Free Republic

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has suspended all city-sponsored travel to North Carolina and Mississippi due to the states’ new transgender laws. Rawlings-Blake made the announcement Tuesday in a letter to city officials, saying she hopes the city’s efforts combined with those of other governments and companies “will push North Carolina and Mississippi” to change. …

BALTIMORE — Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders used a campaign stop Saturday in this economically challenged city to decry the difference between the life expectancies of the nation’s rich and poor, declaring that “poverty is a death sentence.” “If you are born in Baltimore’s poorest neighborhood, your life expectancy is almost 20 years shorter than if you’re born in its wealthiest neighborhood,” the senator from Vermont said, adding that “15 neighborhoods in Baltimore have lower life expectancies than North Korea. Two of them have a higher infant mortality rate than Palestine's West Bank.” Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, promised an...

A man has pleaded guilty to setting a liquor store on fire during riots that rocked Baltimore last year in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death after he was injured in police custody. The U.S. attorney’s office says in a news release that 22-year-old Darius Stewart of Baltimore pleaded guilty Monday to malicious destruction of property by fire in federal court in Baltimore. …

Bernie Sanders says conditions in Baltimore no better than North Korea, West Bank By Linda Qiu on Thursday, April 28th, 2016 at 5:06 p.m. Residents of some Baltimore neighborhoods are no better off than people living in impoverished North Korea and the violent West Bank, Bernie Sanders said during a campaign rally in Maryland ahead of that state’s primary. "Poverty in Baltimore, and around this country — poverty is a death sentence," Sanders said April 24. He then laid out some rather unflattering and harsh comparisons: "Fifteen neighborhoods in Baltimore have lower life expectancies than North Korea. Two of them...

Much of Baltimore's unrest a year ago was rooted in socioeconomic conditions of the city. The Justice Policy Institute examined some of those issues in a 2015 report called "The Right Investment? Corrections Spending in Baltimore City." The report listed indicators of lost opportunities for the communities surveyed: unemployment and commute time, income and public assistance, educational attainment, public safety, housing, physical health and addiction. The report finds that the same neighborhood had the highest rate of emergency narcotic calls to 911 with nearly one narcotic call made for every two people, compared to other neighborhoods in Baltimore. Sandtown-Winchester/Harlem Park...

A contractor who threatened to set off a bomb at the headquarters of Fox 45 Baltimore Thursday afternoon, forcing police to evacuate the building, walked outside before a sniper shot him as cameras rolled. A bomb robot scanned him for nearly an hour before police removed his clothing, picked him up and carried him into an armored van. Crews transferred him to an ambulance minutes later. His condition was unclear.

BALTIMORE (WBFF) -- A man wearing some sort of animal "onesie" threatening to "blow-up" WBFF-TV was shot by police Monday outside of the station. Three loud "shots" were heard and the man was see lying in the street. The suspect's condition was not immediately known. The man broke into the Sinclair-owned Fox affiliate at about 2 p.m. demanding the news station cover a story about some sort of government conspiracy. The building was evacuated. Outside, a dark colored sedan was burning from its gas tanks. Fire crews responded and extinguished a fire which appeared to have been set in the...

A Baltimore TV station has been evacuated following a bomb threat. Police said they were investigating reports a man dressed as a panda was inside the Fox 45 offices on the city's TV Hill, claiming to have an explosive strapped to his chest. Pictures taken from the outside show the individual wearing a white onesie and black ears.

BALTIMORE (WBFF) -- The FOX45 offices on W 41st Street were evacuated Thursday afternoon after a threat was received at the building. Fire crews responded and extinguished a fire which appeared to have been set in the gas tank of a vehicle parked in the station lot

BALTIMORE - The immense new CVS dominates the corner of Pennsylvania and West North avenues. It's a contrast that shows what's changed and what hasn't in the past year, since Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man, died of injuries sustained in police custody, unleashing days of protests. But if 2015's protests emphasized police brutality and race relations, the absence of more stores like CVS that are easily accessible to people in impoverished, predominantly black neighborhoods underscores Baltimore's other persistent inequities. Scarcity defines life in Sandtown-Winchester, the 72-block neighborhood where Gray lived for part of his life. Its roughly 9,000 residents...

