SUMMARY:Nearly a year ago, President Trump signed a bipartisan federal criminal justice reform bill that reduced mandatory sentences. Many states followed suit -- but not Maryland. In collaboration with the University of Maryland’s Howard Center for Investigative Journalism, John Yang reports on the uncertain fate of prisoners who are still serving life sentences for crimes they committed as minors.
SUMMARY:Baltimore [Maryland] is once again beset by allegations of corruption. The city’s mayor, Catherine Pugh, is accused of bestowing contracts and political favors on companies and organizations that purchased large orders of her book. The scandal, plus rising crime and a lack of economic opportunity, keep Baltimore residents cynical about government. William Brangham talks to Paul Jay of the Real News Network.
SUMMARY:Climate change has profoundly affected Ellicott City, Maryland. The mill town, located where multiple waterways converge, was devastated by a flood earlier this year, after already suffering a deadly deluge in 2016. John Yang and a team from the University of Maryland's Capital News Service explain the debate over whether destroying Ellicott City's historic buildings could help save the town.
SUMMARY:Faces of the five victims led the front page of the Capital Gazette, a day after mayhem broke out in the Maryland newspaper's offices. The accused gunman has a long-held grudge against the paper after a 2011 column about his guilty plea to criminal harassment. Amna Nawaz talks with Terence Smith, contributing columnist for the Capital Gazette and longtime NewsHour contributor.
SUMMARY:The governors of Maryland and Oregon are making an urgent call for greater federal help to deal with the opioid epidemic in their hard-hit states. Gov. Larry Hogan (R-Md) and Gov. Kate Brown (D-Ore) sit down with William Brangham to discuss the problems in their states, what works and what they need to end the suffering.
SUMMARY:Baltimore City Public Schools faced outrage from parents after images emerged of students wearing coats in a freezing classroom. More than a third of schools reported a lack of heat this winter during a cold snap, and that’s just one of the many problems plaguing the school system’s crumbling infrastructure, underscoring a larger debate about long-term funding and investment. John Yang reports.
SUMMARY:Two Baltimore city police officers were convicted in federal court on Monday on charges including racketeering and robbery, as part of a brazen corruption scandal. Baltimore’s Gun Trace Task Force were tasked with getting illegal guns off the street, but used their authority to target people for theft. John Yang talks to Jayne Miller of WBAL-TV about the debate on how the city police force needs to change.
SUMMARY: Good vision care is a luxury for families who can’t easily afford the time or money spent getting a child’s first pair of glasses. But a new program called "Vision for Baltimore" called provides eye exams and two pairs of glasses to every student who needs them, totally free of charge -- a simple thing that can dramatically improve the quality of their education. William Brangham reports.
SUMMARY: "Step," a new documentary, follows students from the Baltimore Leadership School for Girls, an institution with the primary goal of 100 percent college acceptance. But that's not their only success. Girls at the school channel their strengths into practicing step, an artform that combines movement, percussion and more. Members of the school explain what the program has meant to them.
In 2015, Baltimore wrote a city-wide prescription for a heroin antidote. Two years later, as the city tries to expand access to addiction treatment, will the White House support its mission?
With a black plastic bag in hand, Gerald Young ducked into the needle exchange van parked across the street from Baltimore's Saint Paul Freewill Baptist Church. A cold January rain drizzled outside.
Young shuffled to a small table and sat down, untying and overturning his half-knotted bag. Three bundles of used needles tumbled into a red medical waste bin.
Across from Young, John Harris opened a new box of clean hypodermic needles and restored Young's supply. Harris, a Baltimore public health worker, also gave him a new kit of Naloxone, an opioid antidote that stops a potentially fatal overdose in moments. Young, a 61-year-old homeless Baltimore native, rose to leave the van and wander around his hometown.
On that same van, outgoing U.S. drug czar Michael Botticelli, whose strategies targeted substance abuse and addiction treatment for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, stood off to the corner, asking workers what they'd been seeing. Botticelli had traveled to Baltimore to praise the city's fight against the opioid epidemic. On the eve of President Donald Trump's inauguration, he wondered how his work would carry forward.
Over the last five years, the nation's opioid crisis has gained momentum, despite federal, state and local officials' attempts to control it. The most recent government data shows more than 33,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses in 2015 alone. Those deaths have quadrupled since 1999, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And in Maryland, which ranked 14th in drug overdose death rate nationwide in 2015, that rate rose 20 percent over the previous year. By September 2016, 70 percent of the state's 918 fatal heroin overdoses happened in and around Baltimore, state records show.
