Industry

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...

Maryland trainer Chris Grove knows all too well that racehorses sometimes take fatal missteps. It happened to one of his best horses last summer during a morning workout, and Grove likens the experience to losing a child. To Grove, the animals' broken bones are mostly unpredictable, unexplainable - and ultimately unpreventable. "They're kind of like kids - they find ways of hurting themselves," said Grove, a Frederick resident and former trainer of Sweet Goodbye, a six-year old, Maryland-bred mare with career earnings topping $600,000.

The woman who says she represents North American Power is not telling the truth about the benefits of buying electricity from her company. "You can save up to 10, 15, 20 percent of your bill, depending on your usage," she says in a telemarketing call to my house. But the rate she eventually quotes is only about 7 percent less than the standard price offered by Baltimore Gas & Electric — something the average customer would have no way of knowing. And of course the percentage savings won't vary even if my "usage" goes up to that of a steel mill.

According to Wicomico County Executive Richard M. Pollitt Jr. ("So what if O'Malley emails with Perdue lawyer," May 13), "[n]ot only is our entire region and state helped by the economics of the chicken industry, but so is our environment. " How could he possibly arrive at that conclusion? The data tells quite a different story. Maryland crop and livestock production combined has constituted about 0.35 percent of the state's Gross Domestic Product for the past decade, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis at the Commerce Department.

If all goes as planned, sometime this morning a spacecraft will blast off from its launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and ride a fiery plume of contrails upward through the pre-dawn darkness to begin a two-week journey to the International Space Station and back. But the flight won't be just another NASA resupply mission. Instead, the Falcon 9 rocket and its unmanned Dragon cargo capsule built by Space Exploration Technologies Corporation - SpaceX for short - will be the first commercially owned and operated vehicle ever to rendezvous with the station's orbiting astronauts.

All along, they had been so relaxed. So when it came time for Team O'Neill's horse to make his charge -- a historic one -- the colt moved forward almost nonchalantly. I'll Have Another glided past Bodemeister to win the 137th running of the Preakness Stakes on Saturday at Pimlico Race Course, setting up a chance at the first Triple Crown since 1978. The California-based horse is the 12th to win the first two legs of the Triple Crown since Affirmed edged Alydar in all three races.

Aside from Gov. Martin O'Malley's denial of any "quid pro quo," the large donations of the various wind industries to the Democratic Governors Association inexplicably coincides with the governor's past and future embrace of offshore wind ("Firms with interests in Md. pour cash into DGA," Nov. 27). That aside, it also raises another question. If the industry has enough money to give large donations to secure their highly questionable industry, why do they need big grants, loans, etc. extended by the federal Government?

You remember some who said "let Detroit go bankrupt?" You also remember that guy who cavalierly offered to place a $10,000 bet. Instead of placing a "regular guy" bet of $10,000 or giving two Cadillacs to his wife, President Barack Obama made another bet. He bet on the American worker and guess what? America won. And the president says he would place that bet again. That bet saved millions of jobs and will end up costing the U.S. taxpayer next to nothing. GM is now the No. 1 auto producer in the world.

Wouldn't you like to get something for nothing? That sounds too good to be true, but it's the business model the debt settlement industry has regularly used as it has taken money from tens of thousands of vulnerable consumers around the country and often done little or nothing to help them settle their debts. To stop such predatory practices, the Maryland legislature needs to strengthen the debt settlement bills now before the House and Senate and establish firm and reasonable caps on the fees the industry can charge consumers.

Three veterans of Maryland's information technology industry have formed a political action committee that will make campaign contributions to political candidates who support the industry's efforts in the state. The new group is called the Maryland IT PAC and will operate at both state and federal levels. The committee's founders were involved in fighting – and successfully overturning – the tax on technology services in 2007. The committee's chairman is Michael Rosenbaum, chief executive officer of Catalyst IT Services.

The Army's next-generation carbine may come out of a Highlandtown machine shop best known for making high-volume bottling equipment for major drink makers. Adcor Industries Inc. learned this month that it was among a handful of weapons makers selected to compete to build a possible replacement for the M4, a rifle descended from the well-known M16 and that some soldiers have criticized as unreliable in the dry, dusty conditions in Iraq. Adcor, which employs about 80 people in its block-sized building on South Haven Street, will face some of the biggest names in global gun-making in a race to be the Army's small-arms weapon of choice in the 21st century.

