Harbor

City leaders hope that by this time next year they'll have returned from Annapolis with funds to put toward making the Inner Harbor what its original designers intended it to be - "a playground for Baltimoreans. " "The city has changed so much since the original development of the Inner Harbor," said Laurie Schwartz, executive director of the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore Inc., a nonprofit that manages and advocates for the city's waterfront. It's time to evaluate the Inner Harbor and decide what needs to be done to sustain it as a vibrant part of the city, she said.

A Washington-based nonprofit group has offered to test for toxic contamination in city park land that borders a new casino being built in South Baltimore, but City Hall says it's not interested. The Inner Harbor Stewardship Foundation, which bankrolled a lawsuit seeking to block work on the Horseshoe Casino until more cleanup is required on the site, wrote Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake on Monday saying that it would pay for testing of soil and ground water at Gwynns Falls Trail Park.

The Century boys showed their depth at Saturday's Pikesville Track Classic. Julian Woods won three different events, and Jake Stefanick finished first in another, but it was Chandler Kennell's late win in the pole vault - the last event to finish - that pushed No. 2 Century past No. 6 Digital Harbor at Pikesville. Kennell set a meet record with his effort of 14 feet, one inch. Nicholas Neral added a fourth-place finish in the event, and those 13 points let Century (69) top Digital Harbor (60)

If it felt like it couldn't get any hotter in downtown Baltimore on Wednesday, that might be because it wasn't hotter anyplace else in the country. The Inner Harbor reached a high of 96 degrees at 4:11 p.m., according to the National Weather Service. That was 5 degrees hotter than out at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, where the high of 91 degrees broke a record of 89 set in 1922. (The 1922 record, strangely enough, was set just a few blocks from the Inner Harbor at the U.S. Customs House.

Baltimore police have arrested a 24-year-old man in the fatal stabbing of a Cheesecake Factory employee who was leaving work early Sunday. Police said Anthony Black, 20, was being picked up by his girlfriend at 2:18 a.m. after work when two men began hitting on his girlfriend, who was sitting in her car in the 400 block of E. Pratt St. near the Inner Harbor. "That's my girl," Black told the men, according to Baltimore police spokesman Detective Vernon Davis. One of the men responded by telling him to "calm down, your girl is hot-looking," according to a court charging document.

Baltimore Police say a man was stabbed to death early Sunday morning after apparently getting into an argument with two other people near the Inner Harbor. Police said the incident occurred at about 2:18 a.m. Sunday in the 200 block of East Pratt Street. The victim, identified by police as a 20-year-old black male, was leaving work when two individuals approached him and became engaged in an argument. The argument escalated and the victim was stabbed multiple times in the upper body, police said.

H&S Bakery is moving its Harbor East distribution center to an East Baltimore business park, freeing up prime real estate that the breadmaker-turned-developer has eyed for development for more than a decade. The facility, bounded by South Central Avenue and South Eden, Fleet and Aliceanna streets, lies on the edge of the fast-growing shopping, hotel and business district. Its future home, meanwhile, is a development that was once in bankruptcy and has struggled to attract tenants.

The sales pitch to 46 uniformed men was simple: Welcome to Baltimore. Next time, bring a tall ship. City and state officials and the nautical community have begun a marketing drive aimed at filling the Inner Harbor with majestic sailing vessels and gray-hulled warships for the War of 1812 commemoration finale, Sept. 6-14, 2014. On Wednesday, they pitched military attaches from 40 countries, including Canada, Mexico, Turkey and Sri Lanka. Navies begin planning their sea exercises and courtesy calls about a year in advance, and there's a lot of jockeying among East Coast seaports to secure the biggest and best ships for summer events.

The board of the Baltimore Development Corp. is recommending the city approve a developer's request for $107 million in tax increment financing to pay for roads, utilities and parks for the $1 billion mixed-use Harbor Point development on the waterfront between Harbor East and Fells Point. The board of the BDC, the city's development agency, voted Thursday to send a recommendation to Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake for consideration. The financing, a way to fund construction of public infrastructure for new development, also requires City Council approval.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration reported this week that ancient rocks on Mars analyzed by its Curiosity rover, which landed on the Red Planet in August, show that what is today a barren and inhospitable environment might well have supported living organisms quite comfortably in the distant past. Several billion years ago, scientists say, Mars had a thicker atmosphere and warmer weather and was awash in water flowing across its surface that was safe enough to drink. Humans, of course, did not yet exist in that primeval past, which long predated even the appearance of the first dinosaurs on Earth some 230 million years ago. But microbial life could easily have flourished during that era. Though Curiosity's lab isn't equipped to detect Martian life, past or present, it can determine whether the kind of organic molecules that are essential to life - at least as we know it - are present in the Martian environment.