Free Republic

After 38 years, a popular family-run Vietnamese restaurant in Oakland is closing at the end of the month. Owners of Le Cheval announced on social media that the restaurant’s last day at 1007 Clay St. will be Sept. 30. While “this chapter comes to a close,” they wrote, they will seek a new location elsewhere.Owner Son Tran told KPIX that Le Cheval is closing due to slow sales, which were around 25% of pre-pandemic levels, he said. He also cited criminal activity in the area as a deciding factor. Diners at Le Cheval in 2012. The 38-year-old Oakland restaurant is...

A man with a gun was spotted protesting near President Joe Biden's Wilmington, Delaware home on Sunday. The man, dressed in a yellow and orange safety vest, carried a sign that read on one side, 'Bidens are criminals, 20 shell companies?! Where's the laptop? 10% for the big guy.' The other side of his sign read, 'Joe has aliases?! Robert L. Peters, Robin Ware, JRN Ware.' The demonstrator walked by the pool of reporters assigned to cover the president and walked down the road toward the president's home, with a Secret Service vehicle trailing him. 'The individual expressing his constitutional...

Criminals across New Mexico were ecstatic to hear from Governor Grisham today that no one in the state would be armed for an entire month. "Oh, sweet!" said local carjacker Jeff Diggs. "It's so stressful wondering if your next victim could be packing. Gosh, that's such a weight off!" New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham made the announcement yesterday in a press conference, to resounding cheers from criminals across the state. "I just want every thief in our great state to know they have nothing to fear," said Governor Grisham. "We're delivering bold leadership on crime, and making a statement...

Police in Democrat-run Oakland, California, are urging residents to use airhorns as a way of sounding an alarm when criminals strike amid a surge in crime. Crime has risen to a point where police are not only advising the purchase of airhorns but also the placement of “security bars to…doors and windows,” CNN noted. Burglaries in the city are up 41 percent “and robberies by more than 20 percent.” Oakland resident Toni Bird indicated that she followed the advice of police and now has three airhorns. Bird said, “The types of crime that we’re seeing feel much more violent and...

In one of American cinema’s most riveting scenes, Vito Corleone, the Godfather, rebukes a distraught undertaker whose once-beautiful daughter has been beaten to a pulp by two young men — one of them the son of a powerful politician. Though the case was a slam dunk, a corrupt judge had let the brutes off with no jail time. That the system is rigged against those who play by the rules suddenly dawns on the law-abiding undertaker, whom the film’s co-writer, novelist Mario Puzo, named Amerigo Bonasera — as in Goodnight, America, where threats lurk around every corner, and the rules...

Pritzker held a bill-signing ceremony for a measure bringing about mandatory supervised release for the state’s criminal justice system. ... Separately, the governor’s office announced he signed another 95 House bills and 39 Senate bills. Some take effect immediately, like House Bill 3751 that allows non-citizens to apply to be a police officer. Also effective immediately, the Illinois State Board of Education is required to adopt a literacy plan Other laws begin Jan. 1, 2024, like a measure allowing Illinois licensed motor vehicle dealers to conduct sales over the internet and deliver vehicles to customers. House Bill 1199 designates October...

How's this as a consequence of radical leftist policies that coddle society's troublemakers? As of Sunday, the San Diego Union-Tribune ran a Page One above-the-fold story by Paul Sisson headlined "Hospitals in County Look for Ways to Cut Attacks on Workers," which is an important story indeed because it points to the consequences to innocent hospital workers of constantly coddling bums, illegals, drug addicts and criminals, all of whom were named as perpetrators in the piece. For some strange reason, the story not there on the San Diego Union-Tribune's website and I looked and looked. I don't think it's a...

It says a lot about the modern Democrat Party that its prominent figures like Rep. Eric Swalwell (California representative) and Beto O’Rourke (perpetually unemployed) would actually support and pose for a photo with Stacie Laughton when he was running for a seat in the New Hampshire state house.For the uninitiated, Laughton has the distinction of being the first transgender person elected to a state legislature. More importantly, he was charged in connection with the sexual exploitation of children, specifically by receiving and talking about explicit photos of children possibly as young as 3 years old. Laughton allegedly obtained the photos...

Prisoners are streaming Hollywood hits, curating Spotify-style playlists and getting access to popular video games thanks to an explosion in iPad-style tablets inside institutions across the country. One company alone is providing devices to 600,000 inmates, nearly one-third of estimated 1.9 million people in US jails and prisons. The ubiquitous tablets, which are still growing in popularity, were highlighted by a series of topless pictures of South Carolina murderer Alex Murdaugh, who used the device to make video calls directly from his cell. California – the nation’s second-biggest state correctional department – became the latest this month to complete a...