Some Baltimore residents who expected to work for state Sen. Catherine Pugh’s mayoral campaign Tuesday instead damaged vehicles outside of her campaign headquarters after being told there were no jobs available. A spokesman for Pugh’s campaign called it a misunderstanding. Anthony McCarthy, the spokesman, said Pugh decided “they will be paid” regardless. A crowd of about 100 people lined the block outside Sandi’s Learning Center on North Ellamont Street, many of them saying they were promised election day jobs. About a dozen police officers were on the scene and two security guards were at the door. Police said they responded...

On Capitol Hill, Representative Chris Van Hollen is, literally and figuratively, a Democratic fair-haired boy. An American son of diplomats born while his parents served in Pakistan, he has used his fund-raising savvy, policy smarts and easy manner to position himself, party elders assumed, as a potential Democratic speaker of the House. Instead, Mr. Van Hollen, now running for the Senate in his home state of Maryland, is fighting for his survival in an identity politics primary that raises an explosive question: Should a white man, or a black woman, inherit the seat held for 30 years by Barbara A....

Just one day ahead of the anniversary of the worst riot Baltimore had seen in more than 40 years, its residents will head to the polls to determine who will lead the city for the next four years. […] Shortly after the April 27, 2015, unrest, Democratic Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake instituted a mandatory 10 p.m. curfew. Four months later, she announced she wouldn’t seek re-election. The open race attracted a flood of hopefuls declaring their candidacy; before the Feb. 3 deadline passed, 13 Democrats jumped into the primary. The two most politically entrenched candidates emerged as front-runners: Sheila Dixon, who...

The city of Baltimore worked to tear down thousands of homes on Monday in an effort to lift itself out of decades of urban decay. The city and state are paying millions for demolition in the hope that, one day, developers will see vacant lots as a land of opportunity.

They work for the government and even their closest relatives have no idea what they do. It’s not because they’re spies or nuclear scientists, but because their jobs are so arcane: trying to reinvent Medicare to improve it, and maybe save taxpayers money. In a sprawling, nondescript office park near Baltimore, some 360 people at the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation are trying to change the health care system, using the government’s premier insurance program as leverage. If they prevail, the U.S. may no longer have the worst of both worlds: unsustainable spending and unenviable results. […] Because the...

Dozens of people marched Saturday in Baltimore to mark the anniversary of the death of Freddie Gray. Sharon Black, an organizer with the Peoples Power Assembly, the group that planned the march, said the marchers don’t believe anything has changed for the better in Baltimore since Gray’s death. Black says “deep-seated anger” remains in the community a year later. …

Many of the exact same groups that participated in Occupy Wall Street and helped organize protest rallies in Ferguson and Baltimore are now promising to bring us “the largest civil disobedience actions in a generation”. I recently wrote about the trouble that radical leftists have caused by attempting to disrupt Trump campaign events, but now there is a very organized effort to turn this into a national movement. On March 19th, thousands of angry protesters will descend on Trump Tower in New York City to denounce Donald Trump’s “fascist policies”, and on April 2nd dozens of leftist organizations will join...

Is the Obama administration, or at least some officials in it, hostile toward whites? This is certainly an awkward, publicly unspeakable question -- and answering it is exceptionally difficult. Not easy to discern the motives of countless Washington bureaucrats.  Nevertheless, recent events outside of Baltimore, MD suggest that enmity toward whites does afflict some Obama administrators and our proof, though short of the smoking gun standard, is probably as good as it gets.  In a nutshell, thanks to Washington’s money and political pressure, thousands of poor blacks will now be re-located from Baltimore’s slums to upgraded housing in the surrounding,...

BALTIMORE, MD (WJZ/CNN) - Some people want police to explain the fatal shooting of a father and son. Officers fired 56 shots at Kimani Johnson and Matthews Wood Jr., who police claimed may have planned a mass shooting. Their family said the police's story doesn't add up. "Boom, boom, boom, 56 shots, That's an overkill," said Mary Scott Harper, who has two children with Wood. She says the 43-year-old was in fear for his life because of an ongoing dispute when three officers spotted him and his 18-year-old son with two loaded guns in East Baltimore on Thursday. "He was...

Late at night this month, the pastor’s phone beeped with a text message from an anguished parishioner. Andre Taylor, the church member’s great-nephew, had been shot and killed. “Dre had just turned 16,” the message on the Rev. Ira Acree’s phone read. “I think that it’s time to call for action and solicit help, have the National Guard to take over and patrol the Chicago streets.” Four days earlier, another text had appeared. A different parishioner’s granddaughter, Daysha Wright, a 21-year-old nursing student, had been shot to death in a car, leaving a 2-year-old son. At his desk at Greater...