Zaka Hossain

ANNAPOLIS - At Lewnes' Steakhouse one recent evening during Maryland's 90-day legislative session, magnums of high-end wines waited uncorked in a private dining room with the blinds drawn. As two Capital News Service reporters watched nearby, more than a dozen Maryland legislators headed up the stairs to a free, expensive meal courtesy of a prestigious lobbying firm whose clients have business before them.

Scanned death certificates containing handwritten text were processed using a Python script and Google Gemini to extract structured data, which reporters then verified against source records and analyzed in R. Reporters also compared Cheltenham coverage in The Baltimore Sun to the the Afro-American , which involved a computational text analysis of 1,030 articles. Visualizations were built in and Datawrapper .

Following an October community meeting that saw many attendees push back on proposed data center development, Prince George’s County has released a new report concluding that data centers will be welcomed in the county, but only under certain circumstances and with more community input. The 400-plus-page report proposes 14 recommendations, including one that calls on data centers to be steered toward industrial zones and away from populated areas.