Free Republic

Maybe San Franciscans aren't as blindly left as they appear to the rest of the country. First, Democrat mayor London Breed had to backtrack on defunding the police when faced with the reality of what happened after the police were defunded. Crime increased...a lot. Then the public recalled members of the school board who were more interested in pushing ideology than keeping schools open. Democrat district attorney Chesa Boudin didn't see or refused to see what was happening in his city. Residents grew tired of his failure to go after criminals and enforce laws. Boudin, a political newcomer, took office...

Colin Kaepernick celebrated “Unthanksgiving Day” by ripping the “US government” for having “stolen” over a “billion acres” from indigenous people, during an annual ceremony held in San Francisco, California, Thursday. “The US government has stolen over 1.5 billion acres of land from Indigenous people. Thank you to my Indigenous family, I’m with you today and always,” the former 49ers quarterback wrote in a tweet Thursday afternoon: Spent the morning at the Indigenous People’s Sunrise Ceremony on the 50 year anniversary of the Occupation of Alcatraz. The US government has stolen over 1.5 billion acres of land from Indigenous people. Thank...

25 Surprising Things About Alcatraz Only The Guards Knew Alcatraz holds a very special place in the minds of the US public. It has a certain image that has been carefully fostered by Hollywood films and more recently, by tourists’ visits to the site. It has a popular-culture reputation as an island prison designed to hold the most infamous and notorious of the nation's criminals. In the mind's eye, thugs and hooligans sit behind stone walls and plot various schemes for escape. And while all of this is accurate to a certain degree, there is so much more to...

The fate of the three inmates who successfully escaped from San Francisco’s Alcatraz prison in 1962 is one of America’s greatest unsolved mysteries. Their bodies were never found and the manhunt is still on 54 years later. But could a trio of common crooks really have survived paddling across the frigid, shark-infested waters surrounding The Rock on a makeshift raft cobbled together from raincoats? A newly surfaced letter has reignited hope that the so-crazy-it-just-might-work scheme — made legendary by the Clint Eastwood film “Escape from Alcatraz” — wasn’t just a success, but that one of the men may still be...

"My name is John Anglin. I escape from Alcatraz in June 1962 with my brother Clarence and Frank Morris. I'm 83 years old and in bad shape. I have cancer. Yes we all made it that night but barely!" The FBI says this is the most recent piece of evidence that forced the agency to reopen the iconic cold case. The letter was sent to the San Francisco Police Department's Richmond station in 2013. The writer makes a deal – "If you announce on TV that I will be promised to first go to jail for no more than a...

Colin Kaepernick made a surprise appearance at the Alcatraz Indigenous People's Sunrise Gathering on Thursday. A tradition since 1975, the annual dawn festivities, also known as Unthanksgiving Day, commemorate the 1969-71 occupation of Alcatraz by American Indians, during which 89 American Indian activists and leaders occupied the island and former penitentiary with the demands that it be turned into an Indian cultural center and school. Between traditional dancing and speeches, Kaepernick delivered a message of resistance and hope to the thousands gathered on the island

This point cloud animation of cell block D is totally fascinating.

The spying by the Obama administration on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump reportedly was even worse than what he has alleged. And it had nothing to do with Russia but everything to do with politics. Sources in the intelligence community claim the potentially illegal revealing of names, or unmasking, of people in the Trump camp who were under surveillance was done purely “for political purposes” to “hurt and embarrass (candidate) Trump and his team.” The bombshell revelations come from rank and file members of the intelligence community who are fighting back against a stonewall by the leaders at the nation’s spy...

Texas tourists Meredith Shindler and her 10-year-old Keaton visited the Golden Gate Bridge, Chinatown, the Exploratorium, Lombard Street and Pier 39. The Blue Angels whizzed over them in the sky. And they took a tour boat to Alcatraz Island. But the highlight of the entire four-day trip to San Francisco? A great white shark eating what appears to be a sea lion in the bay. "Yeah, Keaton's talking mostly about the shark," Shindler told NBC Bay Area on Wednesday in a phone interview from San Antonio after returning home. She captured the shark on her iPhone6 Plus on Saturday, just...

The evidence is offered up by the Anglins’ nephews David, 48, and Ken Widner, 54, who are featured in “Alcatraz: Search for the Truth,” a History Channel special airing Monday. The evidence has pumped life into the cold case, and has investigators lining up new interviews and planning to search South America for signs of America’s most notorious escapees. “This is absolutely the best actionable lead we’ve had,” Art Roderick, the retired US marshal who was lead investigator on the case for 20 years, tells The Post. The Anglin family sat on those leads for years because, they say, they were spied on and...

