Queen Anne’s County Library has been expanding efforts to get more services to incarcerated individuals at Queen Anne’s County Detention Center. This project, funded by an $11,000 grant from the Library Services and Technology Act. Since September 2023, when the first order was submitted, the library has delivered approximately 650 new books, replacing a large... Read more

A camper went up in flames Thursday morning in Chestertown. WBOC reports at approximately 4:45am, a fire broke out at 500 Double Creek Pt. Road. The incident was described as a fire in a “30′ aluminum camper with attached living quarters”. According to state fire officials, the fire, which was discovered by the owner, took... Read more

Three out-of-state men were charged by the Chestertown Police Department for the theft of Pride flags and other rainbow-themed items taken from the Emmanuel Church on Cross Street during the weekend of the Juneteenth celebration, June 15, 16. The Kent County News reports in all, nine victims of theft were identified. The crimes occurred on... Read more

In Rock Hall, Ferry Park Beach Boardwalk will be closed Monday, July 29th through Thursday, August 1st (daytime only) for the Boardwalk to be replaced thanks to the Parks & Recreation Beach Grant from 2021. If you have any questions, please call the Town Office at 410-639-7611.

A man is charged in Queen Anne’s County with driving under the influence. Authorities say 43 year old Steven Lunczynski was pulled over late at night on July 18th for failing to maintain his lane. The deputy who made the stop detected alcohol on the driver’s break and administered a field sobriety test, which he... Read more

Heron Point’s riverfront garden has met the criteria of a Certified Wildlife Habitat® as established by the National Wildlife Federation. The Evening Enterprise reports the area has been transformed into a sustainable native garden that supports a variety of wildlife, including birds, butterflies, bees and frogs. According to a news release, the National Wildlife Federation... Read more

The Queen Anne’s County Commissioners voted 3-2 to approve “re-including” 101 acres of property on Piney Creek Road owned by Chesterhaven Beach Partnership, LLP back into the Chester Growth Area. The Bay Times & Record Observer reports Chesterhaven Beach Partnership, LLP submitted a Reconsideration Comprehensive Rezoning Request to add to the Chester Growth Area and... Read more

Queen Anne’s County has now accumulated upwards of 90,000 acres of preserved agricultural land, pending the settlement of an additional 1,830 acres. County Commissioners have made land preservation a top priority in recent years, dedicating over $1 million this year to the Maryland Agricultural Land Preservation Foundation program, which, after the state match, resulted in... Read more

A Chestertown pediatrician surrendered his license to practice in Maryland. The Kent County News reports Julio Ramirez, formerly head of his private practice at 6602 Church Hill Road in Chestertown, is being sued by a Kent County woman seeking relief from the court for physical, psychological and emotional injuries she said she incurred while seeking... Read more

Schools across Queen Anne’s County Public Schools have raised more than $16,000 during recent fundraising efforts for the American Heart Association. Seven schools took part in the efforts including Kent Island Elementary School, Bayside Elementary School, Centreville Elementary School, Grasonville Elementary School, Kennard Elementary School, Centreville Middle School and Sudlersville Middle School.

By Helen Coster, Alexandra Ulmer and David Morgan

(Reuters) – Republican nominee Donald Trump has called her “crazy,” “nuts” and “dumb as a rock.” Republicans in Congress disparage her as a diversity hire. Right-wing activists and trolls have smeared her online with racist, sexist and sexualized barbs.

The attacks on Kamala Harris, the first woman and first Black and South Asian person to serve as U.S. vice president, have intensified in the days since she consolidated support to become Democrats’ likely presidential nominee.

The demeaning racist and sexist attacks threaten to distract from the Republican Party’s concerted effort to focus on Harris’ policies. Trump allies, including some members of the “Black Americans for Trump” coalition, warn that disparaging Harris could hurt him in his outreach to Black voters, a crucial demographic in the Nov. 5 presidential election.

In interviews with nine Republican lawmakers and 11 Black Republican women who back Trump, eight said personal attacks on Harris should be avoided. While guarded in their comments and emphasizing their continued support for Trump, several expressed worry over the tenor of the attacks and whether the onslaught could harm Republicans at the ballot box.

“I think there is a way to critique her without going underneath her clothes,” said P Rae Easley, a Black conservative radio show host in Chicago and a member of the “Black Americans for Trump” coalition, a loosely organized group of Black allies backing Trump.

Several members of Congress echoed her sentiments.

“I’m going to oppose Vice President Harris because of what she’s done, not who she is,” said Representative Dusty Johnson, who chairs the 75-member Republican Main Street Caucus. “Some of this ugliness is unbecoming of a great country.”

Others said the attacks on Harris’ personal life were no different than Democrats attacking Trump over his personal and family life.

