Free Republic

White House press secretary Jen Psaki struggled to explain why President Joe Biden’s administration was considering putting up migrants in hotel rooms. Psaki did not dispute reports that the Biden administration awarded a Texas-based nonprofit $86 million to provide hotel rooms for six months for approximately 1,200 families who cross the southern border. AD Newsmax reporter Emerald Robinson questioned Psaki on why the Biden administration would provide hotel rooms, food, and shelter for migrants even as American national guard troops were forced to sleep on the floor when they protected Capitol Hill. “That’s a disparity a lot of people are...

HILDALE — Continental breakfasts are now being served at a bed and breakfast that has opened on the site of a sprawling, mostly unoccupied compound in southern Utah that was built for the leader of a polygamous sect. America’s Most Wanted Suites and Bed and Breakfast takes its name from Warren Jeff’s time on the list of the FBI’s 10 most wanted fugitives. Accommodations in the Hildale bed and breakfast run from $85 to $200 a night. Hildale and neighboring Colorado City, Arizona, are both home to members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Former Jeffs...

The seal pup that spent a night in a couple's Westport motel room in June will be released back into the wild Tuesday. The seal pup that spent a night in a couple's Westport motel room in June will be released back into the wild Tuesday. PAWS Wildlife Center spokeswoman Mary Leake Schildner said the pup is grown up and able to hunt on his own, which means he's ready to return to his natural habitat. PAWS took the seal pup into its care after the couple staying in a motel in Westport had taken it from the beach to...

U.S. cities are racing to fix security vulnerabilities revealed by the devastating terror attacks in Mumbai, and many hotels remain “sitting ducks,” experts tell Newsmax.

Monday, 31 March 2008 ICE-led probe results in criminal and civil forfeitures of more than $1 million PHOENIX - A federal judge has sentenced the last of the 13 owners and former owners of six motels in Mesa, Ariz., who were indicted after a probe by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) revealed they were using their businesses to harbor illegal aliens in support of organized human smuggling. U.S. District Judge Frederick J. Martone imposed sentences of probation, fines and forfeiture on the final two defendants in the case March 26. The owners of the motels on Mesa's Main Street...

When Manoj Patel's family bought the Wigwam Motel in Rialto, Calif., four years ago, the iconic Route 66 property was rundown. Its stucco teepees, built in the 1930s by Kentucky motor-inn visionary Frank Redford, had been frequented by drug addicts and prostitutes because the Wigwam's previous owners tried to reel in customers with a cheesy sign urging them to DO IT IN A TEE PEE. The Patels, who left India for the U.S. in 1980, worked hard to restore the motel to its former glory and added some modern amenities, including free wi-fi access. Says the owners' son Manoj, 27:...

SHANGHAI, Jan 16 (Reuters) - German engineer Michael Bosch is not fazed by the lack of a gym and other creature comforts at his budget hotel in a converted Shanghai office building. He's stayed at such hotels on nearly a dozen trips to Chinese cities. "All I need is a clean, warm place to sleep. I don't care so much about service," the 32-year-old said as he waited for 10 minutes for a distracted receptionist to attend to him at a Motel168 on the edge of Shanghai's financial district. The number of budget hotel rooms has mushroomed in the past...

MIAMI, Okla. - The Riviera Courts motel is crumbling away and nobody seems to care. Once a stop along Route 66, the 2,400-mile neon carnival that connected hundreds of communities from Chicago to Los Angeles, this late-1930s Mission Revival is just a weather-worn building on the side of a country road in far northeast Oklahoma. Next door, soybean farmers Richard and Rosemary Woolard watch the place deteriorate from their front porch. "Been a lot of changes in this old county," 77-year-old Richard Woolard says plainly. The Riviera Courts is among hundreds of mom-and-pop motels that met their demise along the...

FAIRLEE, Vt. -- Who needs a car at the drive-in theater? Just go straight to bed. The Fairlee Motel and Drive-In Theater combines the best of roadside America. Drive in, and you have your classic outdoor experience. Check in, and a picture window and NuTone speaker give you the same show from your king-size bed _ with air conditioning and no mosquitoes. Please don't wipe popcorn butter on the sheets. Someone taller than about 5-foot-8 can even watch the movie from the shower, through the tiny bathroom window. The Fairlee is one of at least two drive-in motels in the...

By Sonia Moghe ASSOCIATED PRESS 11:40 a.m. August 4, 2006 RICHARDSON, Texas – When Ron Patel talks to customers at the Super 8 Motel he owns, he usually does so in English. When he speaks to the housekeeping staff it's often in Spanish. When he talks to his wife, it's in the Indian language Gujarati. It's a complicated but increasingly common scene in U.S. hotels and motels, about one-third of which are owned by Indians, according to the Asian American Hotel Owners Association. To help keep order in the multilanguage environment, many hotel operators are turning to a Gujarati-Spanish phrasebook...

FEDS CHARGE 13 PROPRIETORS OF ARIZONA MOTELS WITH USING BUSINESSES TO HARBOR SMUGGLED ALIENS United States Attorney Seeks to Forfeit Five Motels PHOENIX - Indictments charging 13 owners and former owners of six motels on Main Street in Mesa, Arizona were unsealed late yesterday. The indictments charge the defendants with harboring illegal aliens and allege that the businesses facilitated organized human smuggling. The government is seeking forfeiture of five of those properties following a nine-month undercover probe by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The initial results of the investigation were announced here this morning by U.S. Attorney Paul K....

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) -- Holiday Inn founder Kemmons Wilson, whose coast-to-coast chain of motels offered travelers in an increasingly mobile postwar America a clean and affordable place to stay for the night, has died at 90. Wilson, who died at home Wednesday, is widely viewed as the father of the modern-day hotel. He started with a single hotel outside Memphis in 1952 and built his company into a worldwide behemoth that revolutionized the industry. Travelers could expect comfort, cleanliness, quality service and good food at moderate prices. When Wilson left the company in 1980 following a heart attack, it had...

An Ohio man filed a $1.5 million lawsuit Tuesday against the Knoxville Marriott hotel after finding a hidden camera in a bathroom light fixture in July. Bryan Brewer discovered the small video camera after noticing a tiny black spot - which he thought was an insect but turned out to be a hole - in the fixture, according to the lawsuit. At the time Brewer, the vice president of a California company, was staying at the Marriott while on business. His attorney, K.O. Herston, filed the lawsuit in Knox County Circuit Court. Named as defendants are Marriott International Inc. and...

EVERETT -- A cocaine raid on two motels resulted in eight arrests with seven others being sought, and traces of the drug were found in three children, one 20 months old, police said. The raids were conducted Thursday morning in two rooms each at the Everett and Topper motels following a four-month undercover investigation of crack and powder cocaine dealing on North Broadway, police Sgt. Boyd Bryant said. In an unrelated raid a day earlier, Snohomish County sheriff's deputies said they found two methamphetamine labs and at least 35 stolen cars at a farm outside Marysville. A 32-year-old man was...