AeroVanti, an Annapolis luxury flight club, is expanding beyond the skies into the sea to bring a touch of James Bond-chic to Maryland. The rapidly growing travel company has launched the AeroVanti Yacht Club, a venture that offers three vessels for charter. The boats will be rented similar to how planes are chartered through AeroVanti, with a professional captain and crew on board. The most notable vessel is the “Casino Royale,” the same type of Sunseeker Predator that appeared in the 2006 James Bond movie “Casino Royale” as the main base of the villainous Le Chiffre. The two other boats are smaller than the 108-foot ship made famous by Hollywood, a 50-foot sportfishing boat, and a 50-foot sailing boat.

Former Gov. Larry Hogan (R) spent years plotting his political rise, with mixed success. It wasn’t until he launched an organization called Change Maryland in 2011 that Hogan hit his stride politically, capitalizing on voters’ fatigue over high taxes, activist lawmaking in Annapolis and then-Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) in general. Change Maryland focused on taxes and the economy, using Facebook to collect tens of thousands of names and email addresses of disgruntled Marylanders — Democrats and independents as well as Republicans. The advocacy group essentially morphed into Hogan’s campaign organization, propelling the Republican to improbable victory in the 2014 gubernatorial election.

With lawmakers facing a July 1 deadline to provide a framework for the legal use, possession, and sale of cannabis after voters approved full legalization in November, it’s clear, almost two weeks into the General Assembly session, that the task won’t be straightforward. While the public is generally enthusiastic about legalization, legislators have a lot of work to do to build a legal market that fulfills their commitments on issues like equity, public safety, and taxation and revenue. “The people of this state have spoken and they have spoken loudly,” said Moore at a press conference Thursday. “We cannot, we will not, repeat the mistakes that the state has made when medical cannabis was legalized. … [W]e have to get this right from day one.”

Chester Finn, Jr., a preeminent policy expert and former member of the Kirwan Commission and the Maryland State Board of Education, once observed: “Perhaps no challenge in American schooling is as perplexing and under-examined as special education … change is desperately needed in this corner of the K-12 world.” Maryland’s more than 105,000 students in special education are shamefully under-served and under-performing. But Maryland is now positioned to change that. The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future sets the stage, and the Blueprint Accountability and Implementation Board has superbly charted a course for reform of special education that can be a model for the nation.

Asma Naeem, a Pakistan-born, former New York prosecutor turned museum curator, was named Tuesday as director of the Baltimore Museum of Art — the first person of color to lead the institution in its 109-year history. The appointment of Naeem to head Maryland’s second-largest arts institution was confirmed during a Tuesday afternoon vote of the board of trustees. She begins her new position Feb. 1. “The Baltimore Museum of Art is one of the boldest and brave museums in the world,” said Naeem, who is 53 and lives in Howard County. “We have begun an incredible dialogue with our neighbors and community partners about what role a museum should play in an urban environment. That is a conversation I intend to continue.”

Baltimore-area students are showing signs of returning to pre-pandemic levels of proficiency in English language arts but continued to have setbacks in mathematics, according to newly released scores from a spring 2022 standardized assessment of Maryland public school students. The Maryland State Department of Education in December released a statewide snapshot of public-school students’ overall scores on the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program assessment. This standardized test, which the state administered for the first time in spring 2022, hinted at resilience amid the coronavirus pandemic in English language arts — but also produced ominous scores in math.

Before the first COVID-19 vaccines were readily available in Maryland, Rachel Ledney Odom was already sick and getting sicker. A fever, accompanied by a headache, cough, fatigue and heart palpitations put her in the hospital for a week. At home, she developed recurring pneumonia, brain fog, chest pain and myocarditis, or inflammation around the heart muscle. Today, Odom still feels sick and said friends, family and doctors don’t understand the enormity of her burden. She’s sidelined from her work, struggled with family responsibilities and needs assistance with once-mundane tasks, like showering. Fearing bringing COVID-19 back into their home, Odom’s teenage son stopped going to in-person school.

Every four years after an election, the Maryland governor makes what seems like routine appointments to the state’s 24 election boards, after seeking nominees from the local central committees of both the Democratic and Republican parties. For the last 8 years, with Gov. Larry Hogan (R) at the state’s helm, Republicans have held the majority on the local boards, but the new Democratic governor will flip the balance of power on the 24 boards when Gov. Wes Moore (D) makes his picks, giving Democrats the majority on the panels. Those election board appointments are arguably a fairly arcane responsibility so far as the general public goes, but they are decisions that are mighty important to party operatives and political insiders.