Free Republic

A former NBA player and actor was sentenced to 90 years to life in prison on Friday for a series of violent sexual assaults, some of which occurred in Los Angeles County, authorities said. “During their investigation, detectives learned [that] in 2010, Byrd was convicted of sexual assault involving a different victim,” the LAPD release stated. “Detectives also discovered that Byrd had been arrested for sexually assaulting a young woman in Washington State in 2005.” Byrd’s victims told investigators that he was “initially charming” before he subsequently forced them into a variety of sex acts. “He started as a charmer,...

Washington Post writer Maura Judkis is under fire this week for a column in which she mocks shoplifting stories as the “moral panic” of a nation built on “stolen land.”It is reminiscent of those who excused rioting in past summers “as an expression of power” and demanded that the media refer to looters as “protesters.” Now, the Washington Post is suggesting that it may be just desserts for a nation of colonizers and enslavers.The prior day, the Post ran another column downplaying accounts of stores closing due to shoplifting even though employees blamed rampant shoplifting in San Francisco.Judkis wrote a...

San Francisco's supervisors plan to offer a formal apology to Black residents for decades of racist laws and policies perpetrated by the city, a long-awaited first step as it considers providing reparations. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is scheduled to vote Tuesday on the resolution apologizing to African Americans and their descendants. All 11 members have signed on as sponsors, guaranteeing its passage. It would be one of the first major U.S. cities to do so. The resolution calls on San Francisco to not repeat the harmful policies and practices, and to commit “to making substantial ongoing, systemic, and...

Were your ancestors abused by a racist, oppressive system? If so, you may have rightful dibs on three-quarters of a hundred billion dollars. At least, that's true of "you" in the group sense -- such is the stance of an alliance in Missouri. For those unfamiliar with Saint Louis University (SLU), the Roman Catholic research institution was founded in 1818 and is the country's second-oldest Jesuit school. ... Fast-forward to the formation of Descendants of St. Louis University Enslaved (DSLUE). On February 8th, organization President Robin Proudie -- flanked by civil rights attorney Areva Martin, economist Julianne Malveaux and Democratic...

Beginning Monday, Pittsburgh police won’t respond to any calls that aren’t in progress emergencies. Chief Larry Scirotto wants to cut their call volume from approximately 200,000 calls per year down to about 50,000. That essentially means that calls for criminal mischief, theft, harassment and burglary alarms, just to name a few, will all be handled by the telephone reporting unit or online reporting.

A mom of three given nearly $11,000 in a taxpayer-funded program for impoverished families has admitted blowing most of it on a luxurious five-day trip to Miami — even getting a $180 glow-up to not look like a “working” mom while there. Canethia Miller, 27, was one of 132 mothers in Washington, DC accepted last year into the “Strong Families, Stronger Futures” pilot program designed to help those living around the poverty line, according to the Washington Post. She chose to take a no-strings-attached $10,800 lump sum, rather than $900 monthly payments — and immediately spent more than $6,000 on...

The city of Chicago on Tuesday sued six major oil companies and the primary fossil fuel lobbying group, alleging they funded and planned a campaign of climate change denial that directly affects the city’s residents. In the lawsuit, the city accused BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, Phillips 66, Shell, and the American Petroleum Institute (API) of misleading the public about the impact of their products and of contributing to the effects of climate change on Chicago. These impacts include unsafe summer temperatures, an increase in extreme weather, shoreline erosion and susceptibility to disasters such as flash flooding in basements on...

During Sunday’s broadcast of CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) voiced his disapproval of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership. Clyburn, a confidant of President Joe Biden, argued Netanyahu’s leadership had been bad for Israel. However, he would not go as far as to say Biden agreed with him about Netanyahu. “When it comes to Israel, should he stick with his position on Prime Minister Netanyahu or perhaps rethink that relationship?” “Face the Nation” host Robert Costa asked.

As if NASCAR didn't already have major issues, this article comes out that NASCAR and the France Family are at an impasse with the Owners and Drivers of the Sport to the point the owners have hired a top Anti-Trust Lawyer to advise them. Since Dale Earnhardt Sr. died, my interest in NASCAR has steadily faded, however, I will be watching later today as the weather has cleared and the race should start on time. You had to think sooner or later that the iron fist rule of the France Family over NASCAR would be challenged, and it appears that...

