Free Republic

Ezequiel Romo had been gone a long time. He went to prison in 1996. When he returned to Panorama City 18 years later, he didn't like what he saw. He was going to "clean out house," Romo told another veteran of his gang. He would rid the neighborhood of rivals, of informants, of drug addicts and the do-nothings he considered dead weight. Prosecutors said the 45-year-old made good on that promise: On Romo's orders, members of his gang, Blythe Street, turned on and killed one another in a string of murders that left eight dead, according to evidence presented at...

The FBI has opened a probe into an antisemitic assault on a Las Vegas Jewish teen with autism who came home from school with a swastika carved into his back, according to Newsweek. The 17-year-old boy who wears a kippah is non-verbal. He uses a service dog to go to school at Clark High School in Las Vegas, the Jewish Press reported. In the incident, the boy’s service dog’s equipment bag was also vandalized. The teen’s mother told the news outlet that Clark High School refused to take her complaint seriously. The mother questioned how the boy’s assistant could have...

Loud music by the likes of Beethoven, Mozart and Vivaldi has been blaring inside the Westlake/MacArthur Park Metro station, along with the blinding effects of floodlights, the LA Times reported. The push is part of a pilot program launched in January using a royalty-free playlist to drive out the homeless and cut down on crime — but some critics have described the sonorous strategy as tone-deaf torture that fails to address the underlying problems. The tactic of using loud music with ulterior motives is nothing new.

UPDATE: I did not know about the Nashville school shooting until after I sent out this story. I did not intend to make a political statement of any kind about the victims from the Covenant School. I pray for the families and the school.As president, Donald Trump privately pushed for banning AR-15-type rifles, according to a new report. Trump was — and is — a big defender of Second Amendment rights. So the new revelation is surprising that he tried to renew the “assault weapon” ban during his first two years in office. The news about Trump is buried in...

Teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) went on a three-day strike Tuesday as negotiations fell apart and the district’s two unions walked off the job, leaving families in the lurch. Working parents scrambled to find child care options and alternate activities during the midweek strike. The first day of the strike happened to coincide with the start of yet another storm, limiting outdoor possibilities. As Breitbart News reported last week, the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) is striking in solidarity with Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 99, the union that is at the heart of the...

For the first time in the state’s history, Republicans have a supermajority in Louisiana. Republicans now have a 70-vote supermajority and can override a veto by the state’s Democrat governor John Bel Edwards. On Friday, the longest-serving Democrat in the Louisiana state legislature Rep. Francis Thompson announced he was switching parties. Thompson has served in the legislature since 1975. This action by Thompson doesn’t come as much of a surprise as his voting record shows that the had been caucusing with the Republicans. Thompson gave a statement after announcing the switch, “Let me clear. Nothing has changed, there are values...

A massive police response was deployed Wednesday night in east Los Angeles after three officers were shot. The shooting took place some time after 6 p.m. near the intersection of Mission Road and North Broadway in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood. Video from Sky5 showed a large perimeter set up around the scene for what appeared to be a barricaded suspect.

Authorities with the Los Angeles Police Department on Monday released the photos of three men in custody for unrelated cases of attempted murder in hopes additional victims of unreported aggravated assault or attempted murder involving the suspects will come forward. The first incident occurred Dec. 15, around 9:30 p.m., in a parking lot located in the 3200 block of West Florence Avenue. The suspect, identified as 18-year-old Kaleb Cotton, who was armed with a handgun, approached a vehicle with four occupants, two women and two men, and fired multiple rounds into the car. One of the men was hit in...

In the aftermath of the shooting of two Jewish men in a heavily Orthodox Los Angeles neighborhood last week, Mayor Karen Bass told 400 people attending a local town hall on violence against Jews that antisemitism “goes against our humanity.” Speaking to an audience in the YULA Orthodox Boys High School gym that was painted yellow and black, symbolizing the yellow star Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis, Bass condemned the shootings. She also emphasized that she would hire more police officers and would institute programs to place extra cameras and license plate readers in the city, the...

Los Angeles, California city officials announced a new public safety initiative which implements yoga, meditation and healing circles to homeless communities as an alternative form of unarmed policing. The initiative's launch cost the city of Los Angeles $2.2 million in city funding. At a briefing on Monday, Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez, who chairs the City Council's public safety committee, announced the Project TURN initiative-which stands for Therapeutic Unarmed Response for Neighborhoods. The initiative aims at providing trauma training and services to 100 community intervention workers to tackle retaliatory violence. "Community-based public safety workers are regularly exposed to high trauma environments and...

