Free Republic

Angry residents and workers Sunday decried the hordes of hookers brazenly peddling themselves on a Queens street, where it was business as usual the day after The Post exposed the rampant illegal trade. “The police do nothing — nothing!” fumed Anna Garcia, 42, who works at a cellphone store along the seedy stretch of Roosevelt Avenue in Corona dubbed the “Market of Sweethearts” by the prostitutes. “Drugs, prostitution, alcohol — it’s terrible,” she said of the flagrant “underground” red-light district taking over the neighborhood filled with families with children.

New bill would decriminalize, support sex workers in New York A new bill that would decriminalize sex work in New York — while still holding pimps and buyers accountable — is set to be introduced in the state Senate this week, The Post has learned. Sen. Liz Krueger (D-Manhattan), who is slated to announce the bill Monday morning, created the legislation with the assistance of sex trade survivors and advocates who want to make sure workers are given help instead of a jail cell.

A bill to legalize adult prostitution in Vermont was recently introduced by female lawmakers in the state’s legislature. The bill’s text read: This bill proposes to repeal the prostitution laws while retaining felony human trafficking laws that prohibit recruiting, enticing, harboring, transporting, providing, or obtaining a minor for the purpose of commercial sex; patronizing a minor for commercial sex; recruiting, enticing, harboring, transporting, providing, or obtaining any person through force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of having the person engage in commercial sex; compelling any person through force, fraud, or coercion to engage in commercial sex; and patronizing any...

Police in Northern California responded to a "mass casualty overdose" situation on Saturday that resulted in one death and a dozen people hospitalized. Authorities said that the incident was caused by exposure to the deadly opioid fentanyl, which also affected two responding officers, according to NBC News. Mike O'Brien, a police captain in Chico, Calif., said at a news conference that four of the victims were in critical condition. "Certainly there's potential for additional fatalities," O'Brien said. "I want to emphasize that."

Dec 29 (Reuters) - Zach Lazarus, chief executive officer of A Green Alternative, a marijuana dispensary in San Diego, California, has lost count every time he re-opened a bank account after it was closed because of his connection to the cannabis industry. Lazarus has had to play a game of "whack-a-mole" with banks, likening his frustrations to a popular arcade game in which a player repeatedly gets rid of something only to have it re-appear somewhere else. Lazarus and other marijuana business owners in the $8 billion industry resort to cash-only transactions for business and to pay employees because they...

Philadelphia — A new Clinton administration would pursue a bill to legalize illegal immigrants in “the first 100 days” of her tenure, vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine told Spanish-language network Telemundo in an interview Monday, presenting a deep contrast with Republicans. Mr. Kaine also predicted that House Republicans, who stopped President Obama’s last bid for legalization in 2013, will reverse themselves next year and said House Speaker Paul D. Ryan will lead the GOP to embrace legalization. “Paul Ryan and the other leaders of his party are going to understand that if they want a future for their party they

California voters will decide whether to legalize recreational marijuana after Secretary of State Alex Padilla said Tuesday that initiative proponents turned in more than enough signatures to place the question on the November ballot. A successful vote in California would mean one in every six Americans lives in a state with legal marijuana sales, including the entire West Coast. The initiative is promoted by a well-funded and politically connected coalition spearheaded by former Facebook president Sean Parker. It asks voters to allow people 21 and older to buy an ounce of marijuana and marijuana-infused products at licensed retail outlets and...

Floridians will vote on medical marijuana come November, after a divided Florida Supreme Court ruled Monday that ballot language for a proposed constitutional amendment meets all legal requirements. If at least 60 percent of voters agree, Florida could become the first Southern state to legalize use of marijuana for health-related reasons.

Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) official Hanan Ashrawi said on Saturday that Israel's demand that the PA recognize it as a Jewish state is an attempt to “legalize racism,” reports the Ma’an news agency. Ashrawi, a member of the PLO’s Executive Committee, said that defining Israel as a Jewish state would signify that any Jewish person would have the right to return to “Palestine”, while Palestinian Arabs would lose that right. Israel wants to "create a narrative that denies the Palestinian presence, rights, and continuity on the historic Palestinian lands," she charged, in a conversation with Ma’an. She also claimed that...

