Around Maryland

Future educators gathered at Hood College on Tuesday to learn about introducing computing concepts as early as pre-K. In a series of sessions funded through a grant from the Maryland Center for Computing Education, participants worked to understand the concepts themselves and practiced applying them in simple lessons for young students. The conference was the first of its kind at Hood. Called “Destination Innovation,” it was tailored to current or future teachers with little to no knowledge of computing, said Jennifer Cuddapah, an education professor at Hood.

The gunfire erupted about 6:30 p.m. Monday in a suburban area west of Knoxville surrounded by businesses. Describing the fatal encounter as an “agent-involved shooting” on Monday, the FBI gave no further explanation Tuesday about what happened and would not say whether the fatal gunfire came from federal agents, Roy McGrath or both.

The Maryland Attorney General’s Office will release Wednesday a redacted version of its long-awaited report on child sexual abuse in the Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore, culminating four years of investigation and stirring hope among survivors that the public reckoning will help hold the church accountable. The report is nearly 500 pages long and will tell how 158 clergy sexually abused and tortured more than 600 children and young adults over an 80-year period beginning in the 1940s.

The city of Baltimore now has its first-ever independent advisory board. The Office of the Inspector General said the 9-member panel, which will act as a watchdog over the IG position itself, is now made up of citizens who are not elected leaders. The head of the Board of Ethics selected all but two of the panelists, those last two were selected by professional CPA and fraud examiner groups.

On a recent Tuesday morning, Animal Enforcement Officer Miles Hughes darted through a narrow brick rowhome facing M&T Bank Stadium in South Baltimore in search of an orange tabby cat left behind after an eviction. The speedy feline, now named Libra, briefly avoided capture. But Hughes and two of his fellow animal enforcement officers eventually scooped up the cat and loaded it into an air-conditioned van.

NASA on Monday named the four astronauts who will fly to the moon by the end of next year, including one woman and three men. The three Americans and one Canadian were introduced during a ceremony in Houston, home to the nation’s astronauts as well as Mission Control. “This is humanity’s crew,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. The four astronauts will be the first to fly NASA’s Orion capsule, launching atop a Space Launch System rocket from Kennedy Space Center no earlier than late 2024.

I had made a grave error. “Do you have memories of eating pickled onions?” I asked in a post on the Facebook group “Baltimore Past & Present Photos.” I had shared a photo of a jar of whole sour onions I had purchased at Baltimore’s oldest Italian deli. I was quickly — and repeatedly — corrected by members of the more than 89,000-person-strong Facebook group: In Charm City, they’re called onion pickles, not pickled onions.

Diesel-belching trucks are rumbling down Maryland 550 in Woodsboro at high rates of speed. It’s a pretty remote stretch of highway in Frederick County, surrounded mainly by cornfields. Many of the trucks are stopping at Laurel Sand and Gravel, a massive quarry and mining operation off the main road, where 600,000 tons of small stones are ground into powder every year. The powder, known as aggregate, is sold to the concrete industry as a thickening agent.

The Howard County Council voted unanimously Monday night to approve legislation that puts in place additional procedures the county auditor is required to follow during certain special investigations, after a description of race in a February report published by the office sparked public protest and calls for the county auditor to be fired.