day has become more than a day where Americans clean parks and plant trees or flowers.

The American Council on Exercise is using it as a day to promote outdoor activity.

They are using it as a day to encourage people to trade the treadmill for a walk in the park or the weight bench for an outdoor yoga class.

Here are five workouts they are suggesting for Earth Day, which is today, April 22.

Bacon lovers, are you sitting down?

Better yet -- are you dead?

If so, your dream product is here.

Today they guys who brought the world Bacon Salt, Baconnaise and most recently, Bacon Lube, unveiled their latest creation: the bacon coffin.

BALTIMORE -- Three years ago, he was a 26-year-old college dropout cleaning carpets at the Social Security complex in Woodlawn. There, toiling away in the wee hours, Jonte Hall vowed to give basketball one last shot.

The Harlem Globetrotters are glad he did.