CONVOCATION: Less than 24 hours after offering Easter blessings and meeting with Vice President JD Vance, Pope Francis died this morning in Rome at age 88, the Vatican announced.    Originally from Argentina, Francis was the first Jesuit and Latin American pope. …

DUE PROCESS: Maryland Sen. Senator Chris Van Hollen met yesterday in a hotel lobby with  Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident wrongfully deported to prison in El Salvador last month.    Van Hollen, a Democratic a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, shared …

THE TARIFF ECONOMY: Stocks took another swan dive yesterday following remarks by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell that President Trump’s global trade war might cause inflation, slow economic growth, and bring unemployment.   With Trump’s up and down, on-again off-again tariffs on imports, “Markets …

DEPORTATION SHOWDOWN: A federal judge rebuked the Trump administration for doing “nothing” to arrange the return a Maryland man wrongly flown to prison in El Salvador, and set in motion what could be a constitutional clash between the courts and the …

HARVARD HOLDS SWAY: Harvard University rejected demands by the Trump administration to make changes in academics and administration under threat of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding. It’s the first of at least seven universities to tell Trump to …

ARSON ATTACK: Police in Pennsylvania arrested a suspect in the arson attack that heavily damaged the governor’s mansion overnight Saturday while Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family were asleep. No one was injured.   Shapiro, his wife, and four children were awakened …

PRIDE GOETH BEFORE:  The Dow Jones jumped more than 600 points late in yesterday on optimism that the Trump administration might make a trade deal with China. The day had started with China raising its tariff on US imports to a whopping …

WHAT GOES UP: Rather than get on the phone to negotiate, China today raised its tariff on US imports to 125 percent, deepening the trade crisis created by President Trump.    A Chinese spokesman said his country will not back down and …

HITTING “PAUSE”: Donald Trump blinked in the face of world economic turmoil and placed a 90-day pause on his draconian “reciprocal” import tariffs. The stock markets that lost trillions of dollars in value over the previous four trading days immediately rebounded, …

TRADE WAR: China today responded to  President Trump’s 104 percent tariff on their goods with an 84 percent tariff on US-made goods brought into China. The Chinese government swears it is not backing down as the world economy and financial system tremble.   The …