Free Republic

* The Facebook founder pledged $100million to Newark schools in 2010 to bring sweeping educational reforms * However, most of the money has been spent on labor contracts and consulting fees * The money has had little impact on student performance so far In his first major show of philanthropy, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made a splash by announcing his plan to give $100 million to help turn around Newark, New Jersey's public schools in an appearance on Oprah in 2010. But nearly four years later, Zuckerberg's money has run out, having been spent mostly on labor contracts and consulting...

Detroit women are turning to abortion at a staggering rate as poverty and crime grip the city, with more than one-third of pregnancies being terminated. According to 2012 figures, the most recent year for which data are available, 31 percent of pregnancies among Detroit residents ended in abortion — compared to about 14 percent for all of Michigan, The Detroit News reported. (Snip) Dr. Susan Schooley, chairwoman of the Department of Family Medicine at Henry Ford Hospital, said the statistics make Detroit look “more like some Third-World country than someplace in the United States.”

So, my new Sunday night 'guilty pleasure' is a show called "Those Who Kill", with Chloe Sevigny and James D'Arcy. The series started March 3rd on A&E, but it was moved to the Lifetime Movie Network recently presumably for lack of ratings on A&E (even though the 'lead-in' was the very successful "Bates Motel"). It is a violent/suspenseful show about a detective in the Homicide Division of the Pittsburgh PD (Sevigny), who works with extremely violent cases. Last night, a woman serial killer named Angela Early was looking for a man who had raped her when she was 13 years...

If you’re hoping to escape from big city crime, look elsewhere. These places actually defy the stereotype of smaller cities being safer. When you see small towns on TV and in movies, they’re almost always idyllic places where the American dream is thriving and neighbors all know each other. That, and unless you’re watching a whodunnit, no one’s ever the victim of a crime. In reality, small cities are surprisingly similar to all the others, meaning that there are good ones and bad. While the Movoto Real Estate Blog has been writing lately about America’s safest places, we thought we’d...

A piece of New York City history is bidding arrivederci. Rising rents and changing demographics have driven Little Italy to the verge of extinction. Once a teeming neighborhood stretching 50 square blocks, it now barely covers three blocks of Mulberry Street—and even that strip is under threat. “You can’t rebuild Little Italy,” said Robert Ianniello Jr., owner of the famed Umbertos Clam House. “If we go away, it will never be here again. You can’t build an Olive Garden and say it’s Little Italy.” …

Differences Between Rural and Urban America Are Underappreciated Factor in Political Split EL DORADO SPRINGS, Mo.—The owner of the nicest restaurant in town doesn't serve alcohol, worried that his pastor would be disappointed if he did. Public schools try to avoid scheduling events on Wednesday evenings, when churches hold Bible study. And Democrats here are a rare and lonely breed. Older, nearly 100% white and overwhelmingly Republican, El Dorado Springs is typical of what is now small-town America. Coffee costs 90 cents at the diner, with free refills. Two hours north and a world away in Kansas City, Starbucks charges...

It´s a quiet crisis. In a city of plenty, a staggering number of people are struggling to feed themselves and their families. Nearly one in five New Yorkers, 1.4 million people, now rely on a patchwork network of 1,000 food pantries and soup kitchens across the city to eat. That represents an increase of 200,000 people in five years — straining the charities that are trying to help. The two biggest, City Harvest and the Food Bank for New York City, now provide nearly 110 million pounds of food to soup kitchens and food pantries a year. Yet those working

In New York City, 80% of the babies killed by abortion in 2012 were minorities: Hispanics, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Blacks. According to a “Pregnancy Outcomes” report published by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, there were a total 73,815 “induced terminations,” or abortions, in 2012 in the five boroughs that comprise New York City. (See Pregnancy Outcomes NYC 2012.)[PDF]Among those abortions, 58,738 were of babies of minority race or ethnicity. That’s 79.57% of the total, or approximately 80% of all the abortions that year.The abortions by race/ethnicity and number are listed below:Hispanic 22,917Asian & Pacific...

Sarah Slocum loves her Google Glass. She wears the gadget on her face for more than 12 hours a day and enjoys showing others how to use it. With the wink of an eye, she can take a picture or use her voice to command it to record video. The device is, she says, “the future”. So it was with some shock that she discovered there are those who disagree. Rather forcibly, in fact. On a recent outing to a bar in San Francisco, the 34-year-old technology writer says she was attacked by people who told her “F--- Google!”, accused...

Are San Francisco straight men that hard up for a date that they need women to be flown in from elsewhere? Apparently, according to one dating site: the Dating Ring. Currently still in the fundraising stage (Really, we're fundraising for dating sites now?), a post on SFGate notes "Love-lorn young ladies can reserve a spot on the trip by simply anteing up $1,000, which will net them a flight, housing, three dates and two parties." Don't make us gag. Judging from the comments on our recent post disputing NerdWallet's findings that San Francisco is the best place to be a...

