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The federal racketeering and drug charges unveiled this week against 25 inmates and guards at the Baltimore City Detention Center raise serious questions about the state's management of the facility. Investigators detailed a pattern of corruption and criminal behavior that was so widespread that for much of the last few years, the inmates were literally running the asylum. It will take drastic action to root out the crooked corrections officers and incompetent higher-ups responsible for this debacle, but that's only a start.

Let us beat the gun-rights crowd to the punch and agree with them right here and now that firearms aren't the only dangerous devices out there in dire need of greater regulation. It seems that certain types of fireworks may need to be added to that list, too. For those who aren't up on the latest word from the Boston Marathon bombing investigation, it appears some or all of the gunpowder allegedly used in the manufacture of bombs by Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev came from fireworks.

Lawmakers in Annapolis rejected a bill this year that would have decriminalized the possession of small amounts of marijuana, but prosecutors in Baltimore City are already ahead of the curve in treating the offense as a public health issue rather than as a crime. This is the beginning of a sane policy on marijuana that one can only hope city officials will seek to expand in coming years. When the idea of treating drug abuse as a medical problem rather than as a criminal justice issue was proposed in the late 1980s by former Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, critics dismissed the suggestion as not only dangerously naive and impractical but as morally and ethically wrong.

Imagine you are a benevolent monarch and you have the power to institute a sales tax. (Even benevolent government has to be financed, after all.) Would you set one up that gave preference to sellers located outside your kingdom and penalized your own subjects? Would you go further and discourage those outsiders from even setting up shop in your country? Of course you wouldn't. That would be crazy. And while there are plenty of examples of insane heads of state, they aren't usually beloved by their people.

A 19-year-old naturalized American citizen is accused of committing a crime of violence in the United States, and a gaggle of elected officials are urging for him to be treated as an enemy combatant and placed in the hands of the military. Not just the usual right-wing suspects but Rep. Peter King, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. John McCain are leading the chorus. Thankfully, President Barack Obama did not listen, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was charged in his hospital bed today by federal officials with using a weapon of mass destruction and malicious destruction of property.

In Baltimore County, like much of Maryland, tax revenues have flat-lined. State aid for such things as road resurfacing is not much better. County workers won't be receiving cost-of-living increases for the fifth year in a row. Yet amid all this austerity, Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz last week proposed a budget that finances new schools and retrofits many others with air conditioning. There are millions of dollars for new school security systems, for a new family resource center on the east side of the county and for new technology for police.

The case of a small painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir stolen from the Baltimore Museum of Art decades ago took an unexpected turn recently when new questions were raised about a woman's claim that she bought it at a flea market. The holes in her story should cement the BMA's legal efforts to reclaim its property after all these years, but the strange tale also throws a fascinating light on the pitfalls that inevitably arise in any dealings with artworks of mysterious provenance.

In Your House was a two-hour show that premiered in May 1995 that was designed to give WWE a monthly pay-per-view event. With it being shorter than the traditional three-hour offerings, as well as every IYH event having the same look and feel (at least in the beginning, anyway), you would think that they would be treated as, and perceived to be, second-rate WWE pay-pew-view events. But there were many diamonds in the rough at these events. Shawn Michaels, for example, had many memorable and career-defining matches at In Your House.

If there were any remaining doubts that what the CIA did to captured terrorist suspects in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was torture, a report last week by an independent investigative panel should put them to rest. According to the report by the Constitution Project, an independent legal research and advocacy group in Washington, not only did the Bush administration indisputably engage in torturing prisoners to extract information, a practice banned by both U.S. and international law, but the nation's highest officials knew about the abuses and condoned them.

We are all Boston. It's something we said on Monday, when we were at a loss for words to describe our shared sorrow and horror at the marathon bombings, when we knew no other way to express our solidarity with a city reeling from terrible loss. Four days later, it is something we said as we cheered along with all those gathered on a quiet street in Watertown as police captured the second suspect in the bombings alive, put him in a squad car and drove away. We say it now out of pride for a city that responded to tragedy in a way we all hope we would and brought a terrifying week to a close with a professionalism and dignity that represents the best in us all. We now know just enough details about the two men believed to be responsible for the bombings to invite speculation about what could have led them to commit such a terrible act. The older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was a promising amateur boxer who experienced troubles in this country.