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Baltimore City State’s Attorney is calling for major changes in investigations of police misconduct. State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby pushes reforms for officer misconduct cases, including granting her office arrest powers. Do her proposals go too far or do they fix a broken justice system? Mosby wants the power to limit officers from choosing bench trials–after the strategy proved successful for the officers she charged in Freddie Gray’s death. It’s one of several changes the state’s attorney is asking for in police misconduct cases.

Marylanders are getting their first opportunity to cast ballots in early voting in the hotly contested presidential election between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump today. Turnout across the state has been high. About 95,000 people had voted across the state by 5 p.m. On the first day of early voting in 2012, 78,000 people cast ballots. In Baltimore, lines at some early voting centers took more than an hour to navigate. In Carroll and Howard counties, more than 50 voters were lined up outside some early voting centers before polls opened at 8 a.m. At one polling place...

On Oct. 20, Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby introduced a set of proposed policy reform proposals for investigating and prosecuting police misconduct. While Baltimore City Police Commissioner Kevin Davis said the department would study the proposals before making on a decision, the Fraternal Order of Police swiftly condemned the proposed changes. In response Mosby issued a vigorous defense of her proposals in an interview with the AFRO. The proposals, in short, would make it more difficult for defendants to receive a bench trial instead of a jury trial, something some of the officers in the Freddie Gray case did...

Voting machines that switch Republican votes to Democrats are being reported in Maryland. “When I first selected my candidate on the electronic machine, it would not put the ‘x’ on the candidate I chose — a Republican — but it would put the ‘x’ on the Democrat candidate above it,” Donna Hamilton said. “This happened multiple times with multiple selections. Every time my choice flipped from Republican to Democrat. Sometimes it required four or five tries to get the ‘x’ to stay on my real selection,” the Frederick, Md., resident said last week. Queen Anne County Sheriff Gary Hofmann said...

IMPORTANT: This information should not be downloaded using government equipment, read during duty time, sent to others using government equipment, or sent to anyone while in a government building because it involves election related activity. Congressman Hoyer has been an “unwavering advocate” for federal workers, union says WASHINGTON – The American Federation of Government Employees, the nation’s largest union of federal workers, has endorsed Rep. Steny Hoyer for re-election to Maryland’s 5th Congressional District.“Congressman Hoyer has been an unwavering advocate for federal government employees since he was first elected to Congress in 1981,” AFGE National President J. David Cox Sr. said.“Rep....

Pretty amazing If true

Republican Larry Hogan got some good news Friday when the Cook Political Report labeled his gubernatorial race against Democrat Anthony Brown as a toss-up. But polling aggregation site FiveThirtyEight is throwing cold water on Hogan's hopes that today's vote will be tight. In its final forecast for gubernatorial races, FiveThirtyEight projects Brown has a 94 percent chance of defeating Hogan. Based on polling averages, Brown is leading Hogan by 9.8 percent — a number that has increased by 0.1 percent since Monday, according to FiveThirtyEight. Nonetheless, Hogan has been projecting confidence as the campaign winds down, promoting a pro-business agenda....

Like most Americans, but unlike most of the other 434 members of the House of Representatives, Andy Harris pulls a lengthy commute to work each day. One way and without traffic, the Maryland Republican says he can go door to door in an hour and a half from his home in Cockeysville to his office on Capitol Hill. But if he hits traffic, it takes almost three hours just to get to work. Harris doesn’t mind. As a physician, he says he’s used to long hours in the operating room and, as a single father, the 60-mile trek is necessary...

The two major-party candidates running for Maryland's open U.S. Senate seat sparred Friday over their legislative records as well as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump as they took part in the first debate in the race to succeed retiring Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski. ... Szeliga, a Baltimore County lawmaker and the minority whip in the Maryland House of Delegates, said she lived on the minimum wage as a "maid, a waitress, a dishwasher" before starting a contracting firm with her husband. Szeliga, who opposes raising the $7.25-an-hour minimum wage, said low-wage earners are more interested in a career than a...

A Frederick doctor found dead in his office Sept. 30 shortly after being named in a federal indictment likely killed himself, according to city police. The Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner will determine an official cause and manner of death. However, Frederick police said their review of evidence from Dr. Sandeep Sherlekar’s office in the American Spine Center indicated the 51-year-old took his own life, said Sgt. Andrew Alcorn, a Frederick police Criminal Investigations Division supervisor. “We are ready to officially call it a suicide and we’re confident that the medical examiner’s office will determine the manner of...

