Free Republic

ALBANY — With Democrats targeting veteran Sen. Martin Golden’s Brooklyn seat, the Senate GOP this past weekend offered to put volunteers who came to help the incumbent from outside the district up in hotels. An email obtained by the Daily News sent from the personal account of Michael Ostrander, the special assistant to Senate secretary Francis Patience, urged people to volunteer to do door-knocking in the district this past Saturday. “The opposition is coming after him hard so we’ll need a good turnout for the Senator,” Ostrander wrote. “Please let your volunteers know of this opportunity and the importance of...

Prosecutors are asking a judge to slap disgraced former Brooklyn Assemblywoman Pamela Harris with more than three years in prison at her upcoming sentencing. Harris admitted earlier this year that she stole nearly $25,000 from FEMA in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, claiming the natural disaster had left her home in shambles. The ex-pol also admitted she’d told family members to lie to FBI agents during their investigation into whether or not she’d defrauded the government.

Mayor de Blasio and new Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza on Thursday approved a controversial plan to scrap admissions standards in one of the city’s top districts as part of their crusade to diversify student bodies. Effective immediately, the 11 middle schools in Brooklyn’s District 15 — which spans Park Slope into Sunset Park — must ditch education-based entrance criteria for a weighted lottery system that reserves roughly half of their seats for kids who are low income, homeless or learning English.

Brooklyn’s District 15 isn’t just barring middle schools from selecting students based on their grades — the area’s lone performing-arts middle school is now forbidden from holding auditions. Entry into New Voices School of Academic & Creative Arts in Sunset Park will now be determined solely by lottery — with no pirouettes or piano-playing required.

A purported member of the MS-13 gang broke into the bedroom of a sleeping 11-year-old Brooklyn girl and raped her in her bed, cops said Saturday as the suspect was taken into custody. The horrific crime happened at 11:30 p.m. Wednes­day in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, officials said.

In a searing speech from the pulpit of a black church, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told a Brooklyn congregation on Sunday that Donald Trump is a “slick salesman” who fooled many people in this country, but the Democrat said the Republican president hasn’t fooled New Yorkers. Cuomo spoke at Brooklyn’s First Baptist Church of Crown Heights after a week of criticism for saying America “was never that great” during a bill signing. New York Republicans have demanded he apologize, and Trump tweeted that Cuomo was having a “total meltdown.” The governor seemed to counter what many observers considered a...

CROWN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN — New Yorkers who call 911 on law-abiding people of color are committing hate crimes and should be prosecuted, according to a state senator who was recently reported to police for campaigning in his own district. State Senator Jesse Hamilton, who represents Brownsville, Crown Heights and Flatbush, proposed new legislation a week after a self-described Trump fan called police to report him for speaking to constituents in public. It would criminalize 911 calls against people of color without evidence of malice. "That's gonna be a hate crime," Hamilton said. "This pattern of calling the police on black...

Training camp for child terrorists has chilling connection to top Democratic Party operative. Siraj Ibn Wahhaj Jr., 40, of Clayton County, Georgia, was arrested along with his two sisters and two other adults last Friday in New Mexico on charges of felony child abuse ... But there is more to this story that is not appearing in the nightly news accounts we've all been following. Nobody is talking about Wahhaj's well-connected father, Siraj Wahhaj Sr., a radical Brooklyn imam who is the spiritual adviser to Democratic Socialist and Bernie Sanders supporter Linda Sarsour. The elder Wahhaj also has ties to...

An 18-year-old Brooklyn woman returning with her sister from a trip to Jamaica has been identified as the mother of the premature newborn found dead inside an airplane toilet at LaGuardia Airport, officials said Wednesday. The teen, who checked in to Kings County Hospital after giving birth, claimed she never knew she was pregnant when she rushed into the bathroom of an American Airlines plane after it landed at the Queens airport about 10:45 p.m. Monday. “She pulled the baby out and put it in the toilet and covered it with paper,” a law enforcement source said. The woman told...

TAOS – The mother of a disabled boy whose disappearance led to a law enforcement raid at a remote, ramshackle compound north of Taos last week told police in Georgia that the boy’s father wanted to perform an exorcism on the child. According to an arrest warrant affidavit filed in Taos, the woman said Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, 39, one of five adults now charged after the Friday raid, believed “the child is possessed by the devil” and that he intended to deny the boy his medication. ... the whereabouts of Abdul-Ghani Wahhaj, 4, who was allegedly abducted by Siraj Ibn...

