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President Barack Obama will meet with Muslim community members this coming week in a public show of support. The White House says Obama plans to visit the Islamic Society of Baltimore on Wednesday and hold talks with Muslim community members. Obama has been outspoken in pushing back against calls by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and others to block Muslims from entering the U.S. over fears of domestic terrorism linked to extremist groups. ...

President Obama will make the first visit during his presidency to a U.S. mosque next week, the White House announced Saturday, as the administration tries to promote religious tolerance at a time when rhetoric linking Islam with terrorism is becoming more voluminous. On Wednesday the president will visit the Islamic Society of Baltimore, a sprawling community center in the the city’s western suburbs, that serves thousands of people with a place of worship, a housing complex and schools, (according to its website). It is one of the Mid-Atlantic region’s largest Muslim centers and describes itself as aspiring “to be the...

Koller, author of an impassioned anti-gun letter to the Baltimore Sun in 2013, slugged the armed robber in a Thursday night scuffle that ended with a gunshot tearing through her right shoulder, sources said. "I think it's random," said NYPD Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce of the perp's choice of targets.

On Thanksgiving night, Ben Carson sat in a chartered plane on a Baltimore airport tarmac surrounded by his wife and campaign advisers. The destination: Jordan. A secret mission to the Middle East, his team hoped, would help reestablish the retired neurosurgeon's credibility amid searing questions about his shaky grasp of foreign policy. The trip would be kept under wraps until Carson appeared on the Sunday news shows from the location -- partly a security measure, partly a political play. But as Carson and his team awaited takeoff, they were blindsided when The New York Times posted a story outlining the...

Every once in a while our society surprises me and that's what happened in Baltimore recently. When the first police officer in the Freddie Gray case went to court it ended in a mistrial. That was surprising enough in and of itself. I'm fairly sure that when the city, led by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and prosecutor Marilyn Mosby, decided to put the officers on trial they were fairly sure that any jury they seated would bring back a conviction. That's probably why they fought so hard against moving the case out to an area where they might find a slightly...

<p>BALTIMORE --Two Baltimore police officers were indicted Wednesday and a third officer received a criminal summons stemming from an assault reported a year ago, city police said Thursday.</p> <p>City police said the assault was reported to have taken place at Sinai Hospital on Jan. 14, 2015, involving three police officers and a juvenile.</p>

he jury in the trial of Baltimore Police Officer William G. Porter was one vote from acquitting him of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Freddie Gray, the most serious charge he faced, according to sources familiar with the deliberations. Judge Barry G. Williams declared a mistrial because the jury deadlocked on all four charges last month. Jurors were two votes from convicting Porter of misconduct in office, and more divided on charges of assault and reckless endangerment, sources said. How the jury voted was not publicly revealed, and the judge ruled that jurors' names should not be revealed.

In case you'd forgotten about Baltimore, here's a few stores from the past 12 hours: 3rd Teen Confessed To Stabbing Man Biking Home From WorkWoman shot in chest, neck in NW Baltimore Tuesday nightBaltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake calls killing of bicyclist 'tragic' Family, friends remember Baltimore stabbing victimNeighborhood activist grapples with son's alleged role in murder

Months after a hearing on sexual harassment at the Environmental Protection Agency, one of the House’s top government watchdogs has delivered on his promise to protect the youngest members of the federal workforce. The Federal Intern Protection Act, introduced by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), ranking member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, unanimously passed the House on Monday.

A Baltimore Sun columnist wrote in a Thursday op-ed that citizens who legally own firearms are more frightening than the criminals who use the weapons on the rough streets of her hometown. Tricia Bishop, deputy editorial page editor for the Baltimore paper, explained how billboards advertisements for guns and everyday Americans carrying them around made her sick. "I'm less afraid of the criminals wielding guns in Baltimore... than I am by those permitted gun owners," Bishop said. She says this because she believes as a middle-class white woman, she's shielded from her city's criminal element but, in her opinion, she's...

A Baltimore Sun columnist wrote in a Thursday op-ed that citizens who legally  own firearms are more frightening than the criminals who use the weapons on the  rough streets of her hometown.Tricia Bishop, deputy editorial page editor for the Baltimore paper,  explained how billboards advertisements for guns and everyday Americans carrying  them around made her sick.“I’m less afraid of the criminals wielding guns in Baltimore… than I am by  those permitted gun owners,” Bishop  said.She says this because she believes as a middle-class white woman, she’s  shielded from her city’s criminal element but, in her opinion, she’s not  protected from...