I have written about the disastrous policies of Mayor Brandon Johnson for Chicago. As a native son, it is hard to watch this wonderful city undermined by Johnson and radical allies in the city council. Some initiatives like reparations and state-funded grocery stores will cost money but will not impose nearly the costs of Johnson’s dismal record on crime and taxes. However, this week saw a particularly confusing moment when, after calling the anti-crime program ShotSpotter “racist,” Johnson asked the company to extend its contract beyond the upcoming Democratic National Convention. So Johnson will put an end to this supposedly...

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton defended staying in the Democratic nominating contest on Friday by pointing out that her husband had not wrapped up the nomination until June 1992, adding, “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.” Her remarks were met with quick criticism from the campaign of Senator Barack Obama the comments touched on one of the most sensitive aspects of the current presidential campaign — concern for Mr. Obama’s safety.

MSNBC host Joy Reid lamented that black Americans have not received sufficient reparations for “literally, physically” building this country, believing that former President Barack Obama’s eight-year tenure is the best they will get. Reid issued her comments during an interview on Salon Talks with writer Dean Obeidallah wherein she said that black people “literally, physically, built this country” and therefore deserve much more than a two-term black president.

Reparations advocates had the wind in their sails last year. Cities across the US set up teams to hash out plans to compensate black people for the legacy of slavery, taking their cue from a successful pilot in Evanston, Illinois. The landscape in 2024 is very different. Squad member Cori Bush, the Missouri Democrat who has championed payouts, is under investigation for campaign spending violations. Her bid for a $14 trillion federal compensation package is dead in the water. The reparations task force in Detroit — a hub for African-American culture — has descended into a 'shambles' of quitting and...

On Wednesday, lawmakers in the state of California introduced a series of bills aimed at providing reparations for historical slavery, which would include giving out property and financial compensation for alleged descendants of slaves.As Politico reports, the bills represent the first of their kind in the country, after a rising left-wing movement in favor of reparations first emerged shortly after the 2020 race riots. The California bills had been in the works for the last several years after Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) set up a reparations “task force” to make suggestions, which led to a 111-page report issued last year.The...

A U.S. Senate committee approved legislation on Wednesday that would help set the stage for the United States to confiscate Russian assets and hand them over to Ukraine for rebuilding after the destruction of the nearly two-year-long war. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 20 to 1 in favor of the unprecedented "Rebuilding Economic Prosperity and Opportunity (REPO) for Ukrainians Act." If it were to pass the full Senate and House of Representatives and be signed into law by President Joe Biden, as expected, the act would pave the way for Washington's first-ever seizure of central bank assets from a...

Montgomery County Public Schools Superintendent Monifa McKnight said in a statement Monday she was asked by school board members last week to “step away” from her post. McKnight said the board didn’t give a justification for its request and hadn’t communicated concern about her performance — and she said she would fight the attempt to oust her. (See backstory below) “For these reasons, I’m concerned that its actions are based on something other than my performance, which would constitute a violation of my contract,” McKnight said. “I will defend my reputation and my decades-long commitment to the students and families...

While federal authorities did not bring legal charges against the black press for the balance of the war, that doesn't mean they shifted to a hands-off approach. Instead, they ratcheted up both intense monitoring and informal pressure. In the first half of 1942, FBI agents visited leading black newspapers that had carried critical stories about the federal government. Moreover, postal inspectors admonished two leading papers that the "benefits of citizenship" carried an obligation not to "'play up' isolated and rare instances in such a fashion as to obstruct recruiting and in other ways hamper the war effort."

1. Which party started the KKK? 2. Which party abolished slavery? 3. Which political party gave African-Americans the right to vote?

LeVar Burton got a glimpse into his lineage in “Finding Your Roots” and discovered something about his ancestors that shocked him. The former “Reading Rainbow” host, freedom-to-read advocate and actor knew little about his lineage. He’d been estranged from his father, Levardis Robert Martyn Burton, since he was 11, and his mother, Erma Gene Christian, had been tight-lipped about her own history. Burton said it was “impossible” to get her to open-up about her upbringing.

China’s state-run Global Times on Wednesday eagerly touted a report from two climate alarmist think tanks, Common Wealth in the United Kingdom and the Climate and Community Project in the United States, that claimed the British and American militaries “owe” $111 billion in “climate reparations” to communities supposedly threatened by their carbon emissions. The Global Times is the house organ of the Chinese government, the worst polluter and carbon emitter on Earth by a very wide margin, but it naturally left China’s emissions unmentioned as it focused on the “social cost of carbon” calculations run by the two think tanks...