Around Maryland

In-person Independence Day celebrations, with explosive fireworks displays, are coming back to many places after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the cancellation of live events — especially those with large crowds. But while some cities will welcome throngs of people looking for anything to do outside of the house, others are running into surprising obstacles with supply, labor and pricing. Some cities, including College Park and Ocean City, have canceled their fireworks shows or had to come up with alternative plans.

Every day, Maryland schools lock up students for misbehaving, often keeping them in closet-sized, padded rooms monitored by an adult watching through a small window or by video camera. Sometimes they lock up children as little as kindergarteners. And sometimes, those children, desperate and scared, try to harm themselves inside. This long-standing practice of seclusion will be banned in the state’s public schools when a new state law takes effect on Friday.

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.