NEWS
By Robert Koulish and Mark Noferi | February 20, 2013
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security now incarcerates, via immigration detention, more people per year than any other state or federal agency. In 2012, the DHS detained over 429,000 noncitizens awaiting immigration hearings or deportation, at a $2 billion cost to taxpayers. Yet the DHS' new risk assessment technology, which comprehensively and individually assesses immigrant detainees and collects valuable data, makes it possible for Congress to improve detention practices while reforming broader U.S. immigration laws.
EXPLORE
May 15, 2012
It's Armed Forces Day dear readers. Saturday is also the running of the 137th Preakness, part of the Triple Crown. After the Kentucky Derby, now Maryland gets to shine. Lots of hoopla and black-eyed Susans will be the fare at the Pimlico Racetrack. Regretfully, Havre de Grace lost out of this and many other races, when the famous Havre de Grace Racetrack, nicknamed "The Graw" on Old Bay Lane, closed in 1950, and its races were transferred to Pimlico. Much of our ol' racetrack still stands on the grounds of the Maryland National Guard.
NEWS
By Timothy B. Wheeler, The Baltimore Sun | October 7, 2011
A panel of independent scientists has found flaws in the Army's planning to shield workers and the public from harm from a proposed biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick in Frederick. The seven-member committee assembled by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that the risk assessment being done by an Army contractor is "not sufficiently robust" to help design a facility that will reduce potential hazards. The $584 million, 492,000-square-foot Medical Countermeasures Test and Evaluation Facility would develop and test vaccines and drugs to prevent or treat infectious diseases.
FEATURES
By Timothy B. Wheeler, The Baltimore Sun | May 23, 2011
A new environmental study has found people and wildlife face higher-than-normal health risks from long-term exposure to toxic contaminants in the Patapsco River near Sparrows Point, the legacy of pollution from more than a century of steel-making on the outskirts of Baltimore's harbor. The risk assessment commissioned by the Maryland Port Administration determined that people who swam their whole lifetime in the waters off the Coke Point area of Sparrows Point would be two to five times more likely to develop cancers or other health problems as people who did the same elsewhere in the harbor.
NEWS
By PETER HERMANN | September 20, 2009
I had hoped that a video of a juvenile court hearing would help explain how a teenager with a long criminal record who had just been arrested in a drug bust could be sent home from a detention center only to be charged with killing a man two hours later in the front seat of a Buick Park Avenue. Unfortunately, what I saw not only fails to explain why state officials freed 17-year-old Maurice Brown, but it raises new questions about the case, while revealing proposed procedural changes that would make it easier for more young offenders to avoid detention.
NEWS
By New York Times News Service | September 2, 2008
When the Food and Drug Administration approved a new type of cholesterol-lowering medicine in 2002, it did so on the basis of a handful of clinical trials covering a total of 3,900 patients. None of the patients took the medicine for more than 12 weeks, and the trials offered no evidence that it had reduced heart attacks or cardiovascular disease, the goal of any cholesterol drug. The lack of evidence has not stopped doctors from heavily prescribing that drug, whether in a stand-alone form sold as Zetia or as a combination medicine called Vytorin.