Free Republic

In Harlem River Park in Manhattan, homeless men can be seen sleeping on benches around the basketball courts and sprawled out on a soccer field by day, then hunkering under an overpass at night. In Brooklyn, dog owners in Fort Greene Park have had ugly confrontations with homeless people after their dogs woke them up in the early morning when they are allowed off-leash. And in the Bronx, there are so many homeless people in one small park, Devanney Triangle, that the community board and parks department are discussing the removal of all benches. After a decade in which the...

Do-good fine. Police in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., again cited a 90-year-old man for feeding the homeless in a public park, in violation of a city ordinance. Arnold Abbott, who runs a ministry called Love Thy Neighbor Inc., was first cited on Sunday along with two pastors working with him. They face up to 60 days in jail and a $500 fine. Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jack Seiler said the ordinance is not designed to punish the homeless or those who serve them but to balance the needs of all the city’s residents. Abbott, who has been working with the homeless for...

A senior citizen and a couple of clergymen in Florida face up to two months in jail for feeding the homeless. A group of volunteers with the non-profit charity Love Thy Neighbor in Broward County face up to a $500 fine and 60 days in jail because they were feeding the homeless last Sunday in Fort Lauderdale, the New Times reports. World War II veteran Arnold Abbott, founder of the interfaith organization, and members of a local church were confronted by Fort Lauderdale police officers because they had reportedly been in violation of the new laws against food sharing —...

A few weeks ago, I was in New York City to meet someone for drinks, and got on the subway at 34th and 7th to head downtown. I dislike the New York subway for many reasons. It is the only such system in a major Western city to look as if it had been swapped with the metro of a third-world backwater. Pick any otherwise dodgy country on Earth, and chances are the subway of its capital city is a gleaming tube with smooth rolling stock and palatial stations. Not New York. The trains lurch between filthy platforms like...

Police have arrested a man they believe robbed a Holiday convenience store on Wednesday. Police said Todd Mielke, 40, was arrested Thursday around 3 p.m. at a makeshift homeless camp near the HyVee South supermarket. Capt. John Sherwin said it all started when a man walked into the Holiday convenience store at 1520 2nd St. SW just before 1:15 a.m. and implied that he had a weapon. Sherwin said the man was wearing a camouflage mask and demanded money from a 20-year-old clerk. The masked man fled the Holiday southbound on 14th Avenue Southwest. The vehicle he was driving was...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Legal marijuana is luring pot tourists and business entrepreneurs to Colorado, and it’s also attracting another demographic: the homeless, some of whom trek to the state in hopes of landing a job in the industry. “There’s an enormous migration, even a homeless movement, so to speak,” David Spencer, a homeless man from Tennessee, said. “I figured this would be a good place to start over.” While shelters across the metro area are willing to open their doors, they’re quickly running out of room. “We were averaging 190 (homeless) last year. We’re now averaging 345 a night,” Murray Flagg of the...

The city of Pasadena is letting homeless people keep the change. The Los Angeles suburb is turning 14 parking meters into repositories for donations made to nonprofits that serve the homeless, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday. Pasadena’s housing director, Bill Huang, says the hope is that people who might be reluctant to hand spare change to a panhandler will be more open to putting it in a meter. […] Some homeless advocates complain the meters aren’t a serious enough effort to help the homeless. They also say that in some cities meters have been used to push panhandlers out...

In response to an inquiry about unaccompanied minors from one of its school divisions, Virginia’s Department of Education issued a memo this month reminding its 132 divisions about their obligation to educate all children. According to the memo, under federal and Virginia law, the state expects that many of the unaccompanied minors who enroll in public school will be considered “homeless.” “In addition, division superintendents cannot exclude from school attendance those homeless children who do not provide the requisite health or immunization information required of other students,” the memo continued. Full title: Immigrant Children to Be Classified as 'Homeless' to...

SNIP “In light of the heightened media coverage of the issue of undocumented immigrant children, VDOE provides the following updated information for your use in responding to community questions or issues,” says the memo distributed to the commonwealth’s 132 school divisions and obtained by Breitbart News. SNIP “While a case-by-case review of each child’s circumstances upon enrolling in a Virginia public school is necessary, many of these unaccompanied children will be deemed homeless under applicable state and federal law,” the memo reads. It goes on: Pursuant to Va. Code § 22.1-3, a homeless child is one who lacks a fixed,...