“It’s a nasty fight. Democrats have a tendency to play victim,” said Madgie Nicolas, co-chair of Haitians for Trump and the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s national director of African American voices.

The tension suggests Trump campaign efforts to tie Harris to President Joe Biden’s record – particularly on immigration, crime and the economy – risk being overshadowed by personal attacks that show no signs of slowing.

“Going after Kamala Harris as a ‘DEI hire’ is breathtakingly stupid,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres, who has worked on campaigns for U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and others. “It’s going to backfire,” Ayres said, adding that Harris had an “incredible array of far left-wing policies” that could be targeted.

DEI stands for “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives aimed at increasing representation of women and people of color in the workforce to address longstanding inequities and discrimination. The term “DEI hire” is now used to suggest a person is not qualified for their role and has been chosen on the basis of their race or gender.

Ayres said the disparaging rhetoric would alienate women and “anyone who isn’t far-right.”

The Trump campaign did not directly respond to questions about whether it had discussed trying to tone down personal attacks on Harris.

Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric has emboldened people with racist beliefs to express them, according to rhetoric experts, critics and past public opinion polling.

The former president has a history of attacking political opponents, including other Black women in power such as Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is prosecuting his election interference case in Georgia, and U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, the judge assigned to the federal case against him for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

At a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday, Trump did not go after Harris on gender or racial grounds. Instead, he painted a potential Harris presidency in apocalyptic terms.

“She is a radical left lunatic who will destroy our country,” Trump said.

Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said voters would reject Harris not because of her race and gender, but because of her failed policies.

A spokesperson for Harris, whose nascent campaign has generated a groundswell of grassroots fundraising and activism, said she is staying focused on her work.

“These attacks are backfiring and even Republicans know it,” said Sarafina Chitika.

LEWD COMMENTS

Online attacks against Harris were ramping up even before Biden dropped out on Sunday, according to researchers and a Reuters review of posts on the X platform, although exact data is hard to come by.

Some of the recent posts refer to sexual acts and speak of Harris’ past relationships in lewd terms. Others disparage her for not having biological children, echoing a comment Trump running mate JD Vance made in 2021, when he criticized Harris and other Democrats as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives.”

Harris has two stepchildren with her husband, lawyer Doug Emhoff. Emhoff’s ex-wife on Wednesday called such attacks “baseless” and described Harris as a “loving, nurturing, fiercely protective” co-parent.

Disinformation researchers say the online attacks do not appear to be coming from a specific epicenter and are now so prevalent that most accounts are merely “amplifiers” of already-existing narratives.

U.S. Representative Michael Cloud, a member of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, defended Republicans who have disparaged Harris as a “DEI hire.”

“Those were Biden’s words, actually,” Cloud said.

Biden has not called Harris a “DEI hire.” At a campaign appearance with Harris in May, he spoke of the values of DEI and having a diverse administration. “And it starts at the top with the vice president,” Biden said.

Trump has nicknamed Harris “Laffin’ Kamala,” mocking her laugh, and “Lyin’ Kamala,” claiming she tried to hide Biden’s aging from the public. At a Sunday rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the former president called her “crazy” and “nuts.”

Kelly Dittmar, a political science professor at Rutgers University, said the nicknames appeared to be playing into stereotypes about women’s voices and emotions, as well as seeking to emulate African American pronunciation.

“The actual laughing and cackling goes back to tropes about not wanting to hear women’s voices,” Dittmar said. “It’s not the laugh itself. It’s to characterize her as annoying. I think the nicknames are trying to cue the fact she’s Black.”

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, who attended a closed-door meeting this week where party leaders urged members to concentrate on policy issues, told Reuters on Thursday that he had not spoken to Trump or the Trump campaign about how to message regarding Harris.

“This campaign will be about policies,” Johnson said. “And I think everybody will be discussing that in detail, and I think we’ll win on that basis.” 

Easley, the radio show host, said she suggested to Trump campaign officials they engage Black allies more to counter Harris “without the veil of racism being attached to it.”

She and several other Black Republican women who spoke to Reuters said they did not like the personal attacks, with some noting their own experiences confronting higher standards and expectations as Black women, or having their qualifications questioned.

“As a Black woman myself, I don’t appreciate when people start saying because of the color of your skin, that makes you a DEI hire. I don’t think that’s fair to anyone,” said Corrin Rankin, vice chair of the California Republican Party, who said she met Harris when they both worked in San Francisco.

However, Rankin said she felt Biden’s vow to pick a woman or person of color as his running mate in 2020 had allowed that term to take hold.

Other Trump allies warned that his attacks could alienate some voters.

“I am hoping that his advisers will encourage Trump to pull it back,” said Camilla Moore, chair of the Georgia Black Republican Council. “Because it could hurt in the long run.”

