Parents and children lined up to get free backpacks decorated with smiley faces, baseball bats and sharks, and filled with school supplies at Mayor Catherine Pugh’s annual back-to-school rally.

The event, hosted at the War Memorial Plaza downtown Saturday, distributed around 3,200 backpacks ahead of the Sept. 4 start date for city schools. Fewer than 100 backpacks were left over, which will be distributed next week, Pugh spokesman James E. Bentley II wrote via text message.

The rally also featured an array of sponsors, including the Baltimore Fire Department, which taught hands-on CPR; the Enoch Pratt Library; and the Baltimore City Health Department, which delivered immunizations to children in the War Memorial Building.

Read the entire story.

The Health Department’s Supporting Male Survivors of Violence Program (SMSV) is housed within the Office of Youth Violence Prevention, and is one of 12 pilot programs funded through the Office for Victims of Crime within the U.S. Department of Justice.

Baltimore is again suing the White House over its health care policies, this time due to the president’s alleged undermining of the Affordable Care Act. 

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court of Maryland this morning, accuses the Trump administration of violating a constitutional clause to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” through the president’s very vocal push to repeal the eight-year-old Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, most of which took effect in 2014. The law mandated sweeping health insurance reforms in an attempt to expand coverage to millions of Americans, though many Republicans have opposed it, arguing it disrupts the existing private insurance scheme and is unaffordable for many Americans.

Read the entire story.