Commentary

The Youghiogheny River, in Western Maryland, is considered a Scenic and Wild River by the Department of Natural Resources. A few years ago, I hiked along four tough miles of the river and learned firsthand to appreciate what that special designation means. The Youghiogheny, or the Yock, flows for miles through Garrett County into Pennsylvania. The Maryland section, upstream of the town of Oakland to the town of Friendsville, is well known to white-water kayakers and rafters, visitors to Swallow Falls State Park and people who fish the Yock’s long pools and riffles.

Maryland voters will begin casting mail-in ballots early next month and the primary is less than 60 days away. But there is a nagging question that just about everyone in Maryland politics is asking: What’s going on in the race for governor? The lack of independent polling has left journalists, debate planners and — most importantly — voters in the dark about the Democratic and Republican primary contests that will shape the general election in November.

Like many immigrants fleeing poverty after a natural disaster, my family and I immigrated from El Salvador after the 2001 earthquakes devastated our country. With a lot of hard work, we opened a family restaurant where we all worked, and we bought houses in the neighborhood of Brooklyn to live close to each other. Baltimore became our home, and we feel we’re part of the hard-working and diverse community that lives here.

The Minneapolis Police Department will face the intense scrutiny of a federal program after a state investigation spurred by the killing of George Floyd concluded that the city’s officers stop and arrest Black people more than white people, use force more often on people of color, and maintain a culture in which racist language is tolerated. The court enforced plan, known as a consent decree, has been credited with bringing significant reform in some places but scorned by critics elsewhere as ineffective and a waste of taxpayer money.

Five years ago on Friday, Lt. Richard Collins III, a young Black man, was killed at a bus stop on the College Park campus of the University of Maryland. His murderer was a man with white supremacist ties, who demanded Richard step aside and then stabbed him to death when Richard refused. Lt. Collins was the best of America. He was a leader and a student athlete; he was kind and compassionate and had a deep desire to serve his country.

The largest increase in federal funding for Chesapeake Bay restoration in recent memory is quickly headed to on-the-ground projects where communities need them most. The announcement from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials earlier this month is cause for celebration, and reason to take careful note of what works. The Chesapeake Bay and the 18 million of us who share its 64,000-square-mile watershed face interconnected challenges.

In the broadest sense, what goes by the name “replacement theory” — the idea that American elites are conspiring to replace so-called real Americans with immigrants from poor countries — is merely a description of the American way, enshrined in tradition, codified by law, promoted by successive generations of American leaders from Washington and Lincoln to Kennedy and Reagan. There have been four, arguably five, great replacements in American history.