Rickey Wagoner of Trotwood, Ohio, was assaulted by three men while he stood beside his bus in the early hours of Monday morning The two bullets aimed at his chest were stopped by a New Testament Bible that he kept in his chest pocket The shooting may have been a gang initiation after Wagoner told cops that one of the suspects said 'we need to shot a polar bear to get in a club' Polar bear hunting is gang slang for a random attack on an unsuspecting victim. A bus driver in Trotwood, Ohio, is recovering in hospital after remarkably...

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — Police say some of the merchandise at a medical marijuana dispensary in South Los Angeles went up in smoke Monday morning after someone threw a Molotov cocktail through the window. The fire bomb went through the glass of a dispensary in the 5300 block of South Hoover Street at about 3 a.m., Los Angeles police Sgt. Rick Rodgers said.

A warning for dog owners--poisoned meatballs have been found in the Twin Peaks neighborhood again. San Francisco Animal Control officers spent hours Saturday morning looking for them. They found 21 meatballs that are similar to the ones found last summer. Most of them were found near Crestline Drive and Parkridge Drive. Officer have posted dozens of signs to alert pet owners. So far, they have not heard of any pets sickened or killed by the meatballs. But at least one dog died last July after eating poisonous meatballs. Those meatballs left to poison dogs then were potentially lethal to humans.

The Trader Joe’s grocery chain has withdrawn plans to build a store in the heart of a predominantly black neighborhood after a black leadership group fought the move. The Portland Development Commission was set to give the grocer a large discount on property that had been vacant for years, pricing it at just over $500,000, down from an appraised value of $2.9 million, according to The Oregonian. The Portland African American Leadership Forum sent a scathing letter in December to city leaders, saying the plan would price residents out of the area and the group“remains opposed to any development in...

The Trader Joe's grocery-store chain has dropped a plan to open a new store in the heart of the city's historically African-American neighborhood after activists said the development would price black residents out of the area. The grocer, whose stores are found in urban neighborhoods across the nation, said Monday it wouldn't press its plan, given community resistance, The Oregonian ( http://bit.ly/1n7Jyqb) reported. "We open a limited number of stores each year, in communities across the country," it said in a statement. "We run neighborhood stores, and our approach is simple: If a neighborhood does not want a Trader Joe's,...

A 77-year-old man died after collapsing across the street from a fire station, where his daughter had asked for immediate assistance and was instead rebuffed by a firefighter who told her he couldn’t help unless dispatch instructed him to intervene.The man, Medric Cecil Mills, collapsed near the Engine 26 fire station in the Brookland area of Washington, D.C. at about 2:30 p.m. on Saturday. His daughter, Marie Mills, went to the station to beg for immediate medical assistance. But the firefighter she encountered there told her that she had to first call 911 so that dispatch could instruct him to...

It really is a tale of two cities — this time with the tony Upper East Side getting the shaft! Huge swaths of the UES had been not been plowed by early Tuesday evening, according to the city’s own map of snow-plower activity. “He is trying to get us back. He is very divisive and political,” said writer and life-long Upper East Side mom Molly Jong Fast of Mayor de Blasio. “By not plowing the Upper East Side, he is saying, ‘I’m not one of them.’ But we have everyone in this area on the Upper East Side. We have rich...

A walk down the 6-mile city street named for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. yields plenty of images that would surely unsettle the civil rights leader: shuttered storefronts, open-air drug markets and a glut of pawn shops, quickie check-cashing providers and liquor stores.The urban decay along Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in St. Louis can be found in other major American cities, from Houston and Milwaukee to the nation’s capital. “It’s a national problem,” said Melvin White, a 46-year-old postal worker in St. Louis and founder of a 3-year-old nonprofit group that is trying to restore King’s legacy...

The city’s annual prayer breakfast to honor the life of Martin Luther King Jr. on Friday at times turned into an election-year pep rally for Illinois Democrats to push the idea of a minimum wage hike. **SNIP** Democratic U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin and Gov. Pat Quinn weren’t listed on the program, but both took the stage after guests dined on eggs and sliced melon. Both politicians who are seeking new terms this year tied their support for an increase of the minimum wage at the federal and state levels to King’s legacy of fighting for justice. Quinn said leaders today...

A candid picture series exposing the lives of New York City nannies reveals how a deep-rooted racial divide continues to permeate the industry. Photographer Ellen Jacob, 58, told MailOnline that she was inspired to start the project after noticing how it was often 'black women pushing white babies around' on Manhattan's affluent Upper West Side. After spending four years scouring the streets for willing subjects she discovered the majority of caregivers, aged 23 to 60, were immigrants living on the minimum wage with no sick pay, holidays or health benefits.