Around Maryland

The Baltimore Banner on Thursday sued the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, alleging that the agency is improperly denying access to key portions of autopsy reports that are public records under state law — despite providing these documents in the past. For more than three months, reporters from The Banner have been seeking autopsy records for reporting about the opioid epidemic in Maryland. But the medical examiner’s office has “frustrated the letter and the spirit of the law,” the lawsuit asserts, by arbitrarily refusing to turn over critical portions of these documents — including pages that document toxicological findings and contain information about the age, race and gender of people who fatally overdosed, and the locations where they were found.

Adnan Syed is now an employee of Georgetown University, the private university in Washington, D.C., announced Wednesday. Georgetown hired Syed, who was freed three months ago after 23 years in a Maryland prison, as a program associate for the university’s Prisons and Justice Initiative. One of his responsibilities will be working with the initiative’s “Making an Exoneree” class, during which students reinvestigate decades-old wrongful convictions and create short documentaries about the cases to “help bring innocent people home from prison,” the university said.

Operations were smooth Thursday at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, but not so much at hubs in other parts of the country as a storm moves through. The Christmas holiday season is the second busiest at Baltimore-Washington Thurgood Marshall Airport. Officials told 11 News they’re keeping a close eye on hubs in the Midwest and the Northeast as they anticipate an estimated 30,000 departing passengers Thursday and Friday.

Eliana Joftus couldn’t believe someone had spray-painted “Jews Not Welcome” on the entrance sign to her campus, Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda. Days before, she’d helped lead a lesson as president of the school’s Jewish Student Union on how to combat stereotypes and be an ally to Jewish students. The graffiti was clearly a response to that lesson, she suspected. “It could have been just coincidence, but chances are it wasn’t,” Joftus, 17, said. She added that teachers had also received antisemitic emails from a sender outside of the school system over the weekend, confirming that the action wasn’t random. “It really had purpose and motivation behind it.”

Respiratory illnesses, including flu and COVID-19, are on the rise again in Carroll County, leading health care officials to issue a plea for residents to take measures to protect themselves. Though the impact of Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, a common respiratory virus that usually causes mild, cold-like symptoms, is starting to decrease, flu cases are increasing rapidly in Maryland, according to the county health department, and COVID cases are also on the rise.

With Christmas near and the Hanukkah season underway, Frederick County health care leaders are hopeful — but not sure — that there won’t be a repeat of last winter’s tsunami of COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths. The predominant variant of the virus circulating in the Maryland region continues to be versions of the omicron strain, which people as young as 6 months old can now be protected against by receiving an updated booster shot.

One of Maryland’s two 529 college savings plans has frozen interest payments to participants and blocked access to some accounts altogether because of unresolved internal calculation problems, panicking parents as another round of college payments come due early next year.

Maryland officials approved a $500,000 grant Wednesday for Baltimore to move forward with a redevelopment plan for the city’s State Center complex. The Board of Public Works also approved leases Wednesday for the Department of Labor and the Department of Information Technology — the last two state agencies remaining at State Center — to move to office spaces on Charles Street downtown, clearing the way for the complex to be officially vacated next Fall.