Free Republic

Here’s your photo of the week: Columbia University janitor Mario Torres slams 40-year-old trust fund kid James Carlson against the wall in Hamilton Hall with rabid leftists stormed the building late at night last Tuesday. HAVE TO SEE PIC AT SITE...GETTY IMAGES CAN'T POST........... Mario Torres makes around $19 per hour. James Carlson owns in a $3.4 million townhouse in Brooklyn. Mario Torres fought off the anti-Israel protesters when they stormed Hamilton Hall and took control of the building. Torres later told reporter Francesca Block that the protesters were organized and their occupation of the building was planned.

Prosecutors added counts to existing Trump charges in superseding indictment Document says they obtained 'war plans' document mentioned on tape New aide Carlos De Oliveira is now charged New text has De Oliveira telling aide '"the boss" wanted the server deleted' Former President Donald Trump asked an aide to delete Mar-a-Lago surveillance footage in a bid to wipe evidence in the classified documents investigation, prosecutors charge in a dramatic superseding indictment revealed Thursday. Among the charges is that the former president allegedly told aides to 'wipe' security footage from his Florida club's server as a way to foil investigators probing...

It could be the plot of a dark comedy if it weren’t a science tragedy. A janitor working in a laboratory who was annoyed by an incessant beep reportedly flipped a switch that killed the noise — but also shut off a storage freezer, destroying decades of scientific work, according to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute lab in Troy. The cleaner’s alleged carelessness cost the lab at least $1 million in damages, a lawsuit the university filed against its third-party cleaning service charges. “People’s behavior and negligence caused all this,” Michael Ginsberg, RPI’s attorney, told the Times Union in Albany. “Unfortunately,...

He is known to the students of Callisburg High School as Mr. James. Callisburg is a rural town in Texas, near the Oklahoma border, and has a population of roughly 300 people.Mr. James is an octogenarian retiree who recently fell on hard times. His rent was raised by $400 which would make survival simply impossible on his existing savings.But he didn’t complain or look for handouts.Instead, he abandoned retirement, put on his work shoes, and joined Callisburg High School as a janitor. He had a career in a different field previously.Mr. James quickly developed a reputation for being a dedicated...

Multiple companies in Texas are facing a lawsuit for employing a janitor accused of urinating into employee water bottles and thereby infecting more than a dozen victims with sexually transmitted diseases. The lawsuit, stemming from the October arrest of janitor Lucio Catarino Diaz, was filed on behalf of 13 women who say the janitor urinated in their water bottles on the job in an East Houston office building which resulted in positive tests for the herpes simplex 1 virus, KRIV-TV reported. In a press release, Houston law firm Abraham, Watkins, Nichols, Agosto, Aziz & Stogner alleges that the companies employing...

I fully admit that in my previous lives as a campaign staffer, presidential campaign manager and Democrat Party official, my own lack of civility in the heat of battle has been on full display. And it wasn’t pretty. I should have been wise enough and humble enough to have listened to my mother, Jean, who so often would tell me, the third of nine children, to shut up and allow my siblings to speak, and to listen - really listen - to what they had to say. She knew I wasn’t listening so much as I was pausing before launching...

RICHMOND, Va. — Explaining that he had no idea he was even in the line of succession to become the leader of the Commonwealth, Frank Donahue, the State Capitol’s head janitor, arrived at work to discover that he was now Virginia’s governor, sources confirmed Thursday. “This is all a shock to me,” Donahue remarked. Despite having spent the past seven years making sure the bathrooms outside of the Senate Chamber are clean, he is now poised to become the state’s governor due to his noticeably clean background. “I had overheard about the stuff Northam, Fairfax, and Herring were going through,...

As BART’s ridership surged three years ago, along with the number of homeless people lingering inside its downtown San Francisco stations, the transit system doubled down on custodial work — and some of its janitors started cleaning up paywise. One system service worker, BART’s title for janitors, made a little more than $271,000 in 2015, with $162,050 of that in overtime. A year later, two other BART janitors joined him in collecting more than $100,000 in overtime pay in a year. Three years later — after the tale of the high-earning BART janitor became legend and the transit system, and...

Houston Astros catcher and designated hitter Evan Gattis’ journey to becoming a World Series champion is as unconventional as it is inspiring... A three-and-a-half-year personal journey took him to Colorado, where he flipped pizzas and worked as a ski lift operator, according to the New York Times. He then moved back to his home state, where he worked as a janitor for commercial cleaning company Jan-Pro in Dallas.

