Mary de Pompa

“Chaotic would be an understatement.” A driver said she saw a white Range Rover fleeing police at 80 or 90 mph on the Beltway before a major crash in Virginia. A D.C. officer was hit and wounded by a white Range Rover hours earlier. nbc4dc.com/WQDZBOH

Adam Silver noncommittal on Cathy Engelbert's WNBA future reut.rs/3NO8XOW reut.rs/3NO8XOW

Happy peak bloom to all who celebrate!! #cherryblossom #peakbloom

PEAK BLOOM! PEAK BLOOM! PEAK BLOOM! It's official! The cherry blossoms are opening & putting on a splendid spring spectacle. See you soon. 🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸! #CherryBlossom #BloomWatch #WashingtonDC

These two photographs are separated by only 66 years.

Despite a sunny afternoon and patches of blue sky, the cherry blossoms remain at Stage 5: Puffy White. Peak Bloom can't be far away. For visiting tips and to learn more about the cherry trees, go to nps.gov/cherry 🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸 #CherryBlossom #BloomWatch #WashingtonDC

Planning to be in the Rock Creek area this weekend? Starting Fri, March 27 at 8PM through Mon, March 30 at 5AM, Rock Creek Trail (between P St NW and Pennsylvania Ave NW) will be closed, along with a southbound lane of Rock Creek & Potomac Pkwy NW. 🔗dcwater.com/about-dc-water…

MARCH METEOR MADNESS ☄️ It’s been active in the skies over the past 3 weeks with meteor sightings reported from New York to Ohio to Texas and California. Even just last night another #fireball was reported across southern Michigan and northwest Ohio too!

Beginning 3/25/26, a daily partial lane closure is set to begin on the exit ramp from Route 15 to Route 15 Business/Leesburg. While work occurs, the left shoulder of the exit ramp will remain open for through traffic between 10:00 a.m. & 2:00 p.m. More: bit.ly/3Njs2bG

2026 will probably be the hottest year on record. Phoenix has already set or met 13 record highs and it's only March!

President Trump, who is in the midst of pressuring senators to curb the use of mail-in voting, voted by mail ballot in Tuesday’s special election in Palm Beach County, Florida. wapo.st/47fVUwf

⚡ NASA just released insane new image of Mars. Yes those are real clouds. on Mars. 250 million miles away from us. Not just any clouds, these are extremely rare Iridescent clouds seen for the first time ever on an alien planet.

An update from the National Park Service: Starting this week, NPS will close lanes to resurface sections of the George Washington Memorial Parkway between Spout Run Parkway and Interstate 395 and between DCA and First Street in Alexandria. More at nps.gov/gwmp.

After winning the national championship, four members of the Wisconsin Women's Ice Hockey team have now won Olympic gold and an NCAA championship, just 31 days apart 👏

LaGuardia Airport in New York is closed following a deadly collision between a Port Authority airport vehicle and an Air Canada regional plane early Monday morning, according to police. What You Need to Know is streaming on @DisneyPlus. Stream now: abcnews.link/b6V1bt1?utm_so…

BREAKING: We can confirm that a meteor exploded over Houston just before 4:40 p.m. Central time. The GOES East geostationary lightning mapper picked up the infrared flash that accompanied the explosion. A boom was heard across the northern/northwestern Houston metro. There are unconfirmed reports of a meteorite crashing through a woman's home. The American Meteor Society has reviewed dozens of eyewitness reports, and calculated the most likely path of the meteor. It probably entered the atmosphere somewhere near Magnolia and continued descending toward Monroe, at some point exploding in the process. The Brenham, Texas fire department was dispatched to reports of a possible explosion near Highway 50 at Wiedeville Rd. Units on scene did not find evidence of an explosion.

Last year when Olive turned 99, she set out to do 99 new things before her 100th birthday. At the top of her list was attending a PWHL game. Today she is joining us for her FIRST PWHL game. Olive has always been a big supporter of women's sports and we're thrilled to celebrate her 100th birthday with her 💙

The first sunrise of Spring, 2026….. Stonehenge, England……

@ahez68 @Microinteracti1 x.com/ScarboroughNow…

@dePompaWTOP @Microinteracti1 Mueller was a wicked man

Robert Mueller died last night. He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving. He had integrity. And tonight the President of the United States said good! I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good. I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word. Good. This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather. That is what is happening. That is what has happened. The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming. America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner. And the church said nothing. Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary. Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him. Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart. JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn. These men are something more painful than monsters. They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again. Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing. Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less. That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him. And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it. When Trump is gone, they will still be here. Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous. That morning is coming. Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say. He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true. He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad. The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it. That is all it needed to be. A man died. His family is broken open with grief. That is all it needed to be. Instead the President said good. And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸 Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

19 years ago, a high school basketball coach put his team manager into a game for the final four minutes. The kid had never played a single minute of competitive basketball in his life. He scored 20 points. Jason McElwain was diagnosed with severe autism at age two. He didn’t speak until he was five. He couldn’t chew solid food until he was six. He wore a nappy for most of his early childhood. As a baby, he was rigid, wouldn’t make eye contact, and hid in corners away from other children. He tried out for his school basketball team every year and got cut every time. Too small. Too slight. Barely 5’6 and about 54 kilograms. But he loved the game so much that his mum called the school and asked if there was any way he could be involved. The coach created a team manager role for him. For three years, McElwain showed up to every practice and every game. He wore a shirt and tie on match days. He ran drills, handed out water, kept stats, and cheered every basket like he’d scored it himself. On 15 February 2006, the last home game of his final school year, the coach let him suit up in a proper jersey and sit on the bench. With four minutes left and a comfortable lead, the coach sent him in. His first shot missed. His second missed. Then something shifted. He hit a three-pointer. Then another. Then another. His teammates stopped shooting entirely and just kept passing him the ball. He hit six three-pointers and a two-pointer. 20 points in four minutes. The highest scorer in the game. When the final buzzer went, the entire crowd rushed the court and lifted him onto their shoulders. His mum tapped the coach on the shoulder, in tears. “This is the nicest gift you could have ever given my son.” McElwain won the ESPY Award for Best Moment in Sports that year, beating out some of the biggest names in professional sport. He’s 36 now. He works at a local supermarket, coaches basketball, has run 17 marathons including five Boston Marathons, and travels the country speaking about never giving up. When asked about that night, his coach still gets emotional. “For him to come in and seize the moment like he did was certainly more than I ever expected. I was an emotional wreck.”