Around Maryland

The Food and Drug Administration said at least 12 hospitalizations are probably linked to strawberries sold in grocery stores including Trader Joe’s and Walmart.

The World Health Organization’s top monkeypox expert said she doesn’t expect the hundreds of cases reported to date to turn into another pandemic, but acknowledged there are still many unknowns about the disease, including how exactly it’s spreading and whether the suspension of mass smallpox immunization decades ago may somehow be speeding its transmission.

A high school in Prince George’s County was placed on lockdown for nearly two hours Thursday afternoon when police received a call that a student had brought a gun on campus. After searching Fairmont Heights High School, county police said, officers found parts of a “ghost gun” — typically purchased as a kit, and a weapon without a serial number — in a classroom. The student who allegedly brought the gun parts to school was arrested, police said.

The Episcopal Diocese of Maryland has awarded $175,000 in grants to six community groups in its first distributions from a historic $1 million reparations fund. The diocese announced Thursday that it will present grants of up to $30,000 to groups dedicated to “restoring African American and Black communities.” Three of the winners are based in Baltimore and three in other areas of the state.

Herself not a licensed engineer, D’Andrea Walker is bringing in personnel that lack qualifications, critics say. County Executive Johnny Olszewski expresses “full support” for his public works chief. Increasingly over the past year, turnover of senior staff at Baltimore County’s Department of Public Works and Transportation has been raising eyebrows – so much so that when asked about it, one county insider responded, “Oh, you mean the mass exodus?

Baltimore County Chief Melissa Hyatt is addressing one of the complaints that the police union listed in a letter to the county executive calling for her removal. The FOP cited a recent police memorial service where the name of Tia Bynum was included as one of the reasons they want to see her fired.

March for Our Lives, the organization founded by survivors of the 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., is planning a June protest in D.C. in the wake of the nation’s latest school massacre. The organization urged people to march in Washington and in their communities to press elected officials to “step up and pass universal background checks,” after a gunman on Tuesday entered a fourth-grade classroom at a Texas elementary school and killed at least 19 children and two teachers.

Officials are asking anglers to look out for northern snakeheads in the Chesapeake Bay and Blackwater River, and offering monetary rewards. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources launched a new tagging program, in conjunction with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in an effort to monitor invasive northern snakeheads.