The Trail is a new Center Maryland Podcast series about the 2024 Presidential Election. Each week, our hosts Damian O’Doherty, Candace Dodson-Reed, & Don Mohler discuss trending topics about this election cycle. In this episode, the gang recaps the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

The University of Maryland, College Park joined a new national program this year that allows colleges and universities to privately sponsor and resettle academically qualified refugee students. UMD is one of 17 higher education institutions across the country to enroll refugee students in Welcome Corps on Campus, which launched in July 2023. One such student will attend the school this year.

U.S. Rep. Kweisi Mfume is exploring the expansion of a bill that would protect college athletes to include high school players in the wake of the death of a Franklin High School football player this month. Leslie Noble, a 16-year-old junior guard on Franklin’s varsity football team, died Aug. 14 after collapsing during a practice. First responders were called to the high school’s field in Reisterstown for a suspected case of heatstroke.

You, too, might be able to own a 596-foot-long, nuclear-powered floating time capsule that has been visited by a million and a half people, features a ballroom, bar and swimming pool, and once was a star attraction on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight” show. The Nuclear Ship (N.S.) Savannah — the first nuclear-powered ship ever built explicitly for peacetime purposes — has been moored in a quiet corner of the Canton Marine Terminal in Baltimore since 2008.

Ford Motor’s profit engine for decades has been large trucks and SUVs in the U.S. So it might surprise investors that the automaker believes its new path to profitability for electric vehicles will first be led by smaller, more affordable vehicles. The new plan is an “insurance policy” for the automaker to be able to expand its growingly popular hybrid models and create more affordable EVs that it believes will deliver a more capital-efficient, profitable electric vehicle business for the company and investors, according to Marin Gjaja, Ford’s chief operating officer for its Model e EV unit.

For the second time in a year and a half, Victor found himself in the hospital after one of his three kids woke up with excruciating pain. The first cockroach pulled from his 8-year-old’s ear was alive. Another one had died inside. Bugs were not the only problem that Victor, 33, said was plaguing his apartment in Brooklyn, a neighborhood in South Baltimore.

Imagine this. It’s several years in the future. You live in a newly completed residential tower in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, and you need groceries. You take the elevator down from your 32nd-floor penthouse apartment, step outside to where the Harborplace pavilions once stood, and look around. Where is your car? MCB Real Estate — the firm that wants to raze the tourist destination’s struggling pavilions and reimagine Harborplace — proposes constructing two apartment buildings on Light Street along that waterfront that would include a total 900 units.

 

Peloton said Thursday it is digging itself out of the red and eked out a slight sales increase for the first time in nine quarters as it slashed its overall losses. The company’s shares spiked 35% on Thursday. The beleaguered connected fitness company, which two board members have run since former CEO Barry McCarthy resigned earlier this year, saw sales grow by 0.2% during its fiscal fourth quarter.

Howard County is among the districts beginning school next week, and it will be the first year for the county’s new school superintendent. Bill Barnes is overseeing the district following the retirement of Dr. Michael Martirano. 11 News spoke with Barnes about where the district stands heading into the school year, and his big priorities.

Some Marylanders utility bills are set to go up hundreds of dollars starting next year, according to a state agency’s report, and several state lawmakers are blaming the regional grid energy operator’s “mismanagement” for the increased rates. The report released this month by The Maryland Office of People’s Counsel shows monthly residential rate increases across four locational deliverability areas in the state that use regional energy grid operator PJM, which also operates in 12 other states as well as Washington, D.C.