Free Republic

A U.S. Senate hearing Tuesday highlighted growing frustration by lawmakers of both parties with some local governments’ refusal to fully cooperate with federal immigration authorities, as senators heard from the widow of a Sacramento County sheriff’s Deputy Danny Oliver, who prosecutors say was murdered by an undocumented immigrant. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s scrutiny of federal immigration enforcement policies came a few weeks after this month’s killing of San Francisco resident Kathryn Steinle. The undocumented immigrant charged in that case, Juan Francisco Lopez Sanchez, had a lengthy criminal record and was deported several times. San Francisco, a so-called sanctuary city, had...

Father moved family to Sacramento amid security concerns in Afghanistan CHP: Driver, looking at text message, drifted into bike lane and struck dad and son ‘Charges are pending,’ spokeswoman says After risking his life working as an electrical engineer on U.S. military projects in northern Afghanistan, Mustafa Rafi believed he had found a safe haven for his family in Sacramento County. But less than two weeks after settling his family into a modest apartment, the 33-year-old was killed Sunday morning and his 8-year-old son suffered life-threatening injuries after a driver suspected of texting while at the wheel swerved into the...

The latest snips occurred Tuesday, when someone sliced at least three fiber-optic cables in an underground vault in Alameda County east of San Francisco. The cuts disrupted Internet and phone service around Sacramento for 20 hours before service was restored.

WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. (KCRA) —Service was restored late Tuesday night to all Wave Broadband customers in the greater Sacramento and Rocklin areas after a "deliberate act" caused a large outage, according to a Wave official. "The disruption to service in the Sacramento Rocklin markets due to the fiber cut of several partner carrier providers has been resolved," read a statement on Wave's website. "As of about 11:40 p.m. Tuesday night, phone, TV and Internet services are operating normally." The disruption to customers' phone, television and Internet services lasted nearly 20 hours as crews worked to repair fibers that were cut...

According to numbers taken from the Guttmacher Institute and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), some 53 million legal abortions were performed between 1973 and 2013 (inclusive). This number is an approximation as California, New Hampshire and Maryland have refused to supply state abortion numbers during recent years. It is known that the number of abortions has declined over the past several years, for example, from 1.31 million in 2000 to about 984,000 in 2013. Though liberals are undoubtedly distraught that, in a year to year comparison, nearly 300,000 escaped the convenience of wholesale genetic profiling, a few unadulterated whack-jobs...

The Washington Post has published a guest article by a California teacher arguing that American high school students shouldn’t read Shakespeare because he’s a dead, white man. Dana Dusbiber, who teaches English in Sacramento, says she avoids Hamlet and all the rest because her minority students shouldn’t be expected to study a “a long-dead, British guy” (Dusbiber herself is white). And while Shakespeare is widely regarded as the premier writer of the English language, able to timelessly portray themes central to the human experience, Dusbiber says he only is regarded that way because “some white people” ordained it and he...

The rash of tough pro-vaccine bills that infected state legislatures after the Disneyland measles outbreak has largely faded, and based on the uproar in California, it’s not hard to see why. The state capitol has been flooded off and on for months with parental-choice advocates drawing thousands for protests against Senate Bill 277, which would eliminate personal belief or religious exemptions and require all children without a medical exemption to be vaccinated before entering public school. And the outcry has only grown louder as the bill nears passage, spreading beyond the issue of vaccination safety and morphing into a full-blown...

On May 1, S.F. increased rate to $12.25 an hour Voters support move, but some business owners, workers are uneasy Sacramento will study raising pay wage above the $9 state rate SAN FRANCISCO In this diverse and densely packed city, known for high living costs and soaring rents, 77 percent of voters last year approved a series of pay hikes that will boost San Francisco’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2018. Yet there are tensions these days on Valencia Street in San Francisco’s multicultural Mission District over the minimum wage hike and what it means for businesses and...

Newly released California Highway Patrol dashcam video shows an impaired California State Senator Ben Hueso undergoing sobriety tests and answering questions before his August arrest. In the footage, the San Diego senator is seen driving the wrong way onto a one-way street in Sacramento on Aug. 22. He quickly U-turns, but a CHP officer is quickly on his tail, pulling him over at a nearby gas station. Hueso gets out of his car and is asked to do field sobriety tests. At the officer’s request, he walks back and forth in a straight line. He is then asked to do...

