Moth-eaten blankets? Broken old television? Sludgy nail polish? Baltimore County wants it all. Grappling with diminishing capacity at its last remaining landfill, Baltimore County is playing catch-up with the rest of the state by adding textiles — such as clothes, shoes, purses and backpacks, towels, curtains and sheets — to the list of things residents can drop off at the county’s three recycling facilities.

Whatever our differences with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — and they are considerable — there was no reasonable justification for the surprise attack launched Saturday from the Gaza Strip against the Jewish homeland. More than 700 Israelis have been confirmed dead, and thousands more have been wounded in the brutal and coordinated strike by the Islamist militant group Hamas, which controls the Palestinian territory wedged between Israel and Egypt on the Mediterranean Sea.

With the slavery debate raging, Thomas Smallwood, a free Black shoemaker living in the 19th-century borderlands between the North and South, had a mission: free as many enslaved people as possible and rub their former enslavers’ faces in his success. In an 1842 dispatch to a New York newspaper, he noted that a slaveholder’s “walking property walked off.”

There is a 24-story office building in Harbor East where tenants pay top dollar for panoramic views of the Baltimore harbor. Seven years ago, the tower was valued at $300 million, but thanks to a deal between the developer and the city, the building has a city property tax bill equivalent to a Home Depot in East Baltimore’s Bayview. The 2009 deal was framed as a necessary incentive to build the former Legg Mason tower at 100 International Drive, but it also meant the city waived tens of millions of dollars in tax revenue.

The number of juveniles being arrested in Montgomery County, Maryland, is down compared to 2019, but the nature of the crimes — and the ages of some of the juveniles involved — is what concerns police, prosecutors and the community. In 2019, there were 1,646 arrests of juveniles in Montgomery County, according to data from the Montgomery County Police Department provided to WTOP. That number plummeted to 393 in 2021 — during the height of the pandemic — but has steadily climbed since then.

Rabbi Mitchell Wohlberg was about to deliver a sermon as part of a normally cheerful Jewish holiday celebration when word came that the “unthinkable” had happened: The militant group Hamas launched a broad-scale attack, sending thousands of missiles and groups of fighters into Israel, killing and kidnapping people by the hundreds. Wohlberg did something he’d never done in more than 50 years of public speaking: he tossed his notes and spoke off the cuff. He implored listeners last weekend to accept that such an attack is in Hamas’ nature.

As Maryland policymakers look to fulfill the state’s many mandated climate goals, a new report suggests that the fossil fuel appliances and other heavy equipment used to power homes and businesses are contributing far more to poor air quality than all of the state’s power plants combined. In fact, furnaces, HVAC systems, water heaters and other equipment powered by fossil fuels emit more than three times as much health-harming nitrogen oxides as the state’s power plants, according to the study, “Cutting Through The Smog: How Air Quality Standards Help Solve the Hidden Health Toll of Air Pollution from Maryland’s Homes and Businesses.”

A new grocery store will replace the former Giant Food in Crofton Station after the Maryland grocer moved to a neighboring shopping center. The Fresh Market signed a lease for a vacant space at 1161 MD Route 3 in Gambrills’ Crofton Station development, with hopes of opening by the end of 2024, said Dimitri Georgelakos, a principal at KLNB, who brokered the deal for the grocery chain along with Michael Patz.

Rockville’s mayoral and City Council candidates shared their positions on lowering the voting age to 16, allowing non-citizens to vote in city elections, establishing term limits and voting districts at a forum last week. The four referendum advisory questions on the ballot this year were brought up during Thursday’s event hosted by Rockville-based nonprofits Community Reach and Rainbow Place Shelter.