Anne Arundel

Before sunrise Monday, Kevin and Shelley Taylor set out from their Millersville home to a new employment center for the Maryland Live! Casino, a slots parlor next to the Arundel Mills mall seeking workers for 1,500 jobs. Having tracked the progress of what will be the state's largest casino, the Taylors believe the facility could provide opportunity for their five-member family. Though Kevin Taylor has a job, he wants a better-paying one. And Shelley Taylor has been out of work for several months.

Services to honor military Active-duty military and veterans will be recognized in worship services at 8 a.m. and 10:45 a.m. Sunday, May 27, at Galilee Lutheran Church, 4652 Mountain Road in Pasadena. Military personnel will be invited to come forward to be recognized. Information: 410-255-8236. Summer camp Woods Memorial Presbyterian Church, 611 Baltimore-Annapolis Blvd., offers a one-week day camp from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Aug. 6-10 for children entering third through ninth grades to teach them how to express their faith through music, drama, movement and fine arts.

Maryland Live! Casino at Arundel Mills will have its grand opening at 10 p.m. June 6, casino officials announced Thursday morning. The grand opening still requires approval by the Maryland Lottery, which will oversee a trial run to take place before June 6. The announcement comes as the state slots commission on Thursday considers a bid to open a casino in Rocky Gap, in Western Maryland, by Evitts Resort LLC. The commission also has yet...

Pamela Furness Engel, an Anne Arundel County biology teacher and teaching adviser, died of pancreatic cancer May 16 at Baltimore-Washington Medical Center. She was 58 and lived in Linthicum. Born Pamela Furness in Baltimore and raised in Catonsville and Columbia, she was a 1971 Atholton High School graduate. She earned a degree in biology at what is now McDaniel College and had a second degree in education at the Notre Dame of Maryland University, as well as a master's degree in biology from Towson University.

Albert Lord doesn't like to wait - not in business or on the golf course. The colorful chairman of student loan behemoth Sallie Mae, who's embroiled in a nasty fight over the failed sale of the company, has spent 40 years in the accounting and banking industries. He said that experience should have instilled in him a measure of patience, but it hasn't. Whether in traffic, at the office or on the links, Lord said, he just doesn't like to wait. He can't do much about the first two, but he's got a sure-fire solution for the last one: He's building his own, an 18-hole golf course on land he's acquired amid shuttered tobacco farms and grazing horses in southern Anne Arundel County.

Hundreds of people lined up on sun-drenched asphalt Saturday to see if they could get regular payouts, in the form of paychecks, from the new Maryland Live! Casino, a slots casino scheduled to open at Arundel Mills mall in about three months. "I hope I get lucky enough to get a position," said Mark Ellison, who's from West Baltimore. "They want people who are willing to go the extra mile so customers come in and enjoy spending their money. " The operators of what will be the state's largest casino hosted a job fair Saturday with the Anne Arundel Workforce Development Corp.

Four trucks laden with 100 slot machines arrived early Wednesday morning at the nearly completed casino at Arundel Mills mall. For the next two hours, workers wheeled banks of the gleaming new machines, one by one, inside on hand trucks. Installation of the first set of slots moved Maryland Live! Casino, the state's largest, another step closer to its scheduled opening in three months. That's progress for Maryland's lackluster gambling program, which has yet to be fully implemented more than three years after voters approved five slots locations statewide.

Annapolis is getting a special present to celebrate its 300th birthday: a peek at its beginnings.Traces of a cellar and blacksmith's forge, unearthed last week by archaeologists in the Anne Arundel County Courthouse parking lot, mark the earliest signs ever found of the tiny hamlet that became Maryland's state capital."

They're tucked away in residential neighborhoods, alongside marinas and on the Chesapeake Bay's tributaries. But for those who don't have a navigational system in their car or boat, Anne Arundel County's picturesque waterfront restaurants can be tricky to find. A trek to Deep Creek Restaurant in Arnold, Windows on the Bay or the Cheshire Crab in Pasadena - with a left turn here and a right turn there - takes a visitor through tree-lined neighborhoods, past rows of boats suspended on lifts and ends in laid-back culinary delights.

A woman who accidentally started a fire that claimed her daughter's life was placed on five years' probation yesterday, after lawyers said she was punished by the child's death and needed psychiatric and alcohol abuse treatment. "It would seem to me that the public would be better served by your rehabilitation," Anne Arundel County Circuit Judge Robert H. Heller Jr. told Carol SheatsMartin. Martin, 33, of Cape St. Claire said she felt "unjustly accused" of trying to destroy her home and unfairly blamed.

The Anne Arundel Community Action Agency studied a long list of nominees as it prepared to induct the first members into its Hall of Fame. In its nearly 50-year history battling poverty, many staff members and volunteers have kept the agency going, and a few made sure it survived. The final decision fell to the History Committee, which nominated five for the initial honor. "Oh, we have great stories and many great nominees who made significant contributions," said Kinaya Sokoya, chief executive officer of the Annapolis-based agency.

Nearly a year after joining forces to combat illegal used-car sales, an Anne Arundel County panel is launching a program that it hopes will become a model for discouraging the practice across the state. The group includes county zoning inspectors, police and prosecutors, the Motor Vehicle Administration and an alliance of used car dealers taking on "curbstoning" - unlicensed sellers peddling cars to which they do not hold the title, often cannot be titled, have liens on them, turn out to be lemons or are stolen.

Surrounded by lush plants, Leah Boston picks up a green snip of Swedish ivy. Slowly and carefully, she presses its end into a plastic cell of potting mix. "I'm on my fourth tray," the 49-year-old Glen Burnie woman says. Boston is among about two dozen people propagating and nurturing plants in the greenhouses of the nonprofit Providence Center. The Millersville-based center operates programs for developmentally disabled adults in Anne Arundel County. Tucked down a slope in Arnold, the horticulture workshop is not widely known, though it is one of the 43-year-old Providence Center's oldest and sells plants to the public, said Leslie B. Mathieson, horticulture production manager.