Around Maryland

Omer Balva, a 22-year-old Rockville native, was back from his home in Israel. Then, during his U.S. vacation earlier this month, Hamas stormed southern Israel, kidnapping hundreds and killing more than 1,000. Balva’s reserve infantry unit in the Israel Defense Forces quickly recalled him. But before his return, he wanted to gather supplies he knew that soldiers in his unit might need.

Former police chiefs in North Dakota and North Carolina are facing charges in Maryland in connection with a conspiracy to illegally acquire machine guns and other firearms — and court records indicate the case could reach into other states as well. The charges are similar to those faced by Frederick County Sheriff Chuck Jenkins (R), who sought during a hearing in U.S. District Court on Thursday to have the case against him dismissed.

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.

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.

Several Anne Arundel County parents and students used the Board of Education meeting Wednesday evening to voice concerns and offer solutions to specific school issues. Usually the public comment portion of Board of Education meetings are not followed by responses from the board or administrators, but Superintendent Mark Bedell and others were noticeably impressed with Wednesday’s student speakers.