Baltimore will show off its biggest trucks Saturday and allow young residents to meet police officers, firefighters and others who drive the big rigs through city streets. The Biggest Big Truck Show brings about 20 vehicles to the Baltimore Museum of Industry. The event runs from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 1415 Key Highway. Visitors can see, touch, even take a seat in many among the fleet of vehicles, including Big Bertha, Baltimore's largest tow truck, fire engine, motorcycles and a fireboat that will shoot up massive plumes of water.

A series of emails between Gov. Martin O'Malley and Perdue's corporate lawyer shows what an environmental group calls a "cozy relationship" between the two law school classmates as Maryland's chief executive weighs farm pollution regulations of concern to the Salisbury-based poultry producer. Food & Water Watch, a Washington-based environmental group, used Maryland's Public Information Act to obtain 70 pages of emails between O'Malley and Herbert D. Frerichs Jr., a partner with the Venable law firm in Baltimore who is general counsel for the Perdue family holding company that owns and operates Perdue Food Products, Perdue AgriBusiness and other entities.

The Obama administration's latest move to permit testing for oil and gas off Maryland and other Atlantic coast states is drawing flak from both environmentalists and the oil industry. Speaking at a lightly attended public hearing Wednesday afternoon in Annapolis, some residents said they feared the testing might hurt whales and dolphins, disrupt fishing and damage tourism. They also warned that the risks of a spill were too great to warrant even looking for oil. "Avoiding activities that will harm or kill any more marine mammals is significantly more important to me than succumbing to today's frenzied pressures to reduce gasoline prices by a mere 3 cents [er gallon]

Joseph Russ, a West Baltimore mortician who was active in his industry for nearly 70 years, died of heart disease April 16 at his West Baltimore home. He was 98. Born in Baltimore and raised on Brunt Street, he was a 1933 graduate of Frederick Douglass High School. He also had diplomas from the old Cortez Peters School of Business and the Family Bible Institute. In 1941 he married Emma Lucille White, whom he affectionately nicknamed "Lamb Pie. " That year, they established a funeral business at Dolphin and McCulloh streets.

Last year, when Gov.Martin O'Malley signed an executive order establishing a commission to study the impact of drilling for natural gas in Western Maryland's Marcellus Shale deposit, he promised the state would be guided by "scientific knowledge. " Yet gathering that much-needed information costs money, something the state doesn't have at the moment. That lack of funds will likely mean many months of delay for the fact-finding efforts of the governor's advisory commission. The alternative - to simply not do a thorough study of such issues as the potential economic effects of fracking, the disposal of toxic waste water, and the impact on local ground water - would be wholly unacceptable.

Those in government who could make a difference have turned their backs on an industry that this nation cannot do without. The coal industry supplies the energy that keeps the lights on for half the nation, and it is an industry that does not need a government handout to survive. But while the Obama administration has promoted green energy nationwide, the EPA has been allowed to promulgate any kind of bone-headed regulation it wants so long as it goes against the coal mining industry.

A man's body was pulled Tuesday morning from shallow waters of the Inner Harbor near the 1400 block of Key Highway, Baltimore police said. The body was found about 8 a.m., police said, near a stretch of Key Highway home to the Baltimore Museum of Industry. jtorbati@baltsun.com

On a warm, sunny afternoon at the Maritime Industries Academy baseball field, posters honoring members of the Negro leagues hung on the outfield fence and dust swirled under the banner honoring Jackie Robinson at home plate. Members of the Maritime and Southside Academies wore gray and blue pin-striped replica uniform shirts of two teams that played in the NL — the Baltimore Black Sox (Maritime) and the Baltimore Elite Giants (Southside). And they played with wooden bats. In this, the 1st Annual Negro League Appreciation Game, the Maritime Black Sox won, 11-1, in five innings, with pitcher Devont'e Lewis striking out 14 and allowing just one hit while going the distance.