Free Republic

More than 100 people were shot in Chicago over the course of one of the bloodiest Fourth of July weekends in the city's recent history. Police in Chicago are conducting a "very comprehensive review" after 15 people were killed and 86 others injured in shootings between late Friday afternoon and early Wednesday, the Chicago Tribune reports. "The mood here is frustration," Chicago Police Department chief spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi told the Tribune. "It's perplexing. We deployed some very successful tactics over the Memorial Day weekend," he added. Police said their review would include analysis of whether an audio system that pinpoints...

A quality of life study conducted by the website 24/7 Wall Street formulated a list of the 50 worst cities to live in America, and some commonly referenced shanty towns headline it. The 50 worst cities list was not kind to the state of Michigan, which contributed two cities to the top 10, and is home to the number one worst city to live in the US: Detroit.

More than half a million Angelenos stand to get a raise this weekend, making the city the latest testing ground in the drive to boost incomes of bottom-rung workers. Some businesses, facing a labor crunch, didn’t even wait for the new, $12 minimum wage to officially kick in. Josh Loeb started doling out pay bumps among the 400 employees of his six mostly upscale restaurants about a month ago. He paid for it by inching up prices at those Santa Monica haunts, adding a dollar to an organic chicken, and 50 cents to a sandwich or salad. “It’s got to...

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote: “a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” Seattle’s Minimum Wage Ordinance, passed in 2014, exemplifies courageous experimentation by a local government. The ordinance aims to increase earnings of low-wage workers as one response to the troubling rise in income inequality and stagnant wages of low-wage workers. There is national and international interest in knowing how it is working. Unfortunately, not all social experiments work entirely as planned. On April 1, 2015, the...

Lee Smith was one of the first homeless people to pitch a tent near 26th and Wood streets in West Oakland. Now, four years later, he has 100 neighbors, including two pregnant women. The place looks like a Third World shantytown, a village for the city’s poorest on the fringes of its bustling center. It’s one of about 100 such sprawling encampments in Oakland, and they’re not going away anytime soon. They’re likely to get even bigger. Just as the Bay Area’s tech boom has reshaped Oakland in different ways than it has San Francisco, so has its homeless crisis....

If downtown is the heartbeat of Minneapolis, then its collective soul resides on Hennepin Avenue, the corridor that’s long served as its cultural, commercial, and entertainment epicenter. But these days, visitors aren’t seeing the intoxicating glimmer Schmidt beheld so long ago. Talk to civic leaders, downtown workers, and couples descending from Burnsville, and they’ll tell you to drive down Hennepin with the windows open once the sun has called it day. If you watch and listen, the feeling isn’t one of good vibrations. It’s energy with a serrated edge, the vibe that comes from a city turning mean. Apocalypse now...

NEW YORK — A law enforcement official says the gunman who opened fire at a New York City hospital was a doctor who formerly worked there. The official says Dr. Henry Bello walked into Bronx Lebanon Hospital at about 2:50 p.m. Friday with a rifle concealed in his lab coat and opened fire, killing at least one person and injuring six others. He then apparently killed himself.

WASHINGTON – Four days after his inauguration, President Donald Trump threatened to “send in the Feds” if Chicago could not stop its “horrible carnage,” and on Thursday, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that’s just what he did. In a Twitter post on Friday morning, Trump said, “Crime and killings in Chicago have reached such epidemic proportions that I am sending in Federal help. 1714 shootings in Chicago this year!” According to the Chicago Sun-Times’ count, 1,737 people have been shot this year, 306 of them fatally. Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s City Hall was aware that the Trump administration was mustering some additional...

Despite spending more per pupil than all but two large school districts in America, at least half a dozen government schools in Baltimore were unable to produce one single student who was proficient in either English or math last year. The shocking results, uncovered by Project Baltimore, show a monumental tragedy unfolding in the city that represents a microcosm of the damage being inflicted on children across America. The proficiency tests put students in five categories, with four and five considered proficient, and one through three considered not proficient.

Hundreds of thousands of revelers descended on Market Street on Sunday morning to join the explosion of color and chest-thumping music as the 47th annual Pride Parade took over downtown San Francisco.

Six people were killed and at least two others wounded in separate shootings in Baltimore Monday night and early Tuesday morning, prompting Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis to announce a weeklong deployment initiative to put more officers on the street. Effective immediately, all patrol officers and detectives will be required to work 12-hour shifts, rather than their standard 10-hour shifts, and every sworn officer in the department capable of being deployed will be deployed, Davis said. Davis called the latest spate of violence — in a record-setting year for it — "unconscionable," and said he joined community members in being...

