Free Republic

Fire victims in Pacific Palisades say they are frustrated and confused after receiving brush clearance bills from the City of Los Angeles for properties where their homes once stood. What we know: Nearly 14 months after last year’s deadly fire destroyed thousands of homes across the community, some residents say they were mailed $31 notices citing alleged noncompliance with brush clearance rules — even though their lots remain empty and covered mostly in dirt. "This is one final blow. After everything that happened, they’re still trying to take money," said resident Christine Martinez, whose home was destroyed in the fire....

LATEST Feb. 18, 12:45 p.m. The CEO of California’s High-Speed Rail Authority is on voluntary leave after an arrest earlier this month at his Sacramento-area home, multiple outlets reported. Politico and the Los Angeles Times both reported that the rail authority confirmed Ian Choudri’s leave. The rail authority did not respond to SFGATE’s inquiry. “While CEO Choudri has informed the California High-Speed Rail Authority Board that he is not aware of any evidence of wrongdoing, he has voluntarily agreed to take a temporary leave to allow the Board and our parent agency, the California State Transportation Agency, to fully review...

California First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom has unloaded on reporters at a Sacramento press conference about Planned Parenthood — accusing the mostly female journalists of inflicting a “horrific war on women” by not asking on-topic questions. The rant was part of a Siebel Newsom press blitz Wednesday after the wife of California Gov. Gavin Newsom was featured in a glossy Marie Claire profile that discussed her marriage, activist documentaries, as well as her husband saying she’d be an ”extraordinary” First Lady, as he continues. “I think she’d be extraordinary in that role, even if she married someone else and they...

In the dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell wrote, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” The true meaning of that line was never more clear than watching the truly bizarre photo op of California governor Gavin Newsom heralding the success of the greatest boondoggle in history: his high-speed train to nowhere. Without laying a single yard of track after burning $12 billion, Newsom showed a diesel freight train on a conventional track to create the appearance of a working railroad.I have been writing about this boondoggle for...

Construction on part of the High-Speed Rail project came to a halt on Wednesday as crews battled a fire at the Church Avenue overpass in southeast Fresno. "There's a lot of plywood and lumber that's involved in this," Josh Sellers with Fresno Fire said. Workers, all unharmed, watched as firefighters attacked from above. "We have the railroad tracks here that we ended up having to close down and stop the trains because we have a ladder truck in place that's blocking the tracks," Sellers said.

U.N. human rights chief Volker Turk despaired Thursday his agency is “in survival mode” due to funding shortfalls driven by a lack of U.S. taxpayer dollars. Such is his fear for the future Turk launched a $400 million appeal for cash to help the U.N. Human Rights Office survive 2026, AFP reports. The unelected Austrian’s panicked plea comes after U.N. chief Antonio Guterres warned last Friday the world body is on the brink of financial collapse and could run out of cash by July, as he urged countries to pay their dues, as Breitbart News reported. The U.N.’s largest contributor,...

Do you remember that high-speed rail project in California that was supposed to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco and be completed in 2020? Well, it's finally ready to begin laying track on a much shorter section on a ludicrously bigger budget. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) proudly announced that the high-speed rail has entered the track-laying phase. In his words, “We are now in the process of starting to lay track.” (Emphasis added). This is not for the full Los Angeles-San Francisco line that was supposed to be done six years ago, but for a 119-mile stretch from Madera County...

The No. 1 job of a mayor, above everything else, is to keep his or her city functioning. Yet with people dying on the cold streets of New York and trash building up in parts of the city, New York is by no means functioning. Not even close. The snow and frigid temps have tested Gotham’s socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani and, alas, he has not risen to the occasion. Rather, he’s left the city a mess. Everest-size mountains of garbage have popped up. Unremoved snow, ice and road salt have damaged Con Edison electrical equipment, contributing to power outages. Most...

BALTIMORE (WBFF) — A nonprofit tied to Mayor Brandon Scott’s wife stopped operations after receiving roughly $100,000 in taxpayer money, leaving unanswered questions about whether those funds will be returned. ...

Billions in taxpayer money have disappeared in Minnesota...but it’s not just Minnesota. There are other blue states where billions in taxpayer funds seem to be unaccountable. What happened to the missing money? Obviously, it went into someone’s account, at times with the knowledge of state officials who may have received contributions or votes to remain silent, but into whose account? The contrast between New York and Florida in this regard, as in so much else, is revealing. The marginal income tax rate in New York state is 10.9% (nearly 15% in NYC ), along with sales taxes nearly 9% in...

