Free Republic

The Foreign Minister of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez inaugurated the mural along with members of the community, artists and activists from the U.S. and Latin America. Rodriguez was also accompanied by members of the African American community in the Bronx. During the inauguration people shouted, “You can see him, you can feel him! Chavez is present!"

MOTT HAVEN, Bronx (WABC) -- A portion of the Major Deegan Expressway is shut down in the Bronx after a suspicious package was found near the roadway. Less than an hour later, the all clear was given by police. The package, which police said is a pressure cooker, was found at 5:35 p.m. near East 134th Street and Alexander Avenue in the Mott Haven section. This area runs under the highway. Police said no wires or cellphone were found inside the device. The Major Deegan is closed from the RFK Bridge to Willis Avenue (exit 2). Police sent the bomb...

Norman Seabrook, president of the city’s Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, was arrested early Wednesday on federal corruption charges, officials said. Seabrook, 56, was taken into custody by federal agents at his Morris Park home in the Bronx about 6 a.m. He was under investigation for allegedly receiving kickbacks from an investment firm that does business with the 9,000-member union — the largest municipal jail union in the country.

Police sources said Nash, who has a lengthy rap sheet dating back to 1997 — including arrests for assault, robbery and arson —slugged her in the face several times before ripping off her clothes and tossing her to the floor. She was left with bruises to her forehead, cops said. Diallo, a longtime livery driver, had just gotten to the building and parked his car when received a call from his wife, urging him for help. “Call the police for me, I need help! I need help, please!” Nenegale said, according to Diallo’s brother. Fearing for his wife’s life, Diallo...

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — More than a hundred people have been arrested in the Bronx in what authorities are calling the largest gang takedown in New York City history. Authorities are expected to announce charges Wednesday against 120 alleged members and associates of two rival street gangs.

When Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz came to the Bronx to campaign in the run-up to the New York primary, ridicule was not far away. After all, what is a Republican candidate doing in the staunchly Democratic, minority-majority northern part of New York City? What is he doing in New York State at all, when Donald Trump is nearly certain to carry the most votes and, according to market-based forecasts, has an 85 percent chance to win more than 50 percent of the vote? Why would Ted Cruz campaign in the Bronx? For someone like Cruz to campaign exactly...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is facing an uphill battle in New York. For example, an event in the Bronx garnered what the New York Post estimated to be just shy of 100 people on the same day that GOP frontrunner and New Yorker Donald Trump held a rally that brought in what Trump estimated to be 17,000. On Tuesday afternoon there was an announcement for a Wednesday afternoon event at Bronx Lighthouse Charter School. Within hours the Cruz campaign released updated information for a Wednesday afternoon Bronx event that showed an entirely different Chinese-Dominican restaurant location. News broke Wednesday that...

There are more than 1.4 million people in the Bronx — but Ted Cruz couldn’t even muster 100 at a campaign event in Parkchester with state Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr., a conservative Christian minister. Cruz visited the Sabrosura Chinese-Dominican restaurant, where Diaz said the presidential candidate could “listen to the social, economic and spiritual needs of our community” while dining with other clergymen on the eatery’s famed fried rice and plantains.

On Wednesday, MSNBC reported on a New York City protester disrupting an event for Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). The protester yelled that Cruz is a “right-wing bigot” before being led out of the venue by the authorities.

<p>NEW YORK, N.Y. – A New York City middle school teacher was fined $300 for showing students a video of an Islamic State beheading, according to a published report.</p> <p>The New York Post reports that Alexiss Nazario, a veteran teacher earning $105,000 a year, showed the video to eighth-graders at the South Bronx Academy for Applied Media during the 2014-2015 school year.</p>

Two New York City police officers were shot in the Bronx on Thursday night, and one was gravely injured, a law-enforcement official said. The circumstances were not immediately clear, but the official said the officers were on duty when they were shot around the Melrose Jackson Houses near 156th Street. The condition of the second was not immediately clear.

