A national organization advocating for wider use of ranked-choice voting (RCV) is pointing to recent Maryland primaries to bolster its argument that it’s preferable to have candidates who win outright majorities rather than those who win elections with a fraction of the vote. The group FairVote issued an analysis Friday showing that so far this year, 49 candidates have won statewide congressional primaries across the country with less than 50% of the vote.

Baltimore voters will decide this November whether to downsize the City Council, bringing it more in line with other councils in medium-sized cities, but spurring debate over whether this would improve its effectiveness. The Baltimore Sun and FOX45 News examined how Baltimore compares with 10 larger and 10 smaller cities closest to its population size, ranging from Omaha, Nebraska, with 483,000 residents, to Oklahoma City, with 703,000.

Dailey Jogan was pleased to learn she would get $15 an hour and a handful of perks as the head swim coach for a metro Detroit team. Her older brother’s reaction looked more like surprise. At 18 years old, Jogan has spent the summer organizing meets as staff leader of the 250-person team. She also gets some freebies for facilities housed within the park where they practice, like access to the gym and a few comped tickets to the movie theater.

Mayor Brandon Scott has struck a deal with P. David Bramble, owner of Harborplace and a heavy contributor to his re-election campaign, to advance $16 million in city funds to help him erect an office building in West Baltimore. The building would house the headquarters of a small city agency, the Mayor’s Office of Employment Development (MOED), and help jump-start Bramble’s Reservoir Square project on West North Avenue.

South Mountain Creamery in Middletown has been awarded more than $1 million in grants related to enhancing animal waste technology at the creamery’s farm by the state of Maryland and other organizations. On July 22, the Maryland Department of Agriculture announced South Mountain Creamery as the winner of an animal waste technology grant of more than $505,000.

Hundreds of years ago, grassy lawns originally became popular to prove a person was wealthy enough to waste land rather than farm on it. That status symbol no longer applies, since we no longer live in a sustenance farming economy, yet it’s still mandated by law all over America. How lawns became status symbols: Back in 17th century England, the aristocracy was busy converting the old fortified castles of the feudal world into the countryside manor houses of the industrial age.

It’s the slow time of year for Chris Avaritt, a union carpenter who sets up trade shows, so he takes a staycation and fishes frequently from a kayak, armed with two or three spinning rods and an assortment of lures. He’s a warrior in the battle of the Chesapeake invasives, targeting the northern snakehead in the marshy areas of the Gunpowder River, where it meets the bay in eastern Baltimore County.

Whoosh! “Eyah!” Two noises. The first sound is an e-bike (electric bicycle) rushing by me at 15 to 18 miles per hour. The second noise is me jumping out of my skin. For those enjoying an idyllic walk in Baker Park, the atmosphere is increasingly punctuated by the whoosh of an e-bike, or a motorized skateboard, or a motorized scooter, racing by at high speed.

More than half a billion opioid pills permeated the Baltimore area between 2006 and 2019 as pharmaceutical companies targeted doctors with aggressive marketing campaigns, underplayed their products’ addictiveness and failed to block suspiciously large orders of painkillers, according to a trove of court records made public as part of the city’s lawsuit against some of America’s top drug companies.

At 6:30 a.m. Wednesday, Laverne Carter sprung from bed and darted for West Pratt Street, fueled by fantasies of a kitchen brimming with ripe tomatoes. She’s one of thousands in the seven neighborhoods that make up South Baltimore’s Sowebo community to be left without a grocery store in walking distance following the 2022 shuttering of Price Rite in Mount Clare Junction.