Free Republic

It is as iconic an image from the criminal underworld as the Tommy gun, or the getaway car, a grim last act for the unfortunate soul whose life is about to end in a new pair of footwear. Cement shoes.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and other city officials are urging New Yorkers not to eat at Chick fil-A. The popular chicken restaurant is planning to open up a new location in Queens, its fourth to open in New York City. But the liberal mayor argued that the owners of Chick fil-A support groups that promote "hate" against gays. "Chick-fil-A is anti-LGBT," he said in a statement, according to the website DNAInfo. "This group imparts a strong anti-LGBT message by forcing their employees and volunteers to adhere to a policy that prohibits same-sex love. It is outrageous that...

Undocumented illegal aliens are having a documented effect on New York City's finances. New York's flailing left-wing mayor is proposing $2 billion for the city's hospitals as part of an $82 billion budget. A budget that the city can't afford. What's driving the costs? Illegal aliens and ObamaCare. Closer to home, de Blasio said the growth in tax revenue that has swelled city coffers is starting to slow — with projected growth of 3.6% in 2016 and 1.9% in 2017, compared to an average of 7% in the last five years.

New York’s iconic Stonewall Inn, where the modern gay-rights movement took root, will become the first national monument honoring the history of gays and lesbians in the U.S. under a proposal President Obama is preparing to approve.

Wednesday is the 100th birthday of Jane Jacobs, the journalist and urban theorist whose 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, changed the trajectory of New York and cities everywhere. In the book, Jacobs argued that the preceding century of urban planning had essentially “arisen on a foundation of nonsense”—that the old, white men who advocated for highways and high-rises, wide streets and buildings set back from sidewalks by acres of grass, were not only clueless but were actively destroying American cities. Instead, Jacobs wrote, cities should be built with communities and street-level interaction in mind. […]...

For two decades, Sheldon Silver served as one of the most powerful men in New York State. On Tuesday, a judge ordered he serve the next 12 years in prison.

President Obama will reportedly mark Pride Month by designating a part of the Greenwich neighborhood surrounding the Stonewall Inn as the nation’s first gay-rights national monument.

New Yorkers take a kind of perverse pride in never looking up. Not in a figurative sense, of course: we are, after all, as optimistic as anyone else. (Who else but die-hard optimists would willingly live in so unforgiving a city?) But when it comes to actually, physically looking up, most of our gazes rarely rise above the ankles of our fellow commuters. The Boston-born, New York-based artist Duke Riley is going to change that.

The right is blessed in its opponents, who have never truly appreciated how deeply unappealing their platform is, at least to non-millennials, i.e. individuals who aren’t complete ignoramuses. A perfect illustration of this political tone deafness can be found in the mass demonstrations held in front of the Grand Hyatt Hotel during the pre-primary GOP Gala. Our good friend Pamela Hall has a fantastic photo essay which chronicles the concerns expressed by the assorted dregs of humanity...

White powder found in Trump Tower mailroom; 6 being evaluated NEW YORK (WABC) -- The FDNY, EMS, and NYPD were called to Trump Tower in Manhattan after a suspicious white powder was found. The powder was discovered around 8:15 p.m. in the 5th floor mailroom. A Trump Campaign source tells ABC News the 5th floor offices have been evacuated at Trump Tower, but most staff had already left for the day.

After a successful attack on corruption in New York’s state government, the hard-charging federal prosecutor in Manhattan appears to have set his sights on New York City. Over the past few weeks, a series of loosely related public corruption investigations coordinated by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara have spilled into public view, with targets including high-ranking New York Police Department officials, the union representing city jail guards, and the political fundraising activities of several people with ties to New York City’s mayor. Already an embarrassment to the nation’s largest police department, it remains unclear whether the widening probes could do damage...

When Donald Trump spoke earlier this week in Buffalo, media critics lambasted him for allegedly confusing “9/11” with “7/11.” However, a theory emerged as to why Trump didn’t misspeak, one that the media refuses to acknowledge. The controversy all began Monday, as Trump was speaking before a crowd in Buffalo on the day before the New York primary. During the speech, he touted his 9/11 activism. “I wrote this out, and it’s very close to my heart,” Trump said to the audience. Because I was down there and I watched our police and our firemen down at 7/11, down at...

Donald Trump's Staten Island supporters were confident the brash businessman would win in the borough, but even his most staunch allies were pleasantly surprised that the GOP front-runner on Tuesday took the Island with 82 percent of the vote, setting a record for the highest margin of victory for the candidate so far in the national race. (SNIP) On Staten Island, he got 73 percent in the North Shore's 61st Assembly district represented by Assemblyman Matthew Titone; 85 percent in the South Shore's 62nd district, that Ron Castorina Jr. was just elected to; 80 percent in the mid-Island's 63rd district...

With 100 percent of election districts reporting, New York state's unofficial election-night results website has Donald Trump losing only one of New York's 27 congressional districts: The 12th, which covers parts of Brooklyn and Queens as well as the eastern side of Manhattan—including the Fifth Avenue block that's home to Trump Tower, which is where Trump lives and where the Trump Organization is based.

Watch the Empire State Building turn red after CNN projects win for Donald Trump https://t.co/8Z6S8u11Gb #NYPrimary pic.twitter.com/igWPZORhUV— CNN (@CNN) April 20, 2016

New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer has declared that he will conduct an official audit of the New York City Board of Elections in response to many claims of polling irregularities and errors throughout the city’s primary voting system Tuesday.

No article, just reported live. Thousands of Democrat voters showed up in Brooklyn today and found their names are no longer on the voter roles. Fox reporting between 50,000 and 300,000 voters "missing".

Both Republican and Democratic candidates have been courting Jewish voters ahead of Tuesday’s New York primary vote, looking for an edge in competitive districts with large Jewish populations. Orthodox Jews, who make up a significant portion of New York’s Jewish population, have become an important bloc in the New York primary for both parties. […] While Orthodox Jews tend to lean more Republican than Democrat by a margin of 55% to 31%, some Hasidic sects, including the staunchly anti-Zionist Satmar, have lent their support in the past to Democratic candidates. Yiddish flyers distributed by a pro-Sanders group and bearing the...

The bad news has been snowballing for Bill de Blasio, what with the emergence of a federal probe involving, among other things, top cops in Brooklyn accepting diamonds, trips and more from two big donors to various appendages of his political operation and what’s now four separate investigations into a city-aided flip, again involving a wired backer of the mayor, of a Lower East Side nursing home for AIDS patients into luxury condos. I wrote last Sunday that “after this week, I’m losing faith that de Blasio’s horse trading is paying off for the city.” And it appears I’m not...

AUDIO LINK (40 MINUTE SEGMENT) “Cruz's roots: Asked by (Anderson) Cooper if he was more a product of the Northeast or Texas, Cruz chose the Lone Star State. "When I went off to Harvard Law School my dad jokingly referred to it as missionary work," Cruz said. Cruz had completed his undergrad studies at Princeton University by then, becoming the first member of his family to attend an Ivy League school. "To be admitted to Princeton was an extraordinary thing," he said. "It was a world, frankly, that I didn't know. When I arrived there it was a scary place....