Montgomery County Board of Education President Patricia O’Neill asked the county’s state legislators Wednesday if they could help eliminate tolls for county school buses that drive on the state-operated Intercounty Connector. A Montgomery County Public Schools spokeswoman said in an email Friday the school system spends nearly $18,000 per year on ICC tolls. Buses that typically use the ICC include those for cross-county special education routes and sports trips, according to spokeswoman Gboyinde Onijala. “It would help us a great deal to make a more efficient transportation system for the 100,000 students we transport every day if we could use...

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) has postponed funding a busway in the heavily congested Interstate 270 corridor for at least six years, significantly delaying a transit project that Montgomery County is relying on to develop the upcounty without making traffic worse. Hogan’s proposed six-year transportation budget includes no money for the Corridor Cities Transitway, which has been planned since at least 2000 to connect the Shady Grove Metro station at the end of the Red Line with the upcounty. The first nine-mile segment would run between Shady Grove and the Metropolitan Branch MARC commuter rail station in Gaithersburg. Delaying the...

Want a culturally appropriate costume this Halloween? This teen’s got an idea for you. Josh Welch, a 17-year-old from Silver Spring, Maryland, decided to dress as a thief for Culture Day at his high school earlier this week to make a statement about “white culture,” BuzzFeed first reported. “I consider myself a huge advocate for social justice, and I wanted to make a bold statement about ‘white culture,’” he told The Huffington Post Wednesday. “So I decided to use humor to get my point across, but I never imagined it could be this ubiquitous.”

The FBI has detained yet another Islamic immigrant named Mohamed for preparing a jihad attack. This time, the arrested Islamic immigrant is Nelash Mohamed Das, aged 24. He was born in Bangladesh and was living in Maryland. Since 2001, law-enforcement officials have arrested more than 101 people named for Islam’s reputed prophet, Muhammad. Many other Islamic immigrants, converts and citizens have launched deadly attacks against Americans in Orlando, Florida, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in San Bernardino, California, in Fort Hood, Texas, and in other places.

ROCKVILLE, Md. -- Montgomery County Public Schools will remove religious labels from school holidays, but members of the Islamic community say the adjustments to the school calendar do nothing to gain parity and a day off for the Muslim holiday of Eid.

Christmas and Easter have been stricken from next year’s school calendar in Montgomery County. So have Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. Montgomery’s Board of Education voted 7 to 1 Tuesday to eliminate references to all religious holidays on the published calendar for 2015-2016, a decision that followed a request from Muslim community leaders to give equal billing to the Muslim holy day of Eid al-Adha.

A Maryland man posing as a police officer turned his lights and sirens on behind a real police officer, officials said. John Vincent Angelini, 51, of Baltimore, was arrested Wednesday after Montgomery County police said he trailed an off-duty detective driving on the Intercounty Connector in an unmarked car. The detective was headed eastbound on the ICC near Georgia Avenue about 8:15 p.m. Wednesday when he saw a car alongside him. It was a Ford Crown Victoria that looked like an unmarked police car, police said. The driver of the Crown Victoria then slowed down so that he was behind...

For more than a decade, Suleiman Anwar Bengharsa has served as a Muslim cleric in Maryland, working as a prison chaplain and as an imam at mosques in Annapolis and outside Baltimore. He gave a two-week course in 2011 on Islamic teachings on marriage at the Islamic Society of Baltimore, where President Obama made a much-publicized visit this year. But in the last two years, Imam Bengharsa’s public pronouncements have taken a dark turn. On Facebook, he has openly endorsed the Islamic State, posted gruesome videos showing ISIS fighters beheading and burning alive their enemies and praised terrorist attacks overseas....

A few days ago it was reported the non-citizen alien who killed five people in a Washington State mall was a frequent voter. Last week a dead voter registration drive for Democrats was discovered in Colorado, this week it is Virginia. Strange how we never hear a single case of “republican voter fraud“…. (Via WFB) A Virginia Young Democrat working for a Democrat-aligned voter registration group got caught filing applications on behalf of dead people when he filed an application for a deceased World War II veteran who was known by a local clerk.

The mayor's comments were in response to a profile of Mosby in The New York Times Magazine in which she said the mayor disseminated false information about the investigation into Gray's death. In the story Mosby recalled "screaming" at Rawlings-Blake and blaming the riots on her. Mosby told the magazine that she called Rawlings-Blake during the riots in April of 2015 and screamed, "You have single-handedly caused what's happening in this city right now," before hanging up on the mayor. Rawlings-Blake on Wednesday said, "Am I to blame? No," adding, "you have to stand up, be in the big role...