Blood was shed in Baltimore at an unprecedented pace in 2015, with mostly young, black men shot to death in a near-daily crush of violence. On a per-capita basis, the year was the deadliest ever in the city. The year's tally of 344 homicides was second only to the record 353 in 1993, when Baltimore had about 100,000 more residents. The killings were on pace with recent years in the early months of 2015 but skyrocketed after the unrest and rioting of late April. In five of the next eight months, killings topped 30 or 40 a month. Nearly 90...

Blood was shed in Baltimore at an unprecedented pace in 2015, with mostly young, black men shot to death in a near-daily crush of violence. On a per-capita basis, the year was the deadliest ever in the city. The year's tally of 344 homicides was second only to the record 353 in 1993, when Baltimore had about 100,000 more residents. The killings were on pace with recent years in the early months of 2015 but skyrocketed after the unrest and rioting of late April. In five of the next eight months, killings topped 30 or 40 a month. Nearly 90...

In the summer of 1966, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach warned that there would be riots by angry, poor minority residents in “30 or 40” American cities if Congress didn’t pass President Lyndon Johnson’s Model Cities antipoverty legislation. In the late 1960s, New York mayor John Lindsay used the fear of such rioting to expand welfare rolls dramatically at a time when the black male unemployment rate was about 4 percent. And in the 1980s, Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry articulated an explicitly racial version of collective bargaining—a threat that, without ample federal funds, urban activists would unleash wave after wave...

TOWSON, Md. (WJZ) -- The area around Dulaney Valley Road in Towson is briefly blocked off. Police say a group of teenagers began throwing rocks at officers near the Towson Town Center. It happened around 10 p.m. Saturday night. At least one officer was hit by a rock, but did not need medical attention. Dozens of officers responded to the scene. Police say no one was arrested. Cell phone video appears to show a teen wrestling with an officer, before being brought to the ground. It's unclear at this time what started the altercation. The area has since been reopened.

Black Lives Matter and other, related groups are still demanding that Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel step down well before his term expires. It appears that Emanuel did not release for over a year a police video showing the possibly unjustified shooting of criminal suspect Laquan McDonald. He apparently was too afraid of losing his reelection bid to another liberal--and expected that, as a former Obama confidant, he would be granted immunity from inner-city anger. Is liberal anger at the liberal Emanuel a new trend? Will populists one of these days go after the newly declared populist Hillary Clinton for her...

Hung jury. No one is sure what happens now Back when the death of Freddie Gray was a recent development and the riots were still paralyzing the city of Baltimore, it seemed to us that Marilyn Mosby was acting more like a political celebrity than she was like a prosecutor. When people riot and demand certain decisions by a prosecutor, the prosecutor is not supposed to take her marching orders from the rioters. She’s supposed to operate based on the evidence. So when Mosby charged six Baltimore cops in Gray’s death, it certainly appeared at the time like she was...

<p>An off-duty Baltimore cop shot and killed an armed robbery suspect who police say tried to rob the officer with what turned out to be a toy gun.</p> <p>The shooting Saturday at 1:30 a.m. on a block of homes decorated with Christmas lights in the Baltimore suburb of Linthicum Heights was being investigated by Anne Arundel County Police, Fox 45 reported. Police said, according to the the station, that the officer fired in self-defense. They identified the robbery suspect as 32-year-old Edel Moreland.</p>

**SNIP** Then consider this: Lead paint exposure is a widespread national problem, concentrated most heavily in the nation's low-income communities. And government efforts to remove lead paint from public and privately owned housing remains woefully below levels that most child and environmental health experts think truly necessary to eliminate the issue. In fact, the nation's lead paint abatement programs are among those that experienced a budget cut due to sequestration and subsequent federal cost reduction efforts. And that happened even though some public health experts believe that concerted national efforts to reduce widespread lead exposure - such as removing lead...

With all the frantic activity going on this week I didn’t get the opportunity to revisit the long running saga of the Freddie Gray trials, currently unfolding in the burned out remains of Charm City. As we previously discussed, Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby made the decision to not only move forward quickly with charges against six officers involved in Gray’s arrest, but got the trials started in almost breathtakingly short order. This week, the first trial against Officer William Porter (who faced some of the lightest charges) ended in a mistrial. The jury had come back to the judge...