Free Republic

It's weigh in time for competitors ready to stuff their faces Tuesday at the famous Nathan's hot dog eating contest in Coney Island. Eaters to watch this year include reigning hot dog champ Joey "Jaws" Chestnut. He's taken home the mustard yellow belt nine of the last 10 years. Chestnut will try to chew his way to the top against rival Matt Stonie, who briefly took the title two years ago. Chestnut bit back last year, redeeming the frankfurter crown, out chomping Stonie during a nail biter at the beach. He ended up scarfing down a record 70 dogs in...

Two of the Confederate Army’s best-known leaders have streets named for them in a place not normally associated with the Southern side of the Civil War — New York City. Now some elected officials are trying to undo it. They say it’s high time Stonewall Jackson Drive and General Lee Avenue in Brooklyn are renamed, pushing to join a number of Southern cities that have removed or are considering taking down Confederate statues and other memorials in public places. “To honor these men who believed in the ideology of white supremacy and fought to maintain the institution of slavery constitutes...

Macy’s is planning to pull the plug on its Fourth of July fireworks display near the Brooklyn Bridge — and revelers who counted on dazzling views in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan are seeing red. Fireworks will light up the sky above five barges on the East River between 24th and 41st streets, unlike last year’s showcase, which featured a breathtaking display near the Brooklyn Bridge, according to Macy’s reps. Scrapping the show near the iconic bridge leaves neighborhoods including Battery Park, South Street Seaport and Brooklyn Heights in the dark, angry residents and business owners said. Claire Long 26, a...

A Brooklyn woman whose mother suffered a heart attack and died after the two feuded over a pet feline can barely remember the fight, she told the Daily News on Wednesday. “I had one drink, and then I don’t know what happened,” Chandra Sutton, 50, said during a sitdown at Rikers Island.

Crowds of people went running after gunshots rang out near Barclays Center in Downtown Brooklyn Wednesday afternoon. The shooting happened just after 2 p.m. near the Target at the intersection of Fort Greene Place and Hanson Place. This is in close proximity to Barclays Center. A 50-year-old man was shot in the leg. He was taken to a nearby hospital in stable condition.

of them planning bloodbath outside Brooklyn court Police stopped a potential bloodbath outside Brooklyn Criminal Court — thanks to Facebook, officials said Thursday. Cops grabbed three gang members planning violence outside the courthouse on Joralemon St. in Brooklyn Heights on Wednesday after finding a Facebook Live video that showed they had a gun and planned to shoot members of a rival crew, police sources said. Cops monitoring social media sites of gang members found the video around 10 a.m. Wednesday. It showed Rashid Celestine, 19, Davon Arthur, 20, and Envoy Bullock, 24, in a car and armed with a...

High schools across America are being pressured to offer time off school, in-school prayer rooms, and special dietary demands by Muslim students observing the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. One campus in Brooklyn has agreed not to serve food at its prom until after sundown while another school in upstate New York is setting up prayer rooms to satisfy the demands of students who observe Ramadan. Among the Muslim groups agitating for special privileges for Muslim students are the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Student Association and Sound Vision.

For a franchise that has been so successful in Los Angeles, the Dodgers’ 10 retired numbers speak largely to a Brooklyn heritage. On the day the Dodgers retired his microphone alongside those numbers — and perhaps for the last time at Dodger Stadium — Vin Scully told stories of the Boys of Summer. “Those numbers are not numbers at all,” Scully said Wednesday. “I can hear them. I really can.” ... In a pregame ceremony, [Tommy] Lasorda and Sandy Koufax unveiled Scully’s blue and white circle along what the Dodgers now call their “ring of honor,” with “VIN SCULLY” atop...

Rev. Khader El-Yateem, the first Palestinian-American to run for the City Council seat representing Bay Ridge, appears to be shaking up the race for more reasons than just the historic nature of his candidacy, according to political observers, who said he is making notable efforts to differentiate himself from the rest of the Democratic field. El-Yateem told members of the South Brooklyn Progressive Resistance at a forum the group held on April 18 that he was confident he could get Republicans to cross over and vote for him in the general election in November.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) spoke Thursday at Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn, where he told the students that the Trump administration was trying to damage the African-American community. "Jim Crow might be dead," Jeffries said at the beginning of his speech. "He's got some nieces and nephews that are alive and well, and a few of them are running around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue." The audience laughed and cheered in agreement with Jeffries' claim.