'It was like something out of The Shining': Man arrested for hacking off woman's hand before stabbing her to death in unprovoked attack in Bronx hallway A woman was hacked to death by a man with a machete while standing in the hallway of her own building in an unprovoked attacked, say police. The woman, identified by the New York Daily News as Carmen Torres-Gonzalez, 59, was reportedly standing in the hallway of the Mott Haven Houses in the Bronx, chatting with her mother's home care health aide on Sunday afternoon, when she was attacked by a 'psychopath,' say police....

Stacey Dash’s ex-boyfriend, rapper Ryan Prophet of the group Nappy Roots, took to Instagram this morning to get a few things off of his chest. He set things off by sharing a screenshot of a text from Stacey Dash. They dated years ago before Stacey went all ‘conservative’ on us. In the photo’s caption, he put Stacey ALL THE WAY on blast for having an abortion. He’s since changed the caption, but it’s too late. We wonder how pro-life advocate Stacey will respond — if at all.

A Bronx principal ordered her teachers to give up their desks last week, and had the furniture dumped at the curb — telling staff she doesn’t want them sitting in class. Donna Connelly, principal of PS 24, the Spuyten Duyvil School in Riverdale, also told teachers to empty their filing cabinets, which she then discarded. With class in session, teachers were told to push their desks and cabinets into the hallway. Custodians then hauled them outside and piled them like trash on the blacktop of a school across the street.

Two people are dead – and two others critically wounded – after a spate of shootings across the city Saturday night, authorities said. The bloodshed began in Brooklyn at about 5:40 p.m. when a 36-year-old man was fatally shot in front of a dry cleaning business on Church Avenue near Ocean Avenue in Flatbush-Ditmas Park. Just over two hours later in the Bronx, gunfire erupted outside of 724 East Tremont Avenue, leaving a 25-year-old man dead and a 34-year-old woman in critical condition.

Francesco Bove is lucky to be alive. The 62-year-old artist was so viciously mauled by two pit bulls in the Bronx on Friday that a priest read him his last rites outside a church. “I think I’m going to die,” Bove said at the time according to his son Anthony. “But the priest made him promise that he will fight until the end.” A cellphone camera from a tenement caught the attack in which the canines were seen repeatedly biting Bove. At one point they dragged him from the middle of the street to the curb, each taking a shoulder.

A Nicaraguan diplomat was found dead in his Bronx apartment with his throat slashed yesterday when his driver came to pick him up for the UN General Assembly meeting, police sources said. The body of Cesar Mercado, 34, was found shortly after 10:30 a.m. when his driver opened the door of his Grand Concourse apartment and saw him on the floor in a pool of blood, cops said. Investigators are probing the possibility that the killing was caused by a gay relationship gone wrong, police sources said. The sound of men arguing was heard in the apartment before the murder,...

Even when teachers don’t appear to be complaining about Common Core they actually are, because CC is so unpopular that bureaucrats and politicians try to camouflage it. Yet and still, like the spots on a leopard, C squared’s trademarks are becoming easy to spot. For example, on his personal blog, Bronx teacher Jamaal Bowman complained about the Tyranny of Standardized Testing but the CC standards are fairly simple to discern. I tried to make them even easier by italicizing: “As a classroom teacher, the state test jargon became part of the lexicon. We were told to focus more on “non...

RIKERS ISLAND — The head of the Harlem Historical Society wants Rikers Island renamed based on the namesake family's connection to slavery. The embattled jail complex, which has been beset with scandal over poor treatment of inmates and calls to shut it down, gets its name from the family of Abraham Rycken, a Dutch immigrant who settled in New York in the 1600s, according to the New York Historical Society. Jacob Morris, director of the Harlem Historical Society, recently started a petition to rename the embattled jail complex due to family member Richard Riker's history of helping send blacks into...

It was time for Tommy ­DeSimone to die.The mobster — famously portrayed by Joe Pesci in "Goodfellas" — killed two made men, tried to rape the wife of his gangster pal Henry Hill and stupidly lifted his ski mask during 1978’s historic $6 million Lufthansa heist.So John Gotti took care of it — personally.The handsome capo used a silencer-equipped Colt .38 to shoot DeSimone three times in the skull in January 1979 in the basement of an Italian restaurant on Arthur Avenue in The Bronx, says an upcoming book, “The Lufthansa Heist,” written by Hill and journalist Daniel Simone.It’s the...