Around Maryland

An abortion rights advocates protest rally was held Wednesday afternoon in Bel Air. The rally began around 5 p.m. at Harford County Government Center on Main Street and ended in front of the courthouse. About 150 people were involved, organized by three Harford County women who posted the rally on the Harford County Social Justice Facebook group page.

Nearly a million Marylanders are expected to travel for the July 4 weekend, including nearly 880,000 who will travel by car, according to AAA Mid-Atlantic. Friday is expected to be the busiest travel day of the period, with the heaviest travel times predicted to be noon to 9 p.m., according to a AAA Mid-Atlantic press release.

Annapolis City Council ratified contracts for four union bargaining units Monday, but not before expressing frustration with the negotiation process and pledging to make changes. The move came in the middle of an almost four-hour meeting that also found the council deputizing the mayor’s boat, and appointing a new city manager. According to City Code, negotiations with unions representing police officers, firefighters and support staff were to be completed by March.

The Maryland Court of Appeals is among the nation’s most diverse state supreme courts in terms of the percentage of minority and female judges, according to recently released data. The post Md. high court ranks high in gender, ethnic diversity, report finds first appeared on Maryland Daily Record.

Dora Duncan’s phone line is often busy. As a bilingual community health worker at the Asian American Center of Frederick’s office in the Hillcrest neighborhood, she hears from people every day won how to enroll in health insurance or afford to take their child to the dentist.

Frederick County and city officials were unable Wednesday to reach agreement about the site for a library branch on the west side of the city. Two potential locations are under consideration for the new library branch. One is at 800 Oak St., along Himes Avenue. It’s a 209,000-square-foot facility the county purchased last year after leasing it for a mass COVID-19 vaccination site.

This summer Maryland will impose new restrictions on crabbing in the Chesapeake Bay — including the first-ever limits on how many bushels of male blue crabs watermen can haul each day — in response to a troubling decline in the population of the beloved crustaceans. Regulations issued this week, to be in effect starting in July, will limit commercial watermen to at most 15 bushels a day of male crabs in August and September and will end their harvest two weeks earlier than normal on Nov. 30. And the new rules will tighten existing restrictions on the commercial harvest of female crabs and the recreational harvest, too.

Work to convert the former elementary school of the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall into a community center starts this week with a goal to open the $12.5 million facility next July. Interior demolition is underway at the former city public school in Upton that will transform into the Justice Thurgood Marshall Amenity Center at P.S. 103. The center will honor the life, career and legacy of the nation’s first Black U.S. Supreme Court justice who was raised in West Baltimore. He became a civil rights activist and later an associate justice on the Supreme Court from October 1967 until October 1991. Marshall died at age 85 on January 24, 1993.