Baltimore Office

A31-year-old Baltimore Police officer was charged Friday with pimping out his wife after officers from a human trafficking task force found him outside a hotel room where the woman had agreed to have sex for cash with an undercover officer. The child recovery task force was working a proactive investigation into human trafficking when they came across a "young-looking female" advertised as an escort on a website, police said. Officers arranged to meet the female at a hotel near BWI airport, court records show.

The inmates' requests often start small, former corrections officers say: a ballpoint pen, for example, or a sandwich from beyond the prison walls. "You may think it's insignificant," said former Cpl. Sheila Hill, who retired last year from the Patuxent Institution in Jessup. "But it's not. " Even small gifts cross the clear line that should be drawn between inmates and officers, Hill and others said Tuesday. It's a line that federal officials say was flagrantly broken at the Baltimore City Detention Center.

A Baltimore County police officer has been charged with malfeasance in office after detectives said he repeatedly engaged in and recorded sexual acts while on duty, including at least one video sent to a 16-year-old girl. Aaron Z. Pross, 29, of Newark, Del., who was assigned to the Pikesville Precinct, is being investigated by his agency and could face additional charges. Detectives said he took more than 120 images and 20 videos engaging in sexual acts with himself and an adult woman while he was working.

Area billboard companies are speaking out against a proposed tax introduced this week by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. In a hearing before the City Council's taxation committee Thursday, the global billboard firm Clear Channel Outdoor offered to give the city more than $1 million in free advertising if the administration would drop plans for a tax on billboards. If not, the company's local general manager said, the city could face a lawsuit. "Will this legislation stand up to a legal challenge [that could]

Maryland's U.S. House delegation met Wednesday with Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric K. Shinseki to keep pressure on the agency to fix problems at the troubled Baltimore office and follow up on promises for improvement. Rep. Steny H. Hoyer, a Southern Maryland Democrat who is House minority whip, said Maryland veterans should call their congressmen to report troubles with the regional office, which has one of the nation's highest error rates and largest percentages of backlogged cases.

Police on Tuesday worked to find out more about the backgrounds of the two men wounded and one man killed in an overnight shootout with officers in West Baltimore. The incident took place about 10 p.m. Monday after two officers on foot patrol in the 2700 block of Edmondson Ave. saw gunfire coming out of a bronze sedan, police said. The officers fired on the car, police said. All three men shot were in the vehicle, police said. Police did not know the dead man's identity Tuesday and were running his fingerprints through databases.

Description: Baltimore has a per-person "ecological footprint" that is 13 percent higher than that of the average American, according to a study of local consumption habits led by a researcher at Goucher College. The measure takes into account how large of an area would be needed to accommodate the city's waste and to secure the resources needed to do so. For all of Baltimore, the area is the combined size of West Virginia, Delaware and Rhode Island, the study found. The largest impacts come from traffic and electricity use, according to the research.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced Friday a plan to immediately evaluate and pay the oldest disability claims, a move that advocates expect will bring relief to Maryland servicemen and women who face one of the largest backlogs in the country. The agency will make provisional decisions on claims that are at least a year old and have not been acted upon. Based on a rating of the severity of the veteran's disability, benefits will range from about $125 to $3,000 a month, or more if a veteran requires extraordinary care.

When FBI agents heard on a wiretap that a Baltimore police detective was preparing to make a drug arrest based on false information, according to court documents, they decided not to intervene. The arrest of Brenda Brown went forward, and so did the federal case against Kendell Richburg. Richburg pleaded guilty last month to armed drug conspiracy charges after prosecutors said he protected a drug-peddling informant in exchange for information he needed to make arrests. Four more officers have been suspended in connection with the investigation, sources told The Baltimore Sun last week.

With staff members at the Baltimore office of the Department of Veterans Affairs spending a month in training, Maryland's senators called on VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki to dispatch more analysts to help work through one of the worst disability claims backlogs in the nation. The Baltimore staff is training through early May to help improve performance at the office, which has the worst error rate, one of highest percentages of backlogged claims and some of the longest wait times for disabled veterans.