Three inmates who famously escaped from the US island prison Alcatraz had a small chance of making it to land alive - but the odds were stacked against them, a new study suggests. In 1962, the prisoners absconded using a raft, and were never seen again. A novel computer model now indicates that if they set off right at midnight, they could have made landfall. But if they left in the hours either side, it is very likely they died in the cold waters of San Francisco Bay. The study was carried out by scientists at Delft University and the...

The federal government shutdown claimed another casualty Monday - the annual American Indian ceremony on Alcatraz in protest of Columbus Day. Indian activists and their supporters could not take the morning ferry to Alcatraz, as they've done since the mid-1980s, for prayers, songs, dancing and speeches because the island - part of the National Park Service - is closed. Instead, they gathered at Pier 33, from where they usually depart, and marched to Washington Square Park in North Beach, heart of the city's Italian heritage and Columbus Day festivities, then headed for Coit Tower to protest by the Christopher Columbus...

As part of the traveling Alcatraz exhibit that is now on its premises, “Alcatraz: The Last Day” photo exhibition by Life Magazine photographer Leigh Wiener, the Embarcadero Center Hyatt is doing a a special Alcatraz themed dinner menu from August 8 through September 2. The actual three-course prix fixe menu ($28) includes dishes like clam chowder, meatloaf and “lettuce salad.” Plan accordingly everyone. That promotion is all well and good, but we thought we’d take the opportunity to run a very cool menu from Alcatraz. Pictured below is a copy of the weekly Alcatraz menu from September 2 to September...

Fifty years after three prisoners broke out of Alcatraz through a spoon-dug tunnel and launched a raft made of raincoats into the San Francisco Bay in a bid for freedom, a lone U.S. marshal is still looking for them. Whether inmates Frank Morris, 35, John Anglin, 32, and his brother Clarence Anglin, 31, made it to safety on June 11, 1962, or sank to a watery grave is not known. U.S. Marshal Michael Dyke, the only official investigator still assigned to the case, has an educated guess.

Millipedes that glow under black lights have been discovered for the first time on Alcatraz. “There are other millipedes out there that are bioluminescent — they give off their own light,” said Bob Kimsey, an entomology professor at the University of California, Davis, who is investigating whether the fluorescent millipedes are a newly discovered subspecies of Xystocheir dissecta, a species found in the Bay Area and elsewhere. ..

As I wrote in Saturday's editions of The Times, there will be a one-on-one basketball tournament on Alcatraz Island Saturday night, featuring 64 players from the U.S. and abroad playing for $10,000....Early prison code banned inmates from interacting with the outside world, but once a year, they played the World Series over the loudspeakers in the yard. “That was the only time I was there when they were allowed to listen to any kind of radio program,” Heaney said Then in the 1950s a radio system was installed for inmates to listen on headsets in their cells. That coincided with...

When I heard about the possibility that the terrorist detention camp at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base (Gitmo) will move to Alcatraz Island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, I got excited. Ideas from economic stimuli to renewed patriotism started flooding my mind. Here are the top 10 reasons I believe Gitmo should be moved to Alcatraz: 10. D-Block. Not the hip-hop group, but the row of solitary confinement cells at Alcatraz. Need I say more? (Of course, "Gitmo and the Golden Gates" might make a hit rap song, too.) 9. It is rumored that "Dirty Harry" (Clint Eastwood's...

The entire problem could be taken care of if Representative John Murtha from Pennsylvania simply switched districts with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi - that way, Murtha's offer to bring the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay to his district could mean the re-opening of Alcatraz (currently located in Pelosi's district). Pelosi, however, is not exactly warm to the idea of bringing terrorists to her district, no matter who represents it - not necessarily because they are cold-blooded murdering pond scum, or because they might have to be wrongly afforded the rights of Americans - but because it is a tourist...

San Francisco (AP) -- Along with prosaic proposals to renovate parks and tweak police retirement going before San Francisco voters next week is something just a little bit different: Proposition C, "Shall it be City policy that the City should explore and facilitate the acquisition of Alcatraz Island from the United States government to transform it into a Global Peace Center?" With no legal force or funding behind it, and a host of obstacles before it, not least of which is the act of Congress it would take to switch the island from federal to city hands, the measure's purely...

FORT SCOTT, Kan. (AP) – Willie Radkay, a former bank robber who was assigned a cell next to prohibition-era gangster Machine Gun Kelly while serving time at Alcatraz, died on his 95th birthday. Radkay, who died Sunday at Mercy Health Center at Fort Scott, had told reporters he was given the number 666 when he began a seven-year stint in 1945 at the San Francisco island prison dubbed "The Rock." In his later years, Radkay returned to the island for several reunions, where he was interviewed by documentary makers and newspaper reporters. "We used to hijack bootleggers and stick up...