In the past year, Miami Beach Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez positioned herself as a liberal fighting for the rights of disadvantaged black and brown Americans. At a protest against Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez's decision to comply with President Trump's sanctuary-city ban, Rosen Gonzalez swore to protect the city's massive population of people of color, repeatedly telling Gimenez that Miami is a "city of immigrants." She also spoke out against Trump and the current Republican Party at the Miami Women's March and a February 23 protest organized by the anti-Trump group Indivisible. But in an email sent over the weekend,...

Property developer Gil Dezer owns 29 cars. And he plans to admire some of them from his couch in a swank Miami high-rise building, with the ocean in the background. Dezer is planning to park the cars IN his apartment. Miami's 60-floor Porsche Design Tower -- the first of its kind in the world -- has glass-enclosed elevators that bring sports cars up to the plush homes of their owners. The residential skyscraper, which has 132 units and opened in March, is the latest of several super-luxury buildings dotting the Miami coastline. But what if you don't own a Porsche?...

Six people have been killed, including a 15-year-old boy, and at least 44 other people have been wounded in Chicago shootings throughout the Memorial Day weekend. The shootings happened between 6 p.m. Friday and 3 a.m. Tuesday, with a late surge of violence leaving 13 people shot in less than four hours Monday night. The most recent fatal shooting happened around 2:45 a.m. Tuesday. A 21-year-old man was inside a vehicle when someone fire shots at the car, striking the man multiple times, once in the back and through his heart, police said. The man was taken to John H....

BALTIMORE (WBFF) -- A Project Baltimore investigation has found five Baltimore City high schools and one middle school do not have a single student proficient in the state tested subjects of math and English.We sat down with a teen who attends one of those schools and has overcome incredible challenges to find success.Navon Warren grew up in West Baltimore. He was three months old when his father was shot to death. Before his 18th birthday, he would lose two uncles and a classmate, all gunned down on the streets of Baltimore.“I’ve lost a lot of people, so I’m used to...

<p>Denver Colorado is about to smell worse than piss-soaked shit-stained San Francisco. The city voted to essentially decriminalize public urination and defecation and the reason is as liberal as it gets. The city is now becoming a giant toilet to help protect illegal aliens from deportation. Denver is not only a sanctuary city for criminal immigrant scumbags but also now a sanctuary for human waste.</p>

The world’s most powerful nation states are flirting with catastrophic conflict. Whether it is in Europe, Asia or the Middle East, for the first time since the 1960s we are facing a real possibility of nuclear confrontation. With nation states distracted, the threat of irreversible climate change also looms large. Global anxiety is feeding the growth of nationalist movements, emboldened by the drum beat of populism. Anti-immigrant and anti-establishment parties are capitalizing on public disquiet, gaining footholds in political systems across the planet. But as alarming as all this sounds, there are opportunities to head off potential disaster. One of...

Last week, I wrote an article titled The Ferguson Effect: Baltimore Millennials’ Worst Nightmare. The Ferguson Effect is a theory where the increased scrutiny of police post 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Trayvon Martin in Florida will lead to higher crime rates. Baltimore is turning this theory into a reality, as the city descends into chaos before summer start. According to The Baltimore Sun Newspaper, the city has logged in 118 homicides today with the projection of >400 murders for year’s end. It’s so bad here that Baltimore’s Mayor has asked the Federal Government for help...

The bid by Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis for mayor — even if she loses — is the best thing to happen to New York Republicans in a long time. While President Trump and national Republicans continue a misguided campaign to intimidate immigrants and strip funding from cities, local party leaders have been trying to present a different face of Republicanism to a voting public growing younger and more diverse every day. Malliotakis fits the bill. She is the daughter of immigrants from Cuba and Greece, and at age 36 counts as a millennial, winning acclaim in 2013 as one of the...

Doctors found bound, slain in luxury Boston condo, suspect captured after police shootout A couple found brutally slain in their high-rise Boston penthouse were identified on Saturday as respected doctors, police said. Cops reportedly found victims Richard Field, 49, and fiancée Lina Bolanos, 38, dead with their throats slashed inside a bloodied 11th floor apartment at 141 Dorchester Ave. around 8 p.m. Friday after a violent shootout with the couple’s suspected killer. The couple's hands were bound and their bodies mutilated, the Boston Globe reports, citing a source close to the investigation. Blood coated the wall, the paper added.