Free Republic

HOUSTON – A 25 year-old resident of Houston has been ordered to federal prison after he threatened two young girls and required them to engage in commercial sex, announced U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Patrick.A Houston federal jury deliberated for one hour before returning a guilty verdict against Romello Lee following less than three days of trial on March 6. He was convicted on one count of trafficking a minor for commercial sex and one count of trafficking a minor by force for commercial sex.Today, U.S. District Judge David Hittner sentenced Lee to serve a total of 480 months in federal...

So when does the other shoe drop? Who’s going to break the story proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the president of the United States is so deeply connected to Russian President Vladimir Putin that the White House has become a Muscovite colony in all but name? Time to use some common sense—it’s not going to happen, there is no story. ... Barrett had Trump on a whole variety of issues, but check the records yourself—up until the day of his death, the day before Trump’s inauguration, there’s nothing on Trump and Putin. ... The Russia story is...

The Village Voice, a New York journalism staple and the country's first alternative newspaper, announced Friday it will no longer continue to publish stories after more than 60 years. "This is a sad day for The Village Voice and for millions of readers. The Voice has been a key element of New York City journalism and is read around the world," said the Voice's owner, Peter Barbey, in a statement. "As the first modern alternative newspaper, it literally defined a new genre of publishing." "Although the Voice will not continue publishing, we are dedicated to ensuring that its legacy will...

Vogue's Lynn Yaeger (left) is blinded by a mad hatred of Trump - and can't even see her own reflection. Despite being the last to lecture anyone on how to dress, Yaeger now trashes the fashion sense of Melania Trump, joining other Trump haters in one of the most insane hate-fests yet: Oh, Melania. In the words of the late, great Lou Reed, you “couldn’t hit it sideways.”... This morning, Mrs. Trump boarded Air Force One wearing a pair of towering pointy-toed snakeskin heels better suited to a shopping afternoon on Madison Avenue or a girls’ luncheon at La Grenouille....

After more than 60 years, the Village Voice is shutting down its weekly print edition. Founded in 1955 and converted into a free weekly in 1996, the Voice built its name as one of the country’s first alt-weeklies by covering and critiquing New York politics, culture, and more with its distinctive downtown sensibility. The progressive alt-weekly plans to continue on in digital form, according to an announcement from Peter Barbey, who purchased it in October 2015 amid financial struggles, and will also continue to sponsor events like the Obie Awards and Pride Awards. “[The Voice] has been a beacon for...

Investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, a scourge of New York City power brokers from Rudolph Giuliani to Mike Bloomberg during a decades-long career with the Village Voice and an early and tenacious chronicler of President-elect Donald Trump, died Thursday at age 71. Barrett, who had been battling interstitial lung disease, died at NYU Langone Medical Center, his family told The Associated Press. […] Few reporters knew Trump as well as did Barrett, whose death came less than a day before Trump was to be sworn in as the country’s 45th president. He began covering the budding real-estate developer in the late...

FULL TITLE: Mother 'tried to sell daughter, FOUR, for sex to a man she had met through online prostitution ad' A Michigan mother has been charged with offering her 4-year-old daughter for sex to a man she had met on a classifieds website. Jennifer Brys, 25, and Edward Reardon, 26, were arraigned Wednesday on charges of child sexually abusive activity and using a computer to commit a crime. According to investigators, Miss Brys, of Warren, placed an ad on Backpage.com last month offering her services as a prostitute. Scroll down for video

If these aren’t the end times, I fear what those might look like. The country’s pioneering alt-weekly, New York City’s Village Voice, has experienced sharp decreases in ad revenue, circulation and staff in recent years. As the paper continues efforts to keep its head above water, a turnoverfilled May has perhaps sounded the paper’s figurative demise, suggesting that its literal end may come sooner than later. On May 9, the Voice’s parent company, Voice Media Group, informed editors of its plan to restructure the paper, which involved further staff cuts. Upon hearing the plans, Editor in Chief Will Bourne and...

The New York Times is very good at what it does — which nowadays involves a lot of lying in service to a leftist agenda. There are the outright lies (such as the paper’s recent distortion of a police bias trial to make the NYPD appear racist), the lies of omission (such as its lack of full reporting on the Obama administration’s fatal acts of malfeasance and dishonesty in, say, the Benghazi and Fast and Furious scandals), and the atmospheric lies (such as its rose-colored reporting on the disastrous economy in bluer-than-blue California). Altogether, these lies combine to make the...

Miami- Senator Marco Rubio was given a tour of a secret “stash house” that is used by organized human trafficking rings and then addressed the media to call the public’s attention to the illegal multi-billion dollar a year human trafficking industry. Rubio pulled no punches when he called out the liberal Village Voice media outlet for its “egregious” exploitation of young women who are part of the growing human trafficking epidemic that is increasingly gripping the country. I want to take a moment to call attention to one of the most egregious things going on across our country, and that’s...