In another interview with KJRH Tulsa, the couple's 18-year-old daughter, Lisa, says her parents kicked her out a week ago and dropped her off at a homeless shelter, where she met 19-year-old Jeremy Lake and the two began seeing each other. "He was my everything," she said. They spent the week at Jeremy's family's house, which is where her father tracked her down. "We were outside for five minutes and that's when my dad pulled up," she said. "There was no argument. I walked away and Jeremy tried to introduce himself and my dad shot him."

The crowd of 500 included grandmothers and small children, Chinese immigrants and the president of a local Republican club, all shouting that the mayor had trampled their rights. The source of their anger? The 180 homeless families the city had moved into the defunct Pan American Hotel in Elmhurst, Queens. The residents felt nervous around the new arrivals, they said. There were reports of shoplifting from the Good Fortune Supermarket, public urination and panhandling – all things, they said, that had been unheard-of in their neighborhood until now. During the protest on Tuesday night, one of the organizers spoke through...

MIAMI (CBSMiami) — A South Florida renter came home to find people living inside his house but the family illegally squatting inside said they are not leaving. The owner of the property on SW 5th street and 49th Avenue said his friend William Ruiz has been renting the house for the past two years and recently started to move out while the house was listed for short sale. Ruiz went on vacation for two days and said when he came back, he found the locks on the house changed and strangers living inside using his belongings. “They’re using his bed,...

Man sets house afire trying to kill spider with lighter, spray paint SEATTLE -- Fire officials say a West Seattle man was using a lighter and a can of spray paint to kill a spider in his laundry room when the house went up in flames. Fire crews were called to a home in the 10200 block of 34th Avenue SW just before 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday. Firefighters originally battled the blaze from a distance after learning there may be ammunition inside. Crews were eventually able to extinguish the fire, but not before it did significant damage to the structure....

Mexican emigrants crossing the Rio Grande near El Paso, Texas. (Danny Lehman/Corbis) A Fox News exclusive reported this morning by Jana Winter inexplicably buried the lede. Winter reports that several dead children have been discovered “washed up along the riverbank” of the Rio Grande, but fails to note that there have been no reports by the Obama administration on this. This indicates a pattern of covering up dead illegal alien kids by the Obama administration. It was two weeks before news was reported on the sole child death acknowledged by the Obama administration, Gilberto Ramos, a 15 year-old boy from...

The orphaned Florida teen whose impassioned plea for a family to 'love him forever' prompted an outpouring of sympathy from around the country has been removed from his foster home following a physical altercation with another child and the father. After 16 years of floundering in foster care, after taking the pulpit at a St. Petersburg church last September asking someone - anyone - to adopt him, after his story was shared around the world and 10,000 people offered to help or take him home, Davion Only moved to Ohio in March to live with the parents who had promised...

Griffin Furlong is a Florida teenager who knows something about heartaches and joy. The 18-year-old is homeless, but he graduated at the top of his class from Florida Coast High School in Jacksonville.

The next time you can be bothered enough to feed a homeless person you might find yourself at odds with the law. Yes, you have to be “bothered” because you are under no obligation to help your fellow mankind, who has fallen on hard times and on harder concrete slabs. That’s right, because if you help homeless people in cities like Daytona Beach, Florida; Raleigh, N.C.; Myrtle Beach, S.C.; and Birmingham, Alabama you could be fined, physically removed and/or be threatened with time behind bars – and they have actually done it. In fact, 33 cities across the United States...

Former homeless man Doug Seegers is set to embark on a tour of Sweden after a chance discovery by a Swedish television crew turned the singer into an overnight sensation in the country. Seegers, 62, featured on the popular SVT show 'Jills Veranda' earlier this year. The street performer, who has admitted to living rough in the past, was catapulted to stardom after performing his song 'Going down to the river' on the programme. It then rocketed to number one on the Swedish iTunes chart. Swedish fans have since uploaded their own version of Seegers' hit song to YouTube, while...

Homeless campers evicted’ That was the top headline in Friday’s TGI after campers at Anahola Beach Park were told to vacate or face arrest last week. We’re not disputing that these folks weren’t supposed to be there, but we will argue this is a sign of the severity of the homeless problem in Hawaii and specifically, on Kauai .... No surprise that homelessness is a problem. Kauai is a very expensive place to live. Rent, utilities, groceries and gas — all of which hit the shrinking middle class and the rising low-income hard — are among the highest in the...

<p>If you think about, the homeless actually serve as the perfect scapegoat for a former American middle class slowly being driven into serfdom. Still completely mesmerized by the religion of consumerism, how is a population losing its freedom and financial well-being supposed to feel better about itself. The easy answer is to look at an even more destitute class and treat them like the “elites” treat everyone else. Like a superfluous and unfortunate outgrowth of humanity.</p>