(Reporting by Helen Coster, Alexandra Ulmer and David Morgan; Additional reporting by Stephanie Kelly and James Oliphant; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Daniel Wallis)

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MEXICO CITY (AP) — A new era is coming for Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel in the wake of the capture by U.S. authorities of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the last of the grand old Mexican drug traffickers.

Experts believe his arrest will usher in a new wave of violence in Mexico even as Zambada could potentially provide loads of information for U.S. prosecutors.

Zambada, who had eluded authorities for decades and had never set foot in prison, was known for being an astute operator, skilled at corrupting officials and having an ability to negotiate with everyone, including rivals.

Removing him from the criminal landscape could set off an internal war for control of the cartel that has a global reach — as has occurred with the arrest or killings of other kingpins — and open the door to the more violent inclinations of a younger generation of Sinaloa traffickers, experts say.

With that in mind, the Mexican government deployed 200 members of its special forces Friday to Culiacan, Sinaloa state’s capital.

There is “significant potential for high escalation of violence across Mexico,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow in the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Brookings Institution. That “is bad for Mexico, it’s bad for the United States, as well as the possibility that the even more vicious (Jalisco New Generation cartel) will rise to even greater importance.”

For that reason, Zambada’s arrest could be considered a “great tactical success,” but strategically problematic, Felbab-Brown said.

While details remain scarce, a United States official who spoke on condition of anonymity said Zambada was tricked into flying to the U.S., where he was arrested along with Joaquín Guzmán López, a son of the infamous Sinaloa leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. The elder Guzmán is serving a life sentence in the United States.

A small plane left Hermosillo in northern Mexico on Thursday morning with only an American pilot aboard, bound for the airport in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, near El Paso, Texas. Mexican Security Secretary Rosa Icela Rodríguez said Friday that while one person left Hermosillo, three people arrived in New Mexico.

The flight tracking site Flight Aware showed the plane stopped transmitting its elevation and speed for about half an hour over the mountains of northern Mexico before resuming its course to the U.S.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a vocal critic of the strategy of taking down drug kingpins, said Friday that Mexico had not participated or known about the U.S. operation, but said he considered the arrests an “advance.”

Later, López Obrador, while talking about where the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels are battling for control of smuggling routes along the Guatemala border on Friday, downplayed the violence that had driven nearly 600 Mexicans to seek refuge in Guatemala this week.

He said, as he often has, that it’s his political adversaries who are trying to make Mexico’s violence appear to be out of control. But those cartels were already fighting each other in many locations throughout Mexico before Zambada’s arrest.

Frank Pérez, a lawyer for Zambada, told The Associated Press that his client “did not come to the U.S. voluntarily.”

It appeared the sons of “El Chapo” Guzmán were somehow in on the trap for Zambada, said José Reveles, author of a number of books about the cartels. The so-called Chapitos, or Little Chapos, make up a faction within the Sinaloa cartel that was often at odds with Zambada even while trafficking drugs.

Guzmán López, who was also arrested Thursday, “is not his friend nor his collaborator,” Reveles said.

He is considered to be the least influential of the four brothers who make up the Chapitos, who are considered among the main exporters of the synthetic opioid fentanyl to the United States. Joaquín Guzmán López is now the second of them to land in U.S. custody. Their chief of security was arrested by Mexican authorities in November.

Guzmán López has been accused of being the cartel’s link for importing the precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl from Asia and for setting up the labs that produce the drug, Reveles said.

Anne Milgram, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration chief, said that Zambada’s arrest “strikes at the heart of the cartel that is responsible for the majority of drugs, including fentanyl and methamphetamine, killing Americans from coast to coast.”

During the current Mexican administration, which ends Sept. 30, Mexico has been unable to control the country’s violence. López Obrador’s decision to focus on alleviating what he sees as the root causes of violence instead of head-on confrontation with the cartels has caused tensions with the U.S. authorities, in particular the DEA.

Felbab-Brown said it has also allowed the cartels to accumulate power that “is unprecedented in Mexico’s history.”

Zambada could now offer reams of information about the cartel’s operations if he decides to cooperate. He faces charges in multiple U.S. federal courts.

He was the cartel’s most skilled agent of corruption and the most influential trafficker who “has been running extensive corruption networks across many administrations in Mexico, across vast geographic spaces, from the top of the Mexican government to municipal institutions,” Felbab-Brown said.

“The most important thing to watch is how much intelligence El Mayo will now provide and how much evidence in exchange for better terms,” she said.

___

Durkin Richer reported from Washington. Associated Press journalists Christopher Sherman, Alexis Triboulard and Martín Silva in Mexico City contributed to this story.

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