High-flying gold and silver took a staggering hit in overnight trading with the precious metals losing roughly $6 trillion in just 30 minutes — as oil prices surge over fears over Iran. Gold tumbled back after hitting a new record at $5,595.47 an ounce as investors rushed to assets deemed safe, including silver, which reached its own record of $120.44 an ounce. The dollar steadied after losing ground most of this week. Gold declined more than five per cent and silver plunged more than eight per cent, while copper and nickel prices also fell, as traders reassessed the market. “The...

A documentary about a sitting first lady is unusual. A $40 million documentary, released theatrically while its subject occupies the White House and retains full editorial control, is something else entirely. That is the situation surrounding Melania, a feature-length documentary about Melania Trump, which premiered this week at Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center before a global theatrical rollout backed by Amazon MGM Studios. The film, which reportedly follows roughly 20 days surrounding the Trumps’ return to the White House, has sparked questions not because of what it reveals, but because of how, when and why it exists at all.From its price...

When Gavin Newsom launched CARE Court with great fanfare, he promised help for people with severe mental illness who go back and forth between homelessness, jail, and emergency rooms. The California Governor boasted that CARE Court would be a 'completely new paradigm' that would compassionately force people's mentally ill loved ones off the streets and into treatment via a judge's order – and estimated that up to 12,000 people could be helped. A State Assembly analysis said up to 50,000 people might be eligible. However after spending $236 million in taxpayer dollars on CARE Court since the March 2022 announcement,...

Donald Trump’s strangely artificial Board of Peace event in Davos on Thursday looked like a Hollywood rendering of an international summit. Everything was too slick, faintly uncanny. Like an AI-generated image, it was photo-real yet failed the most basic human glance test. Too perfect. No wabi-sabi. The first tell was visual: the set, complete with a crisp new institutional logo: a globe on a shield, flanked by olive branches. It carried the unmistakable whiff of Grok or ChatGPT, but the strangeness went deeper than design. The speeches themselves were weirdly messianic and utopian. The most peculiar part was the show-within-a-show:...

Leftist activist Nekima Levy Armstrong, who helped organize a disruptive protest at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Sunday, received more than $1 million in total compensation over a six-year period while leading a nonprofit focused on anti-poverty efforts. According to tax filings reported by Fox News, Armstrong served as executive director of the Wayfinder Foundation, a Minneapolis-based organization dedicated to community activism from 2019 to 2024. During that period, the foundation reported approximately $5.24 million in total revenue. Armstrong's compensation included about $936,395 in salary, plus $201,313 in additional benefits such as health coverage, plan contributions, and deferred...

A California NGO called Community Forward SF is running San Francisco’s Managed Alcohol Program The NGO is supposed to provide free alcohol shots for homeless alcoholics They’ve got $16 million per year for 5 years and have ONLY SERVED 55 CLIENTS $80 MILLION DOLLARS “One of these organizations in San Francisco which is supposed to be providing free shots of alcohol to homeless alcoholics. And in five years, at $16 million dollars a year, they've served 55 clients — This is tax money and it buys free shots of booze to street drunks.”

As a sweeping fraud scandal grips Minnesota, a conservative energy watchdog is encouraging lawmakers to scrutinize billions of dollars in Department of Energy grants they say were rushed out the door in the final weeks of the Biden administration, warning that internal red flags were ignored and taxpayer money may have been exposed to waste and political favoritism. Power the Future founder and director Daniel Turner sent a letter to Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Monday, calling on lawmakers...

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was told over the weekend that a new Nick Shirley video being released soon - maybe even as early as Monday — is "ten times worse" than the "Quality Learing Center" daycare scam. In Shirley's previous video, he and his source, David Hoch, who has been investigating this billion-dollar-plus scam for years, discovered multiple daycare centers in one building without children in them for years. And this is where Hoch says is the heart of the ongoing continuing criminal enterprise. Hoch says the new video will show that most of these companies are Somali-owned, and...

Kids on the autism spectrum are facing challenges as Minnesota implements measures to prevent fraud in social service programs. State's new preapproval processWhat we know: The state is now conducting preapproval reviews on Medicaid claims in 14 high-risk areas, including autism centers. This means businesses like Holland Autism Centers have had their claims held, with no payments expected for up to 90 days. Jennifer Larson, founder of Holland Autism Centers, expressed concern over the financial strain this delay is causing. "They can hold funds according to the federal government up to 90 days. Well, 90 days is a whole quarter....

We often think about human-induced climate change as something that will happen in the future, but it is happening now. Ecosystems and people in the United States and around the world are affected by the ongoing process of climate change today. Climate change affects the environment in many different ways, including rising temperatures, sea level rise, drought, flooding, and more. These events affect things that we depend upon and value, like water, energy, transportation, wildlife, agriculture, ecosystems, and human health.