Los Angeles County supervisors are pushing a .50 cal. rifle ban after a 9mm pistol was used in the January 21, 2023, Monterey Park, California, mass shooting. Breitbart News noted the Monterey shooter killed 11 people with a 9mm pistol. Two days later, another attacker used a pistol to kill seven in Half Moon Bay. On February 6, 2023, KTLA reported LA County supervisors are weighing a ban on .50 caliber rifles and .50 caliber ammo in response to the 9mm killings. They are also weighing a county wide gun registry, a liability insurance requirement for gun owners, and a...

A cousin of Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors died after a Los Angeles police officer used a Taser on him repeatedly following a traffic accident. The incident happened on Jan. 3 and involved Los Angeles resident Keenan Darnell Anderson. The police department released body-camera video of Anderson's arrest Wednesday.

For a while during the runup to the elections last month, it looked as if former Republican real estate developer Rick Caruso might pull off a miracle and defeat Democratic Congresswoman Karen Bass to become the next Mayor of Los Angeles. In the end, Bass squeaked out a six-point victory and will be inaugurated as the first female Mayor in the city’s history. Out on the campaign trail, Bass made a point of repeatedly promising to tackle the city’s endemic homelessness crisis. Not coincidentally, a large group of homeless people have been living in an encampment that activists set up...

Los Angeles County may soon reimpose indoor mask mandates as COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations continue to rise in the area. During a press conference Thursday, LA County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said the largest county in the United States had reached "medium" COVID-19 transmission levels and will require face coverings if it reaches the "high" category. As of Dec. 1, Los Angeles County is averaging 2,490 new COVID-19 infections every day, the highest number recorded since Aug. 26, according to health department data. Ferrer said the real count is likely much higher due to several people testing positive with...

Anyone still wearing a face mask to protect himself from Covid probably has no intention of ever shedding it now. Residents may no longer even have a choice in Los Angeles, where local health officials pledge to reinstate mandates as soon as next week. On Thursday, Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer threatened the return of an indoor mask mandate if rates of hospitalization attributed to Covid continue to climb. “If both hospitalization indicators, new COVID-19 admissions and the proportion of staffed in-patient beds occupied by COVID patients, surpass the threshold for high, LA County will return to...

The FBI’s director on Nov. 15 declined to answer when he was asked whether the bureau had confidential informants among the supporters of then-President Donald Trump on Jan. 6, 2021.“Did the FBI have confidential human sources embedded within the Jan. 6 protesters on Jan. 6 of 2021?” Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) asked Christopher Wray, the director and a Trump appointee, during a hearing in Washington.“As I’m sure you can appreciate, I have to be very careful about what I can say, about when we do and do not, and where we have and have not used confidential human sources,” Wray...

by Becca London | RNNWith a "red wave" expected to hit the midterm elections nationwide (cheating by Dems notwithstanding), Republicans are trying to get out the vote among their own voters, and convert as many independents and democrats as possible. But this year, some unexpected people have already indicated they are abandoning corrupt Democrats and backing a different horse -- and liberals are not happy about it. One key race is for Los Angeles mayor, and the candidates are: a black Democrat female, Congresswoman Karen Bass, and her opponent Rick Caruso -- a white male and lifelong Republican who only...

After making Los Angeles his home for more than two decades, Ozzy Osbourne has decided it’s time to return to the U.K. The Osbournes’ home in California is already up for sale, and their residence in England is already being prepared for their early 2023 arrival. “It’s a very weird place to live right now,” Sharon Osbourne said of living in America. Over the past several years Ozzy, 73, has dealt with numerous health issues – Parkinson’s diagnosis, neck surgery, a fall in the bathroom, two staph infections, blood clots, and more – and while all are enough for anyone...

A white supremacist group hung a banner in support of Kanye West on a Los Angeles overpass on Saturday. Goyim Defense League – a hate group responsible for multiple instances of antisemitic flyers distributed across the United States – also held a demonstration with Nazi salutes at the 405 Freeway overpass in support of the rapper, who has been widely denounced for recent antisemitic statements. Members of the extremist group made Nazi salutes as they unfurled the banner that said, “Kanye is right about the Jews,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “It’s not just words,” tweeted Sam Yebri, a lawyer...

As they say, life moves fast.On Monday, the New York Times published a story about a “small group of election deniers” who pushed a “conspiracy theory” that “a small American election software company, Konnech, had secret ties to the Chinese Communist Party and had given the Chinese government backdoor access to personal data about two million poll workers in the United States.”On Tuesday, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón announced that Eugene Yu, Konnech’s CEO, had been arrested in Michigan “as part of an investigation into the possible theft of personal identifying information of [LA County election] workers” and that...