A Donald Trump campaign bus rolled into Maryland Thursday in a visit organized by the Black Conservative Federation. The bus visited Northwood Plaza. The group said it’s committed to getting former President Trump back in the White House. “Yes, we do support Trump. Why? We feel like his policies worked when he was in office in 2016,” said Brenda Thiam with the BCF. “I am a graduate of an HBCU, and he worked hard with the presidents of HBCUs to bring them funding.”

A year ago, the annual dinner of the group Progressive Maryland turned into an impromptu pep rally for U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-8th), who was the keynote speaker. Raskin had already said he wasn’t going to run for Senate in 2024, but many of the activists at the dinner tried to persuade him to change his mind, with chants of “Run, Jamie, Run!”

Nearly two years after fumbling more than $10 million in federal homeless services funds, officials have approved Baltimore’s request to recoup much of the lost money. Mayor Brandon Scott told reporters last week that officials with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development informed City Hall that it had approved the request to get reimbursed for more than $6 million in grant funds the city received in the 2020 fiscal year — money the city had forfeited after blowing a deadline to send in the reimbursement forms.

 

Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown joined a bipartisan coalition of 41 attorneys general in a letter urging Congress to require warning labels on social media sites, saying that the addictive nature of endless scrolling and content algorithms pose mental health risks to adolescents. “Every day, our youth are turning to social media platforms that, unknowingly to them, are designed to exploit their vulnerabilities and push them deeper into cycles of anxiety, depression, and self-doubt,” Brown said in a statement Wednesday.

The landlord of a federally subsidized Baltimore County glove factory that never opened is trying to recoup $1.3 million, according to recent court filings. Tradepoint Atlantic filed a lien against United Safety Technology last month, court records show. It followed up with a complaint alleging the proposed glove manufacturer has not been paying rent.

 

Buildings have been demolished, the design for a new train station has been released — Amtrak’s future Frederick Douglass Tunnel project is already making West Baltimore look different. But residents are urging city leaders to do what they can to pump the brakes on it until a civil rights investigation plays out. The federally subsidized passenger rail company has won billions in federal grant dollars to replace the current Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel, which is more than 150 years old.

Given Baltimore’s long-standing problems with drug abuse — including suffering one of the highest overdose death rates of any city in the nation — it is not customary to read about hopeful developments in this arena. Yet, in recent weeks, there has been reason for at least some degree of optimism. Lawsuits filed against manufacturers and distributors of opioids, the chief culprit in these untimely city deaths, have one by one resulted in substantial financial settlements.

Greater Baltimore’s hiring outlook is slumping with the rest of the country’s, but one industry is standing strong amid the slowdown. The Baltimore metro’s overall hiring picture is the third worst among 55 U.S. metro areas with a population of at least 1 million, according to new data from payroll giant ADP, which identified the nation’s hottest hiring markets based on pay growth, starting wages and hiring rate for 15 million workers.

SpaceX pulled off its first spacewalk in the early hours of Thursday morning, in a historic first for a company. The marquee event of the private Polaris Dawn mission went smoothly, with two of the crew members — Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis — stepping outside of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule “Resilience.” It’s the first time civilians, and not government astronauts, have performed a spacewalk.

U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-8th), whose personal life and political career were incalculably upended by his son’s suicide, is introducing his first major mental health and suicide prevention legislation since Tommy Raskin died on Dec. 31, 2020, at the age of 25. The Stabilization To Prevent (STOP) Suicide Act would create a grant program at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to expand the use of evidence-based models for stabilizing individuals with serious thoughts of suicide.