Free Republic

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...

A couple of good old boys in Maryland decided they would let some of the Black Lives Matters protesters in Hagerstown, Maryland know what they think of their protests. So, one followed the other's truck, which was a diesel truck and they proceeded to spew black exhaust smoke across the entire group of protesters. Check out the video below, which was originally uploaded by Aaron Gettel and then reposted by a protest supporter, Lawrence Marley Hester. Fast forward to the 1:20 mark.

LANHAM, Md. — The Prince George’s County Public School system has been rocked by allegations of abused students and teacher misconduct. But the scene Wednesday was celebratory as students, teachers and school officials at two schools came together to honor a bus driver who risked her life for kids on board a bus when it caught fire earlier this month. Students at Robert Goddard Montessori and Glen Arden Woods Elementary pulled out all the stops Wednesday for bus driver Renita Smith, who evacuated 20 children from the burning bus and went back into the flames to make sure everyone...

Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources is pushing a prohibition on hunting “big game” with spears, as well as new regulations on the use of air guns to hunt deer.

<p>Tweefie Millspaugh has a relatively short commute from her home in North Baltimore's Abell neighborhood to her job at a downtown law firm. Without traffic, she says, it takes about 15 minutes.</p> <p>But lately, the 54-year-old has found herself yelling fruitlessly in the driver's seat as she sits for 45 minutes on streets jammed by road closures across the city's center. After work, she waits again in a crawling line before finally inching out of her parking garage and into the gridlock.</p>

Baltimore police confirm 8 people shot, including a 3-year-old child. None of the victims have life-threatening injuries. A suspect is not yet in custody. Details soon.

Three gunmen shot and wounded eight people including a 3-year-old girl on an east Baltimore street Saturday night, police said, adding the suspects fled and the victims were all expected to survive. The shooting erupted outside some rowhouses about 8:30 p.m. after the three armed men converged on the group from different points, Baltimore Police Commissioner Ken Davis told The Associated Press. Davis, who went to the scene, said the shooting was a premeditated act of retaliatory violence in response to a Labor Day weekend shooting in which a person was fatally shot and two others were wounded, including a...

HAGERSTOWN, Md. - A Maryland police chief is defending the actions taken by his officers following an incident where a 15-year-old girl was pepper sprayed by police, but the girl and her family tell a different story about what happened. Body camera video released by the Hagerstown Police Department shows the incident, which happened after the girl's bicycle allegedly hit a car. The girl faces charges of disorderly conduct, second-degree assault, possession of marijuana and failure to obey a traffic device. The incident has prompted disagreement about whether the officers acted properly. Footage from two different officers' body cameras was...

Police pepper-sprayed a 15-year-old girl and charged her as a juvenile with assault and disorderly conduct after her bicycle hit a car, prompting disagreement Wednesday about whether the officers acted properly. Hagerstown Police Capt. Paul Kifer said the white officer who arrested the mixed-race girl had to subdue her with chemical spray to get her into a cruiser for a ride to the police station Sunday. Kifer said the girl had refused to cooperate with police trying to question her about the accident and find a parent to authorize her refusal to receive medical treatment from paramedics on the scene....