LAFAYETTE — The City-Parish Council voted down a zoning change 7-2 Tuesday that would have allowed Mello Joy Coffee to build a new corporate headquarters, distribution facility and coffee roasting plant on Moss Street.

The presence of that neighborhood is what many councilmen said drove their decision not to allow the zoning change.

SGPC again expands itself

The SGPC today promoted five employees as assistant secretaries and two as additional secretaries, making the mini parliament of the Sikhs top-heavy.

Avtar Singh today issued the promotion orders, which were his first order after becoming SGPC president for the third consecutive year. Interestingly, the SGPC had four full-fledged secretaries against one post during the tenure of Gurcharn Singh Tohra, who reigned the SGPC for 27 years. With the new promotions, the number of assistant secretaries and additional secretaries has risen to 15 and eight, respectively.

Though the SGPC chief has claimed that the promotions will not put any additional burden on the exchequer of the SGPC, insiders say the newly promoted employees will be entitled to use the additional facilities like telephone, official vehicle etc.

Ban on smoking becomes Md. law

Ellicott City resident Carole Fisher was also there. A cancer and tuberculosis survivor, Fisher was a smoker for 25 years before she stopped in the 1970s. But doctors told her that she paid the price for her smoking when an aggressive strain of tuberculosis left her fighting for her life in 1997.

"I didn't want my seven grandchildren to go through what I did," Fisher said, wearing a bright yellow "I'd [heart] a smoke-free Maryland" sticker on her lapel. "And now they won't have to deal with secondhand smoke. They can live a healthy life."

Jane McConnel, Paula Lawry and Janet Pfeffer, health advocates from Talbot County who have canvassed the state over the past five years convincing Howard and Prince George's officials to adopt similar bans, were front and center at the signing too.

Reference Review

Despite some minor lapses, there is a wealth of information here, without obvious bias and including varying perspectives, conveniently assembled and clearly organized, and with appropriate historical background. Although cross-references are extensive, there are some gaps, such as the lack of a direct connection between the Salafism article and the entries on al-Qaeda or Bin Laden (Jihadist Salafiyya's most prominent follower). Wahhabism, subsumed under Salafiyya, is underindexed. Neither the article on slavery (discussing links between Islam and enslaved African Americans) nor the index point to the actual brief discussion of Islamic law on slavery. The Druze and Sufism articles do not note wide Muslim persecution of such splinter groups (though information on Muslim-Muslim intolerance can be found elsewhere in the book).

The Coal Truth on Candidates

Research should continue; perhaps in the future a lower CO2 process will be found, leaving most of the carbon in a solid form. But we should hardly be rushing to rollout this "solution" at the present time.