The death of the Village Voice has drawn out a coterie of mourners bowing their heads over the venerable radical rag, but their orations at its funeral are completely wasted. The death of the Voice is not due to mismanagement, the right wing or its complicity in human trafficking. After all, its former competitor, the New York Press, which forced it to go free instead of charging a buck fifty, died fairly recently. The end of the Village Voice has to be seen in the context of the death of alternative media. The passing of the Village Voice, its thick...

Meranda Warborg was arrested this week. The 29-year-old Minneapolis woman was charged with prostituting two young girls, 15 and 17 years of age, who ran away from their homes in Eau Claire, Wiscconsin. The girls told police that Warborg kept them drugged up with, variously, cocaine, crystal meth, heroin and ecstasy. She also assigned them a bedroom where they provided sex for pay to dirty old men. Police tracked down Warborg through a cell phone number accompanying an online advertisement she posted on Backpage.com – but of course – featuring her under-aged lingerie-clad call girls in suggestive poses. Against that...

I don't think I ever want to meet Steven Thrasher in person. Aside from the fact that the NPR and Village Voice contributor has an ominously violent last name, this dude is p!ssed. Despite this, I'll admit that while reading his recent Voice cover essay on the insanity of white America, I occasionally pictured myself giving Mr. Thrasher a hug. Don't worry, Steven, I'd whisper: Christine O'Donnell is down 15 percent in Delaware. The Islamic community center near Ground Zero will soon be a reality. A single tweet from Sarah Palin doesn't signal the end of white American sanity. (In fact, there is...

If you're like us, the first impulse you had after seeing your first oil-soaked seagull was to rip off your clothes and hop on a bike. This Saturday, you can do just that in the company of strangers at the Miami World Naked Bike Ride to protest our nation's dependence on that gooey, wildlife-killing, black gold. OK, so the organizers put an asterisk next to the word nudity, encouraging imaginative costumes and well-placed body paint. In other words, bare as much as you dare. World Naked Bike Ride is an international movement, practiced in cities like Vancouver, British Columbia and...

SAN FRANCISCO -- A new court order clears the way for the Bay Guardian to try to raid the financial holdings of the archrival SF Weekly, its parent company and 16 other publications owned by the firm, including New York's Village Voice, to collect on a $21 million lawsuit judgment. Commissioner Bruce Slavit of San Francisco Superior Court granted the Bay Guardian's request Wednesday to place a lien on the Weekly's holding company, New Times Media, and the firm's interests in the Village Voice newspaper chain. Jay Adkisson, the Guardian's lawyer, said Thursday that the lien would enable the newspaper...

Did The Mafia Infiltrate The Gay Rights Movement? This has been a week of marches and open confrontations between Uncle Toms (or Auntie Gays) who have been siding with the syndicate, and the liberationists and revolutionaries who are seeking alternatives to the back room clip joints. Cleverly, Michael Umbers in his public appearances has placed his emphasis of the after-hours raids on police harassment of his good friends, “the poor homosexuals,” thereby diluting the impact of syndicate control and manipulating, via media, the current thrust of the issue. Umbers is shifting the heat from his own hot seat to the...

SAN FRANCISCO -- The $21 million war between San Francisco's alternative newspapers heated up in court Monday when the Bay Guardian asked for a stake in all property belonging to the rival SF Weekly and its parent company, the 14-paper Village Voice Media. Nearly two years after a San Francisco jury found that SF Weekly had engaged in illegal price-cutting for advertisements to try to ruin the Bay Guardian, the Guardian has gotten court orders that allowed it to seize and sell its rival's two delivery trucks and confiscate the rents the Weekly receives from tenants in its office space...

They had one of those Tea Parties in Ely, Nevada recently, and tea-partier laureate Lloyd Marcus, accompanied by some lady rebels in a kick-line, performed a version of "New York, New York" with some new lyrics. "Start spreading the news... we're taking back America/In 2010," he croons. "This socialist nightmare/must come to an end/Cause we're gonna vote them out/In 2010/I wanna wake up in an America where I can speak as I please..." Then he takes it to the bridge: "I wanna find my freedom restored/ACORN is out/No Obama something something something... My Obama blues/Will soon melt away..." Maybe he...

This character defamation is not what I wanted to wake up to this morning, but as NewsReal continues to grow it's something we'll have to grow accustomed to accompanying each morning's breakfast. I've always taken my morning coffee black, though I guess now I'll have to down it with two lumps of leftist lies. It appears NewsReal is now officially part of the "Right-Wing Blogosphere," as it made the regular round-up at the leftist Village Voice's feature "The Voice Explores the Right-Wing Blogosphere." Heh, Lies About the Right-Wing Blogosphere is more accurate. Though this shouldn't be a surprise coming from...

As you may have heard, there is among certain people a controversy as whether Barack Obama was really born in the United States.