Last November, a nonprofit called Transparent California reported that a BART janitor named Liang Zhao Zhang made $271,000 in a single year — over $162,000 of that in the form of overtime. Now, a KTVU investigation into Zhang's hours and pay revealed that he disappears into a storage closet at the Powell St. station, sometimes for hours a day. In order to observe how Zhang spent his sometimes 17-hour work day, KTVU requested surveillance video from BART. On it, they saw Zhang entering a storage closet twice in one day, once for 54 minutes and again for 90 minutes later...

The janitor working at a California-based Planned Parenthood clinic caught selling aborted babies to StemExpress does very well financially. As LifeNews reported, some of the expose’ videos have featured Holly O’Donnell, a licensed phlebotomist who unsuspectingly took a job as a “procurement technician” at the fetal tissue company and biotech start-up StemExpress in late 2012. That’s the company that acts as a middleman and purchases the body parts of aborted babies from Planned Parenthood to sell to research universities and other places. StemExpress was partnered with Planned Parenthood up until last week, when it quietly announced it ended its relationship...

You may have read about the remarkable life and times of Ronald Read. He was the gas station attendant and lifelong resident of Windham County, Vt., who had quietly accumulated a portfolio worth a fortune. As the Brattleboro ­Reformer reported earlier this year, Read died last June at age 92. Despite his relatively modest wages, he left an estate with “stock holdings and property” valued at nearly $8 million. His bequest was to leave most of it to the Brattleboro Memorial Hospital and Brooks Memorial Library. His close friends and family were shocked when they learned the value of his...

Monday through Friday, my full-time job is cleaning restrooms at Van Nuys High School. But that work is not the hardest part of my life. The hardest part is saying goodbye to my 4-year-old son when he asks me not to go to work again. In order to make ends meet, I also work weekends and nights. I know I’m lucky to have a full-time job as a facility attendant in the Los Angeles Unified School District. I’ve done that for 10 years, and some days are better than others, but I like the work, and my co-workers are a...

When Newton Murray — everyone calls him Mr. Newton — moved from his native Trinidad to Tampa, Florida, he went to Harry H. Bell & Sons cold storage facility and applied for a job as a janitor. He got the job, and began sweeping and cleaning 90,000 square feet of enclosed warehouse space, plus parking lots and loading docks, for minimum wage. That was 33 years ago. Since then, the now 99-year-old man has never arrived for work late, never left work early, never said no, and never asked for – or received – a raise. In 2000, the...

An Ohio school board has unanimously voted to place armed custodians on their k-12 campus in an effort to better protect their students from a future mass shooting. Following Wednesday's believed unprecedented 5-0 vote in the state, four male janitors were the first to volunteer to arm themselves with their own handguns on the rural Montpelier campus, the Toledo Blade reports. The vote will permit only non-teaching employees to carry the firearms on the campus, so long as they complete a weapons training course. 'It's kind of a sign of the times,' Superintendent Jamies Grime said on Friday. The move...

At first, Minneapolis janitor Rosalina Gomez said she didn't realize she was cleaning up after the CEO of the bank that bought her foreclosed home in a September sheriff's sale. "At the beginning I didn't know he was the guy," said Gomez through an interpreter in an interview with HuffPost. "I didn't know the relationship between my house and him. I saw him one time but never talked to him." The guy is Richard Davis, CEO of Minneapolis-based US Bank, the nation's sixth-largest bank and recipient of $6.6 billion in TARP bailout funds. On Feb. 28, Davis was set to...

(ST. GEORGE)—Charges have been filed against a custodian at Sunrise Ridge Intermediate School in St. George for assaulting a 16-year-old girl. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Richard Burditt is charged with felony forcible sex abuse, lewdness and voyeurism, among other charges. Police say they became aware of the relationship, which occurred when the girl was at Sunrise Ridge, when the girl’s mother called police. Officers say Burditt and the girl had been sexually involved for more than two years, and that he admitted to the relationship when questioned.

Schools With Good Teachers Are Best-Suited to Shape Young Minds By Dave Arnold There's nothing like having the right person with the right experience, skills and tools to accomplish a specific task. Certain jobs are best left to the pros, such as, formal education. There are few homeowners who can tackle every aspect of home repair. A few of us might know carpentry, plumbing and, let’s say, cementing. Others may know about electrical work, tiling and roofing. But hardly anyone can do it all. Same goes for cars. Not many people have the skills and knowledge to perform all repairs...