A man is in critical condition after being savagely beaten by four men inside a Flatbush fried chicken spot — and then robbed by a fifth as he lay helpless on the floor, cops say. The 37-year-old victim told police that an argument began when he offered to help two men pay for their meal, which they were a few dollars short of paying for, inside Texas Chicken and Burgers in Brooklyn on March 1.

A man was repeatedly punched in the face and told to “go back to your country” on a Brooklyn subway platform Wednesday evening, an NYPD official said. The 27-year-old victim was on the southbound J-train platform at the Crescent Street station at about 5:20 p.m. when a man came up to him and punched him in the nose twice, an NYPD spokesman said. The victim’s nose was broken in the attack. The perpetrator called the victim a “****ing Mexican” and said “Go back to your country.” …

When Isabel Livingston opened a shop in Newark’s Teacher’s Village development in 2015, she had no intention of moving there, too. She had grown up in Newark but left some 15 years ago in search of better public schools for her daughter, eventually settling in Maplewood, NJ. It didn’t take long, however, for Livingston — whose shop, Closet Savvy Consignment, is a brick-and-mortar version of her luxury consignment business — to change her mind. She moved into Teacher’s Village, a $150 million mixed-use project from RBH Group, three months ago. “After seeing all the improvements in the city of Newark,...

He'll bring pernil, platano and a pro-Trump message right to your doorstep. Jose Peralta, a deliveryman for the Bushwick Dominican restaurant Alex Luncheonette, is so into making America great again that customers in the neighborhood are calling him "The Trump Guy." He comes to work at the Knickerbocker Avenue eatery each day with his fire engine-red Trump baseball cap and a pin from the president's campaign. The battered Toyota Corolla he zips around the neighborhood in is plastered with bumper stickers for Trump and the far-right website InfoWars. "They tell me I was the only one in Brooklyn that supported...

Cops caught a suspect Saturday in the murder of Karina ­Vetrano, the beautiful jogger whose brutal strangulation last summer — in the high weeds of Spring Creek Park in Queens — had transfixed the city. Officials did not immediately release the name of the suspect, but sources told The Post he is in his 20s and lives in a housing project in East New York, Brooklyn, a neighborhood just west of her home in Howard Beach. The suspect had been on police radar for a while, sources told The Post.

Thousands of angry demonstrators gathered outside Sen. Chuck Schumer’s luxury Brooklyn apartment building — holding up signs and chanting “What the f–k, Chuck?!” — to protest his lukewarm stance on President Trump’s cabinet picks. “Senator Schumer needs to know we’re watching him,” fumed Brad Wolchansky, a 40-year-old soccer coach from Flatbush who was carrying a cardboard cutout of a giant eye on Tuesday night. “He works for us. We need him to be bold. We need him to stand up to Trump and oppose his picks,” Wolchansky said. He and roughly 3,000 others gathered at Grand Army Plaza around 6...

The train derailed at the busy Atlantic Terminal at rush hour; all of the injuries were considered minor A Long Island Rail Road train derailed at Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn at the height of Wednesday's morning rush, injuring more than 100 people and riddling the track area with shattered glass and debris.

The borough is considered deep blue, but there are red zones too. Consider Dyker Heights. It is no secret that the vast majority of Brooklyn residents, 79% to be exact, voted for Hillary Clinton on November 8. It’s a large borough, though, and out past the rapidly gentrifying brownstone neighborhoods and downtown glass high-rises that have become Brooklyn’s national representation, things can look different. While they may be in the minority in the city, some neighborhoods at the southern and eastern edges of Brooklyn have quite a bit in common with Trump’s electorate.

Three days after the election, my wife and I were shopping at the Fairway Market in Red Hook, Brooklyn. For those unfamiliar with it, Fairway is a less corporate, more co-op version of Whole Foods, offering pretty produce and exotic cheeses that don’t come cheap. The mood in the store was glum. As in most of Brooklyn, people stared ahead, moving slowly, still in shock from the political earthquake of Tuesday night. After getting our Brazilian Arabica ground for drip (I know, I should really use a French Press), Libby and I walked towards the organic maple syrup. That’s when...

This week’s “Saturday Night Live,” hosted by Kristen Wiig, saw a very pointed sketch that poked fun at the presumed “bubble” over millennial neighborhoods. The skit zeroed in on Brooklyn, and painted a picture of a new living establishment completely shuts out the rest of the world. While it’s healthy to have a safe space away from others every once in a while, this particular skit highlighted the dangers of retreating into a bubble of like-minded people at all times. It’s something that should hit pretty close to home regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum. Though of...