Nearly 40 years ago, a series of lawsuits were filed by the U.S. Department of Justice and civil rights advocates against Eastern Shore towns and counties with a history of voter discrimination. All of the towns had deep segregationist roots, and all had failed to elect Black candidates to public office, despite having significant number of African American residents.
The Maryland Chamber of Commerce recently published The 2023 Competitiveness Redbook for Maryland, a data-driven snapshot that compares Maryland’s economic health with the rest of the country across various economic indicators, such as population change, employment growth, taxation and economic, fiscal and regulatory freedom.
I knew him for no more than 15 minutes. Maybe 20, tops. He was a clerk at a Canton cellphone store where a friend was inquiring about changing carriers. I just waited in the corner for her, scrolling the internet on my iPhone, while my kid played with a tablet on display. All I knew about him was that he was friendly, efficient and had gloriously thick black hair swirled high in front, like a stylish modern bouffant.
Fort Detrick is a somewhat problematic neighbor for our community. It’s a huge boon to our economy, a job creator and a partner on civic endeavors, but at the same time, it’s a worrisome home to laboratories handling all kinds of scary materials. This reality was brought home again recently by the publication of a new book that lays out new details about a disturbing incident.
At the end of 2022, the Montgomery County Council approved the building of a median, dedicated lane for the Flash Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) route along US 29. This approval brought the promise of an authentic BRT system for county residents one step closer to reality, albeit progress is still slow for riders and for the demands of tackling the climate crisis.
The recent revelation by Baltimore’s inspector general that a city employee had been double-dipping for months — working jobs for the Mayor’s Office and the city school system simultaneously (a circumstance made possible by COVID-19 related telework rules) — would be comical, if not for the serious context. Inspector General Isabel Mercedes Cumming’s report arrived the day after it was revealed Mayor Brandon Scott had ousted his chief of staff and communications director.
I was at an old fire hall in Ferndale, at a meeting of an old Democratic club. U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin was coming to the well-established club to talk but was late. He spent the day on the road, chatting with elected officials in Annapolis, making appearances and meeting with constituents. Ferndale was the final stop on his itinerary. The clock was pushing 9 p.m. when Maryland’s junior senator rolled through the side door of the little red-and-white building. He looked tired.
“Women deserve better than abortion,” the man stated firmly, before sitting back down next to me in the crowded Maryland senate hearing. He was a member of one of the many “pro-life” groups that testified on March 8 in Annapolis against Senate Bill 798: Declaration of Rights – Right to Reproductive Freedom. I caught a glimpse of his phone background, which was a beautiful, smiling picture of a young girl, likely his daughter.
Though an urban waterway, hard by transit systems, the waters of the Jones Falls attract wildlife. (Baltimore Sun) A few years after the Civil War, a man named William Moody Chase created a stereograph, a three dimensional photograph, of a place called Otter Rock, somewhere along the 18 miles of the Jones Falls as it flows through Baltimore County into the city. We can assume that Otter Rock was so named for good reason: Otters were once common in a river that, 150 years later, we associate more with pollution than with wildlife.
Sen. Ben Cardin, 79, announced on Monday that he will retire in January 2025, at the end of his third term. By then, he will have served 58 years in state and federal office, having won his first election — a seat in the Maryland House of Delegates — in 1966, when Lyndon B. Johnson was president and the United States was at war in Vietnam.
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