Police in New York City are looking for an African American man who they say attacked a man on a city bus just because the victim was white. The attack reportedly occurred on Monday, July 30, at about 10 AM in Brooklyn, Fox 5 New York reported. Police say that a 29-year-old white man was riding the bus on Fulton Street when a black man approached him, yelled racial epithets, and punched him in the face causing swelling and pain. The attacker quickly jumped off the bus at Fulton and Bond Street, witnesses said. CCTV surveillance video released by the...

At the same time that localities across the country are in the process of erasing monuments to Confederates and slave-owners, New York City is preparing to honor a black man who ordered the murder of every white man, woman, and child under his control, resulting in 3,000 to 5,000 race homicides. Seth Barron reports at City Journal: In New York City, street co-namings – in which a thoroughfare takes on an additional, ceremonial name in honor of a distinguished figure – rarely generate much fuss, and their approval is typically pro forma.  But yesterday, a city council committee voted to co-name...

The search for a missing University of Iowa student entered its eighth day on July 26, with investigators examining technology, including her FitBit, while continuing a ground search around the area where she was last seen. Mollie Tibbetts, 20, vanished from Brooklyn, Iowa, where she was dog-sitting at her boyfriend’s brother’s house. She was last seen jogging on the evening of Wednesday, July 18, and sent messages from her phone to her boyfriend and mother later that night. She was reported missing after she didn’t show up for work at a daycamp on July 19. Authorities have said they are...

In a matter of days, Mollie Tibbetts is supposed to accompany her boyfriend on an international trip to watch his older brother get married. First, though, she has to be found. The last time anyone saw the 20-year-old college student was Wednesday night, as she was out for a jog in the small town of Brooklyn, in eastern Iowa, authorities say. She’d been dog-sitting but headed out for some exercise. She sent her boyfriend a photo on Snapchat that night. Then she vanished. Five days later — perhaps longer than any missing-persons case has lasted in the area, and four...

Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered the cash-strapped MTA to waste as much as $30 million on his latest vanity project — retiling two city tunnels in the state’s blue-and-gold color scheme — instead of using the dough for desperately needed subway repairs, The Post has learned. The boondoggle began soon after the taxpayer-funded agency ordered white tiles to reline the Brooklyn-Battery and Queens-Midtown tunnels after Superstorm Sandy, documents show. The governor got wind of the plan — and insisted that the cash-strapped transit agency add stripes of blue and gold, thinking nothing of the additional $20 million to $30 million cost,...

On Sunday, 6ix9ine, also known as Tekashi 6ix9ine, dropped “FEFE,” his new musical collaboration with Nicki Minaj. A matter of hours later, the rapper, whose given name is Daniel Hernandez, was reportedly kidnapped, pistol-whipped and robbed. According to the Associated Press, the New York Police Department confirmed the Brooklyn-born rapper visited a police station in the early hours of Sunday morning. According to the account he allegedly gave police, 6ix9ine was a passenger in a car around 4:30am when three men reportedly emerged from a second car, forced the rapper into their car and robbed him of “an undisclosed amount...

It’s not just luxury-home listings that are piling up in New York City. Even units for less than $1 million — within reach of far more people than a Billionaires’ Row penthouse — are hurting for buyers. In Manhattan, the inventory of sub-$1 million apartments surged 27 percent in June from a year earlier to 3,087, the most for the month since 2013, according to StreetEasy. Such listings jumped 17 percent to 2,738 in Brooklyn, and climbed 6 percent to 2,314 in Queens, a borough usually sought out for its relative affordability. Buyers at all price points are taking their...

Add New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind of Brooklyn to the list of Democrats distancing themselves from the party's leaders. The lawmaker slammed Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Thursday for his attacks on President Trump in a new fundraising email. Instead of "villainizing" the White House and the "hard right," Hikind suggested Schumer and his fellow Democrats at least admit that the economy is improving and that there are radicals in their own party. He wrote his suggestions in a Facebook post. "You forgot to tell us about the economy," Hikind tells Schumer. "As good as it’s been, economists...

These middle-schoolers are getting moved up a grade — but their principal wants them to know they didn’t earn it. A Brooklyn principal sent some parents a letter last week congratulating their sixth graders on being promoted — then implying the kids passed only because the school is too broke stick them in summer school.

<p>A good Samaritan wrestled a homeless maniac to the ground after he attacked two elderly women as they were leaving a Brooklyn grocery store on Sunday morning, police said.</p> <p>Andres Flores allegedly punched the two women — 77 and 79 — after they left the Shoppers World on Pitkin Avenue near Herzl Street in Brownsville at about 9:45 a.m., police said.</p>