Plant

A trio of environmental groups warned Monday they would sue the operator of three coal-fired power plants in Maryland for allegedly discharging excessive amounts of nutrient pollution into Chesapeake Bay rivers and trying to mask their violations by transferring pollution "credits" among facilities. Food & Water Watch, the Patuxent Riverkeeper and the Potomac Riverkeeper contend that NRG Energy has been violating state-imposed pollution discharge limits for the past three years at its Chalk Point, Morgantown and Dickerson power plants.

Crying as she testified, a former scheduler for Anne Arundel County Executive John R. Leopold told a judge Friday that she emptied her boss' urinary catheter bag several times during the workday and went along with planting signs for his 2010 re-election campaign because she feared for her job. "It was my experience that you don't tell him no because then he considered you unloyal," said Patricia Medlin, a 15-year county employee. "People lost their jobs. I've seen it. " Medlin was among the first witnesses in the trial of the Republican county executive, who is accused of using county police officers and staff members to perform personal and political tasks for him. Anne Arundel police Cpl. Joseph Pazulski, a member of Leopold's taxpayer-funded security detail, testified that he, too, planted campaign signs while on duty.

The operator of three coal-fired power plants in Maryland has agreed to pay a total of $2.2 million in penalties and fix long-standing pollution problems at the landfills in Southern Maryland and Montgomery County where it disposes of the ash from those plants, according to court documents. In a proposed consent decree filed recently in U.S. District Court, subsidiaries of GenOn Energy, a Houston power company, agreed to settle lawsuits by Maryland and environmental groups alleging that the company's Brandywine, Faulkner and Westland coal-ash landfills have been polluting groundwater and nearby streams.

Claiming to help farmers, chicken-seller Perdue instead plans to pollute farmers, their families, farms, air, land, water, and food across Pennsylvania's Susquehanna Valley with toxic emissions from a proposed taxpayer-subsidized industrial soybean crushing factory. Lancaster's local newspapers report the factory would emit such a large quantity of the air pollutant hexane that the company would have to pay for the reduction of smog-producing gases elsewhere. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett has awarded $8.75 million from taxpayers to Perdue for designing this factory to dump hexane, a hazardous neurotoxin, into the air of food-growing and food-buying taxpayers across south-central Pennsylvania for decades known as the Garden Spot of America.

Two decades ago, when lawyer Robert Waldman and his family moved to the Annapolis neighborhood of Homewood, there was talk of converting the old railroad right-of-way across from his house into some kind of thruway. An extra lane to take the traffic pressure off West Street, which ran parallel several blocks away; a route for a shuttle bus from downtown Annapolis to Westfield Annapolis Mall - city officials were regularly talking about ways to pave the four-block long stretch of grass that bisected the old neighborhood of mixed-generation families.

Do I have to I clean up my hosta's leaves after they die? If the leaves are diseased, by all means remove them, since this is a basic principle of gardening sanitation and helps stop disease cycles. However, old collapsed leaves provide some winter protection around a plant's base as they decompose, and decayed leaves feed the plant - two good reasons to save yourself the trouble of removing them. Hosta leaves will virtually disappear by the time new leaves come up in the spring.

Mark Harvey, the Camden Yards and M&T Bank Stadium streaker, didn't get the same deal that Morganna Roberts, a stripper and exotic dancer who was known as "The Kissing Bandit," did in 1988, when she ran onto the field at Memorial Stadium and bussed Cal Ripken Jr. as he came up to bat. Harvey, 26, a Severn truck driver dressed in a Batman cape and underwear, took to the field at Camden Yards on Opening Day in April. In September, once again dressed in his Batman outfit, he jumping onto the field during the second quarter of the Ravens's game against the New England Patriots.

For years, Jeff Mikula collected United Way donations from his fellow steelworkers at Sparrows Point. On Thursday, he - and 500 former co-workers from the now-closed plant - stood in line to receive them. The Dundalk man, who worked as an ironman for nearly 39 years at the mill, said accepting boxes stuffed by volunteers with chicken roasters and fixings for Christmas dinner was hard for the steelworkers, who were once among the charity's most generous donors in Maryland. "You see the need; you see what people are going through, the heartache," said Mikula, 57. "Steelworkers are proud people.

The state Board of Public Works approved Wednesday a $75.2 million grant to help pay for upgrading Baltimore's Patapsco sewage treatment plant, Maryland's second largest. The facility, which can treat up to 63 million gallons daily from the city and parts of Anne Arundel and Howard counties, is in the process of improving its removal of nitrogen, one of the nutrients in sewage that can cause algae blooms and other water quality problems in the harbor and the Chesapeake Bay. Roughly half the project's $327.7 million cost is being paid for with grants from the state's Bay Restoration Fund, which draws revenues from the "flush fee" that every homeowner and business must pay. The city is putting up nearly $49 million, with the remainder coming from other loans and grants, according to the Maryland Department of the Environment.

Several hundred former Sparrows Point workers gathering late Monday afternoon for details of their steel mill's demise heard from union leaders that at least two groups had wanted to restart the plant but weren't given the chance. Joe Rosel, president of United Steelworkers Local 9477 in Sparrows Point, told the crowd that Sherman International, an iron and steel equipment supplier in Pittsburgh, wanted to operate the plant and tried to bid $150 million for it last week. "They were told they couldn't bid because the plant wasn't for sale anymore," Rosel said.