SPRINGFIELD, Ill.-- Emma Shafer, 24, was found stabbed to death last Tuesday. The suspect is her ex-boyfriend, Gabriel P. Calixto, 25. Shafer is an intern for US Senator Tammy Duckworth and part of multiple left-wing activist groups. She is on the “Racial Equity Task Force” for Resistor Sisterhood. She is also described as a “community organizer” for the left-wing “racial equality” group Faith Coalition for the Common Good. Calixto is an illegal alien who has allegedly been in the USA since he was five. In 2018, he pleaded guilty to kidnapping another ex-girlfriend and was sentenced to six years. However,...

Another teen in California was 'terrified' after encountering a 'naked male' while showering in a YMCA women's locker room earlier this year ... An Illinois teenager who voiced concerns to her swim coach about biological males identifying as transgender women being allowed in the girls' locker room said she was accused of "hate speech." Last April, sixteen-year-old Abbigail Wheeler, a swimmer on the Springfield YMCA SPY swim team, entered the girls' locker room to change when she noticed a couple transgender individuals sitting there, her father told Illinois-based podcast host Jeanne Ives. The head swim coach Alex Totura was informed...

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) is considering signing legislation into law that would allow illegal aliens, enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, to become police officers in the sanctuary state. Democrat legislators, with a supermajority in the Illinois House and Senate, passed legislation late last month that would allow thousands of DACA illegal aliens living in the state to become police officers or deputy sheriffs.

The criminal practice of trafficking and abusing hundreds of thousands of migrant children who cross the southern border is now, thanks to the open-border policy of the Biden Administration, apparently “normal” inside the US:“According to Customs and Border Protection, since January 2021 when Biden took the oath of office, there have been 5,118,661 encounters with illegal immigrants along the southern border.”

The Dutch government was successful in seizing farms and now they want to take over private homes too. The Housing Act will allow municipalities to force homeowners to sell their homes ONLY to people with a lower to middle income in the value of the home is less than 355,000€. Research shows that this will drive housing prices UP and cost of rent too. It is a shocking power grab in the year 2023.

Equity is one of those quirky words that has numerous meanings .... The Biden administration is unable to enact legislation that will assure its vision of equity. Instead, it relies on the dictate of executive order and bureaucratic malfeasance to push its vision of systematic equity into American culture. ... In search of equity, liberals ignore justice. Democrat district attorneys all over the country downplay criminal behavior because they consider crime the result of a plethora of inequities encountered by law-breakers. They ignore the fact that criminal behavior is a choice made to damage or harm others. Liberals refuse to...

The Minister for Justice has said too many people are being sent to jail for minor offenses by the district court. Simon Harris told RTÉ’s This Week that support needs to be provided to district court judges about the sentencing options available to them. “I have spoken to district court judges during my tenure in terms of the suite of options available to them,” he said. However, the minister defended plans to increase prison capacity, as a means of dealing with overcrowding. He said increased capacity was required to modernize prison facilities, and also to recognize that people need to...

It’s well known that left-wing Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was a psychopath, a dark status that led to his exterminating 20 million human beings. Yet the people who help vault such tyrants to power — sometimes pejoratively called “useful idiots” — are well-meaning but naive sorts, right? Perhaps not always. In fact, a new study informs, Stalin has much psychopathic (and narcissistic) company among leftists, including among today’s variety. Moreover, the researchers found that authoritarian-minded left-wingers often don’t care a whit about the altruism and “social justice” they trumpet, but instead “use political activism to endorse or exercise violence against...

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced this week that he organized for a bus to bring about 40 immigrants north to Denver, Colorado, where they were left near a park, as part of an ongoing plan to move more migrants to the city, according to the Houston Chronicle. Abbott recently announced that Texas has relocated more than 18,500 people as part of his efforts to send migrants who have been processed at the border to northern cities. The governor claimed in an interview earlier this month that these "are the chosen cities by the migrants themselves. Every one of these migrants...

Former U.S. Attorney Brett Tolman joined Fox News' Trey Gowdy on "Sunday Night in America" to discuss the House Oversight Committee releasing additional information alleging members of the Biden family received funds from foreign sources. The latest details were met with "a lack of curiosity by the D.C. media," according to Gowdy. Tolman added, "you didn't have several of the larger media stations covering this."

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been releasing illegal immigrants, including those with criminal records, from custody to clear space for the looming surge of more migrants at the border, in the latest sign of the government’s scramble to prepare for the onslaught. ICE cut its detention population to fewer than 23,000 at the start of the month, down from more than 28,000 six weeks earlier. That includes hundreds of people with criminal records whom ICE has released. Acting ICE Director Tae Johnson told Congress last month that he wanted to cut the population to as few as 21,000 people to...