Around Maryland

Nearly one-fifth of garbage workers in Baltimore’s Department of Public Works don’t have city health insurance, a fact some of them didn’t realize until the inspector general started looking into the question last month. That finding, detailed in a report released Tuesday by the Office of the Inspector General, comes eight weeks after a trash collector for the Department of Public Works overheated on the job, collapsed and died.

Can you find the area of a cylinder? Add exponential numbers? Solve a system of equations? Eighth graders in Maryland are supposed to know how to do all of that and more. But the latest round of state test scores shows that very few of them do. Just 7% of test-takers passed the state’s eighth grade math test, part of the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program.

A student group at the University of Maryland can go ahead with a previously planned event commemorating the anniversary of the Hamas attacks in Israel after administration officials revoked their ability to hold the vigil, a federal judge said Tuesday. Students for Justice in Palestine introduced the lawsuit in federal court last month when the university — facing public pressure and citing safety concerns — allowed and then reversed course on a vigil the group planned for Oct. 7.

David Rubenstein didn’t get into the baseball business to make money, but to “make a great baseball team,” the 75-year-old owner of the Baltimore Orioles said Tuesday. Rubenstein was speaking at iMPACT Maryland, a regional thought leadership conference hosted by The Baltimore Banner. Rubenstein was interviewed by The Baltimore Banner’s Editor-in-Chief Kimi Yoshino. (Photo: Eric Thompson/for The Baltimore Banner)

Amtrak’s Frederick Douglass Tunnel project in West Baltimore faced delays due to a short-staffed team and had an ineffective management structure, an audit released Tuesday found. The issues with the $6 billion infrastructure project, in which Amtrak is replacing the 151-year-old Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel, are being resolved as Amtrak develops a structure, the federal rail corporation’s Office of the Inspector General found.

Drug overdose deaths in Carroll County dropped 25.93% in 2023, from the prior year, according to the Maryland Department of Health. The downward trend started in 2022, when deaths from drug overdose dropped 8.47% from 2021. In 2021, the county saw a 28.26% increase in overdose deaths when compared to 2020. The isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic fueled a spike in overdose deaths nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Mayor Brandon Scott threatened Monday to end the city’s relationship with the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts after its CEO suggested Scott’s office was partly responsible for the nonprofit’s current financial peril. The dispute centers on a $1.5 million state grant given to the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture to help stage Artscape in 2023.

A Montgomery County, Maryland, woman received a first-of-its-kind surgery to repair her ankle — and it was done using only plastic components. Dr. Paul Cooper, an orthopedic surgeon at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital in D.C., performed the all-plastic ankle replacement surgery on the 71-year-old woman a week ago.