Why is it necessary to legalize the roughly 11 million currently-illegal immigrants in the U.S. before newly enhanced border security and internal enforcement measures are in place? Sen. Marco Rubio, the leading Republican on the Senate’s Gang of Eight, says part of the reason is that the federal government can’t afford to secure the border on its own and needs financial help from the immigrants themselves, in the form of fines paid when they are legalized. Rubio made the statement during a radio interview after he voted against an amendment from Republican Sen. Charles Grassley that would have put off...

Much ink has been spilt in describing the precise nature of the soul-searching the GOP is undergoing in the wake of getting totally shellacked last Tuesday. There are a plethora of suggestions — of varying degrees of helpfulness — as to how the Republican party can re-brand and re-orient itself; ranging from capitulating on taxes to deciding that gay marriage isn’t a hill to die on. But there’s one easy ideological maneuver that Republicans could make that would simultaneously burnish their stance as the party of freedom and expand their base while alienating the president from his. It is a...

CARSON CITY — Synthetic drugs that mirror cocaine and marijuana are showing up more often in Nevada, and some state legislators are unhappy that the state Pharmacy Board has not taken action to ban them. Assemblywoman April Mastroluca, chairwoman of the Legislative Committee on Health Care, said it’s been almost a year since the 2011 Legislature discussed the problem and she is frustrated the Pharmacy Board had not adopted a regulation to prohibit the “synthetic cannabinoids and bath salts.”

The Senate this evening is poised to vote on a defense authorization bill that includes a provision which not only repeals the military law on sodomy, but also repeals the military ban on sex with animals--or bestiality. On Nov. 15, the Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously approved S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act, which includes a provision to repeal Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). Article 125 of the UCMJ makes it illegal to engage in both sodomy with humans and sex with animals.

Kokomo — Sheriff deputies arrested one of four people believed to be involved in a child-selling case in which a baby was traded for $17,000 and drugs. Deputies arrested Stephen P. Lynch Jr., 31, Thursday afternoon on a warrant charging him with a Class A felony conspiracy to deal in a narcotic and D felonies conspiracy to commit child selling and profiting from an adoption. According to a probable cause affidavit filed in Howard Superior Court 1, Stephen Lynch, along with another person, gave another couple $13,000, a 1996 Lincoln Mark VIII valued at $3,531 and numerous drugs in exchange...

Petition to legalize pot is first to hit White House threshold; ET proposal closeBy Brendan Sasso - 09/22/11 06:33 PM ET A proposal to legalize marijuana is the first idea on the White House's online petition site to gather enough signatures to break the threshold required to receive an official response. The White House has promised to evaluate and issue a formal response to any idea that receives more than 5,000 signatures within 30 days. Visitors are free to offer their own proposals. The first proposal to reach that limit asks, "Isn't it time to legalize and regulate marijuana in...

Last night on the “Tonight Show”, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger responded to host Jay Leno’s question about the failure of Proposition 19, a measure on the California ballot to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. Schwarzenegger responded that the measure failed in part, because he had already decriminalized the use of less than 1 oz of pot, and also because, “No one cares if you smoke a joint.”

A suspected marijuana grower who was fatally shot by a Mendocino County officer Tuesday once lived in Santa Rosa, was married, had a 4-year-old son and also had a prior criminal record. Angel Farias Hernandez, 24, leveled a rifle at law enforcers as they entered a huge marijuana garden in remote northeastern Mendocino County, Sheriff’s officials said. Law officials seized 11,635 marijuana plants from three gardens in the area following the shooting.

DENVER - Moms got tougher drunk-driving laws on the books and were directly responsible for passing and then repealing alcohol Prohibition. Now marijuana activists are trying to enlist the nation's mothers in legalization efforts with a sales pitch that pot is safer than booze. The nation's largest marijuana legalization lobby recently started a women's group. The Moms4Marijuana website draws thousands. And just in time for Mother's Day, a pot legalization group in Denver has created a pink-carnation web card asking moms to support legalization. These marijuana moms argue that pot is no worse than alcohol, that teens shouldn't face jail...

A Boeing plane that used to transport cocaine from Venezuela to West Africa crashed in northern Mali earlier this month after a failed take-off, the representative of the UN's regional office on drugs and crime said Monday.

President Obama said this week that his health care plan won't cover illegal immigrants, but argued that's all the more reason to legalize them and ensure they eventually do get coverage. He also staked out a position that anyone in the country legally should be covered - a major break with the 1996 welfare reform bill, which limited most federal public assistance programs only to citizens and longtime immigrants.