I can’t quite remember the moment when smash burgers took over, but business owner Josh Vecchiolla puts it at sometime during the pandemic. “During COVID, smash burgers became this big thing,” said the founder of Fuzzies Burgers, which prepares theirs with crispy edges, a juicy center and “really good melty cheese on top.”

More than a year after Baltimore City Department of Transportation officials flipped the switch on two new speed cameras on Interstate 83, car crashes have significantly decreased, a Baltimore Banner data analysis found. The city-controlled “Grand Prix,” as some call it, due to the way some people drive it, connects Baltimore to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It has long bedeviled area drivers with its winding curves, lack of lighting and unruly motorists.

MoCo officials tout the county’s diversity as one of its greatest strengths, but a new data dashboard report suggests otherwise. Blacks make up 52% of defendants in the Montgomery County Circuit Court while Hispanics make up 13%, according to the data dashboard. “There really is growing consensus right now that issues of fairness, equity and justice in the American criminal legal system are paramount,” said Brian Johnson, the associate chair of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland.

 

State officials are taking a six-year, $21.2 billion draft transportation plan all over the state to field questions and gather input from local officials and the public, and the tour comes to Baltimore on Monday. The Consolidated Transportation Program (CTP) is the Maryland Department of Transportation’s annual list of state capital projects that it submits to the General Assembly for approval. Officials will present the plan at Towson University Monday morning, with a focus on projects in Baltimore County.

It was early morning on a patio just outside the Conowingo Dam, and Mike Martinek was looking at hundreds of juvenile eels that had been suctioned from the Susquehanna River into a giant freshwater pool. Martinek, a fisheries biologist for an environmental consulting firm, and a couple of colleagues were planning to truck the eels a couple of hours north into Pennsylvania, past Harrisburg, and dump them near spawning grounds upriver.

Will Jawando, who worked to position himself as the progressive Democrat in Maryland’s U.S. Senate race, announced Friday he will no longer seek the position in 2024. The Montgomery County councilmember was the first person to announce his intention to seek the Senate after longtime Sen. Ben Cardin (D) said in May he wouldn’t seek reelection. Jawando sought to make history as the state’s first Black senator.

As a palliative medicine specialist who often deals with patients nearing the end of life, I have been carefully trained in the art of delivering bad news. The conversations require a mix of compassion and firmness. They are always difficult and often heartbreaking, but they are necessary to prepare patients and to help them face the end. At least that’s what we’re taught in our training; however, I have since learned that not every patient is better off accepting death.

By Friday morning, the Baltimore Police Department had recorded 222 homicides in the city this year, a total that set a pace slightly higher than that of 2022, when 271 homicides were counted. The number of nonfatal shootings by that time was 528, correlating to a pace significantly higher than in 2022, when 578 were tallied. Before the day ended, police would find three more victims, the result of a nonfatal shooting at a home on the 3700 block of Fifth Street.

Mayor Brandon Scott and former Mayor Sheila Dixon held dual fundraisers Wednesday night. Scott’s was held at the newly renovated CFG Arena Fearless Club, a 900-person space. The event was originally planned for Sept. 13, but postponed due to a scheduling conflict, according to a campaign spokesman. A standard ticket cost $100, while higher-tier tickets cost $500, $1,000, $2,500 and $6,000. It was closed to press. Scott’s fundraiser is Colleen Martin-Lauer of Martin-Lauer Associates.

Annapolis City Council members had lots of questions, but received few conclusive answers, Monday at a meeting called to address mold and HVAC problems plaguing Wilbourn Estates, a year-old federally subsidized apartment complex. Two representatives from the Pennsylvania-based firm Pennrose attended the meeting to defend their ongoing oversight of the complex.