With lawmakers preparing to vote on a bill blocking parents from skipping vaccinations for their children, prominent vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. arrived at the Sacramento screening of a film linking autism to the vaccine preservative thimerosal and warned that public health officials cannot be trusted. “They can put anything they want in that vaccine and they have no accountability for it,” said Kennedy, who walked onto and left a Crest Theater stage to standing ovations, of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Wednesday afternoon will see the first hearing for a bill eliminating the personal belief...

U.S. immigration authorities said Monday they have arrested more than 2,000 undocumented immigrants with prior criminal convictions, including 18 in Sacramento and Yolo counties.

t could soon get easier to live on the streets in the Golden State. As controversy swirled around the police shooting of a homeless and mentally ill man on Skid Row in Los Angeles, legislators in California considered a new set of regulations activists said would “decriminalize” homelessness by providing a so-called “right to rest” in public.

<p>A California Democrat has proposed a bill that would raise the state’s minimum smoking age from 18 to 21 in an effort to keep cigarettes out of the hands of teenagers.</p> <p>State Sen. Ed Hernandez introduced Senate Bill 151, which would make California the first state in the country to raise the minimum smoking age to 21. Similar proposals have previously failed in New Jersey, Utah, Colorado and Maryland.</p>

A Jihad Watch reader in the Sacramento area has sent me this flier (click to enlarge), showing that today is NP3 Hijab Day at NP3 High School. NP3 stands for Natomas Pacific Pathways Prep; the school is in the Natomas Unified School District in Sacramento. This all started with a student at NP3 High who is an intern for the Hamas-linked terror organization the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). This student gave a presentation about Islamophobia and Islam at what was a mandatory staff meeting that also included an official CAIR representative. The school then now decided to sponsor an...

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - Suspended California state Sen. Leland Yee could face a jury as early as June for charges of political corruption and conspiracy to import guns. At a scheduling conference on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer said Yee will be tried along with his political consultant Keith Jackson, who also faces drug and murder-for-hire charges. Breyer said those charges will be tried separately, but lawyers for the defendants, including Yee's lawyer James Lassart, were not satisfied. "The firearms charges are going to be extremely prejudicial. The government has acquired 50 to 70 different firearms that, undoubtedly to...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (KCRA) —City Council member Angelique Ashby is among the most fiscally conservative of her colleagues, when it comes to spending her discretionary funds. Compared to other City Council members, last year Ashby spent the least -- about $35,000 on community service programs and local events. But that included giving tax dollars to Planned Parenthood Mar Monte. When we asked Ashby about that expenditure, it led to the end of our interview. "I donated to a scholarship. The money that I gave only could go to a scholarship fund for young single moms already selected to go to college,"...

When KCRA 3 asked Ashby about using tax dollars to contribute to Planned Parenthood programs, she defended the contribution, took off the microphone and walked away.

A college art project that had two men hanging from a tree branch with nooses around their necks has outraged and dumbfounded the student-artist's classmates and the outside world. Christina Edwards, a senior at Sacramento State University, defended the Dec. 4 performance/installation that was part of a series called "Restitution." "The purpose of this performance was to bring to light social injustices and the issues of inequality that impact me and my community as a whole," she wrote in an open letter to the school body, obtained by The Campus Culture. Edwards said that, as a young African-American woman, she...

A popular restaurant owned by celebrity chef Guy Fieri went out of business on Monday, leaving dozens of employees out of work. Britton Archie was told not to talk to CBS13, but he did anyway. “I got a phone call that says today’s your last day,” he said.

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Carly Fiorina on Tuesday rebuked White House officials for their critical stance toward Israeli construction in East Jerusalem, joining a largely GOP chorus that has admonished the Democratic administration. Fiorina, appearing at the Sacramento Press Club, used the episode to demand that Democratic incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer confront President Barack Obama. "Today, I am calling on Barbara Boxer to add her voice to those in the Senate who have challenged the administration on this matter," she said. Boxer spokesman Zachary Coile said in an e-mail response that the senator "has always supported Jerusalem as the undivided...