Policymakers have targeted opioid deaths with new programs in recent years. All states except Missouri use real-time electronic records to monitor how often doctors prescribe and pharmacists dispense drugs. When Congress approved and President Barack Obama signed the 21st Century Cures Act last year, states secured $1 billion to fund substance abuse treatment targeting heroin and opioid users. And a growing number of cities and states have expanded access to Naloxone; Baltimore was one of the nation's earliest adopters.
SUMMARY: With overdose deaths from opioids on the rise across the country, Baltimore has begun training everyday citizens to use a life-saving antidote as one tool to combat the crisis, and the approach is catching on. But while many more states and municipalities have moved to make Naloxone more accessible, not everyone believes this is the right strategy. The NewsHour's Pamela Kirkland reports.
SUMMARY: Violent crime and unemployment rates are nearly twice the national average in Baltimore. Educators say factors like these add significant stress to children, causing emotional and behavioral problems, so several public schools are working to reduce that stress with mindfulness and meditation. Hari Sreenivasan reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):Baltimore, Maryland, has high unemployment and a violent crime rate of nearly twice the national average. Educators say that factors like these add significant stress to children and cause emotional and behavioral problems.
Several area public schools are working to reduce that stress with programs that teach mindfulness and meditation.
Our Hari Sreenivasan has the story.
It for our weekly series Making the Grade.
CHRIS BOWMAN, Student, Patterson High School: And exhale, pushing out all the things that make you stressed out.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): This isn't your local yoga studio. It's the Mindful Moments Room at Patterson High School in East Baltimore. It's a place students go when they act up, get stressed out, or just need a break.
CHRIS BOWMAN: Stay in your happiness.
LATONYA LEE, Student, Patterson High School: My day is so stressful. As soon as I walk in the door — I don't even have to do exercises. There's just a big smile on my face because I'm in here. If they didn't have mindful moments in Patterson, I wouldn't be here at all.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Why?
LATONYA LEE: Because it's too stressful. And for — to not have a place to relieve stress is like putting you in a oven.
HARI SREENIVASAN: These students are participant ambassadors for mindfulness meditation programs run by the nonprofit Holistic Life Foundation at Patterson High.
It's a school that has struggled with higher rates of dropouts, absenteeism, and has more students on free or reduced lunches than the national average.
Nineteen-year-old Chris Bowman not only practices mindfulness meditation at school, but he starts his day with it, and yoga, which he's used to deal with his demons. At a previous school, he says he used to fight with kids who picked on him for being black.
Then his father died when he was 13.
CHRIS BOWMAN: Growing up without a father and stuff like that, I struggled with a lot of depression, a lot of grief, and a lot of just really bad — really bad zones of like suicidal thoughts.
But I had to find a way to get out of that. A mindful moment is when you — you just take a deep breath in a moment of conflict and just — maybe you just look at that and just like, I can do this in a different way. I don't have to fight this person. I don't have to look violence as the answer.
In yet another horrifying incident of human flesh-eating this week, a student in Maryland allegedly admitted to devouring his roommate's brain and heart.
Alexander Kinyua, a 21-year-old Morgan State University student, admitted to murdering his roommate Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie, who was reported missing last Friday, cops told the Baltimore Sun.
Kinyua's father called police late Tuesday night when Kinyua's brother reportedly found human remains -- a head and two hands -- in a metal tin in the basement. The brother and father left the room for a short time, but when they came back, the body parts had been moved and Kinyua was washing out the tin, the paper reported.
Officers searched the house and arrested Kinyua. The man allegedly confessed a shocking revelation: not only had he killed Agyei-Kodie by cutting him up with a knife and then dismembered him, he ingested parts of the victim's brain and all of his heart. He then allegedly dropped most of the remains in a Dumpster behind a church in Joppatowne.
It's yet unclear what Kinyua's motive may have been, but he was charged with first-degree murder on Wednesday. In another incident on May 20, he was charged with first-degree assault when he allegedly beat a fellow student randomly with a baseball bat and then fled into the woods.
The gruesome case comes on the heels of a similar attack in Miami on Saturday, in which Rudy Eugene, 31, was killed by cops while in the process of chewing off most of a homeless man's face.
Ronald Poppo, 65, is alive, but the bizarre flesh-eating attack left doctors with a literal puzzle in how to put his face back together.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
*Anti-First Amendment policies that attempt to turn America into a theocracy by enshrining ANY religious belief as law.
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* Any law or policy that supports discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, race/color, gender, sexual orientation, or any law that does NOT support Equal Treatment under the law.
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