Days after the Patterson Bowling Center abruptly closed, the circumstances surrounding the closure of the building and the future of the alley are still uncertain. A teary employee from the center told a party that had arrived for a birthday on Dec. 3 that the bowling center was permanently closing that day. Ken Staub, who has owned the alley since 2016, told The Baltimore Banner the ongoing sale of the building led him to close the business, citing he couldn’t keep taking on reservations, especially around the holidays.

Baltimore’s third experiment in a promising approach to violent crime, which officials say has provided much needed hope in the Western District over the past year, will now be expanded to other districts and eventually citywide. But the city’s police union and the chair of the City Council’s public safety committee, while both supportive of the program, expressed some skepticism that the Baltimore Police Department has the manpower to support the expansion. Known as the Group Violence Reduction Strategy, or GVRS, the approach melds traditional policing with alternative anti-gun violence approaches, such as offering city services to individuals who have been identified by law enforcement as being the most “at-risk” to be victims or perpetrators of gun violence.

For years, scientists have sought a universal flu vaccine — one that defends against all known types of the nasty virus — and recently there has been progress. University of Pennsylvania scientists reported they used the same mRNA platform from the COVID-19 vaccines to develop a shot that produced antibodies in animals against 20 subtypes of influenza — far more than the two or four in the seasonal vaccine. So what might people expect from such a vaccine in humans eventually, and in the meantime, as cases of the flu, plus RSV and COVID-19 swamp emergency departments and doctors’ offices? Here are some answers from Andrew Pekosz, a Johns Hopkins University flu researcher and professor in the department of molecular microbiology and immunology.

I came across something funny this week while researching the national and state implications of the Respect For Marriage Act, which recently passed the Senate and is expected to clear the House and then be signed into law by President Joe Biden any day now. Actually, maybe “funny” isn’t the right word for it still being necessary, in the year 2022, to codify the right of same-sex and interracial couples to be recognized as legally married in every state of the union. “Sad” is more like it. Anyway, I researched when marriages between Black and white people, like the one I was in before I was widowed, were made legal in Maryland. Officially, that was in 1967, when the Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia, allowing such unions in all 50 states, including this one. But just last month, outgoing Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh formally overruled previous restrictions against Black and white people marrying each other.

Baltimore County’s school board will not only have five new members on Tuesday but get new leadership as well. However, the options for experienced leadership are limited. Board members will elect a new chair and vice chair at the beginning of the meeting. Julie Henn and Rod McMillion, who both ran unopposed in the Nov. 8 election, currently hold those positions, respectively. And Henn, who has been the chair for the last year, said on Facebook that she no longer wants the job. In a Nov. 18 post, Henn said she told her colleagues that she’d neither pursue nor accept a nomination to be chair or vice chair.