Flow

The State Highway Administration will temporarily close the northbound and southbound Interstate 95 ramps onto the Inner Loop of the Beltway south of Baltimore as part of its project to improve the flow of traffic at one of the region's busiest and most congested interchanges. Both ramps will be closed Sunday and Monday at 11 p.m. and will reopen by 5 a.m. the following day. A detour, using the eastbound Beltway to Hollins Ferry Road, will be in place. The highway agency said its contractor is expected to complete its widening of the current single-lane ramps to westbound Interstate 695 by late October.

The Patapsco River doesn't get a lot of love. Pronounced Pa-taps-i-co by many locals and sometimes used as a punch line to an urban joke, the waterway winds about 50 miles from its headwaters to the Chesapeake Bay. It's not a Blue Ribbon trout stream, like the Gunpowder, nor does it enjoy "Wild and Scenic" status like the Youghiogheny in Western Maryland. And it's not the Potomac -- nicknamed America's River by conservation groups. But it provided the juice to power 19th-century textile and grain mills.

It takes a lot to claim a spot on Jason Chapman's Charm City skateboard team. Kabian Maxwell, 18, of Baltimore proved his dedication to the sport by visiting Chapman's park, Charm City Skatepark, as often as he could. After spending a year honing his skills, Maxwell received what he said was the best Christmas present of his life. "[Chapman] called me … and he was like, 'I've got this big box here waiting for you with your name on it.' I came down there, I opened up the box, it was only a little piece of paper that said, 'You're on the team,'" Maxwell said.

When Gov. Martin O'Malley announced the award of a $2 million contract to replace the deck of a bridge over the Capital Beltway in Prince George's County this month, it signaled the end of a yearlong rollout of projects financed by the economic stimulus program launched by President Barack Obama. But the party isn't over. The economic impact of the $317 million in Maryland highway spending financed by the stimulus is expected to linger through next year and into 2012. State officials hope the flow of money will taper off just as transportation revenue begins to bounce back from years of recession that have forced severe cutbacks in construction.

LOS ANGELES — Twenty-seven seconds into Game1 of the NBA Finals on Thursday, the Lakers' Ron Artest and the Celtics' Paul Pierce became entangled, wrestling each other to the floor and getting double technical fouls. Artest, Kobe Bryant and Derek Fisher picked up two fouls in the first quarter, which featured 18 fouls and 20 free throws. It took 35 minutes to play the first quarter, 33 to play the second and 35 to play both the third and fourth. Lakers coach Phil Jackson would prefer the tone of Game 2 on Sunday at the Staples Center be different.

With up to 10,000 bottomless mugs of beer being poured into drinkers at the Preakness infield today, surely planning for such a beerfest must be a logistical nightmare? Not really, says Sebastien Watteau, the man in charge of ensuring there's enough food and drink for the 120,000 or so racing fans and partyers expected to show up at Pimlico. At least no more so than planning for any Preakness — which, he assures, is no picnic. "It's crazy," he says between calls on his cell phone, which come in at the rate of about one per minute in the days leading up to the big race.

Traffic flow on the I-695 west of Baltimore has resumed after a rush-hour accident closed at least two lanes of traffic on the highway's Outer Loop and prompted the hospitalization of one person, a Maryland State Police dispatcher said. The crash, near the intersection of I-70, was called in at 8:02 a.m. and involved a Toyota sedan and a Ford truck, the dispatcher said. The injured person was taken to Saint Agnes Hospital in Baltimore for treatment.

There was one mistake Baltimore never made. Baltimore, and the state of Maryland, never endorsed Prohibition. We were known as the wettest state, where beer and liquor was freely available before and after the Volstead Act's repeal in 1933. Our resistance to Prohibition was in complete violation of a constitutional amendment and federal ordinance. Like many born in the 1950s, my view of Prohibition was shaped by the television series of that era, "The Untouchables," with actor Robert Stack as agent Eliot Ness.

Dr. Nicholas J. Fortuin, a Johns Hopkins Hospital cardiologist who did early research in cardiac ultrasound and was recalled as a gifted teacher, died Sunday near his home in the Caves Valley section of Baltimore County. Family members said he had been bicycling. He was 69. "For generations of cardiology trainees at Hopkins, he came to epitomize clinical judgment and skill, and he brought to their education a healthy skepticism of new fads in a technology-prone specialty," said a close friend, Dr. Thomas Traill, a Hopkins cardiologist.

Environmental groups filed suit Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, accusing an Eastern Shore chicken farm and poultry giant Perdue Farms of polluting waters that flow into the Chesapeake Bay. The Assateague Coastkeeper and Waterkeeper Alliance contends that harmful levels of bacteria and nutrient pollution are flowing from a drainage ditch on the farm into a branch of the Pocomoke River. The lawsuit - the first to target Maryland's chicken industry for water pollution - was filed two months after the groups warned Perdue and Hudson Farms in Berlin that they would sue after spotting what appeared to be chicken manure draining into the ditch.