HOUSTON, Texas – Texas police officers, working with the Houston Humane Society, rescued eight horses suffering from malnourishment and abuse.

The eight horses were found on a property in the Acres Home area of Houston, members of the Houston Humane Society told a Houston newspaper. The horses were ridden with parasites and appeared to have been starved by their owners.

Houston Humane Society Photo

The photos provided by the Human Society tell the story of a long period of animal abuse and neglect. The ragged coats of the sad animals cling tightly to their exposed ribs. The wounds of parasites are obvious from a distance.

The horses were stored in a small area with “ankle-deep muck and manure,” the local newspaper reported. The eight horses, ranging in age from three to twenty, were placed in trailers and taken to the Houston Humane Society’s Animal Wellness Clinic. Officials said the area is “not a farm” and they were not sure why so many horses were on the lot.

Houston Humane Society Photo

Houston police officers and deputies from the Harris County Precinct 5 Constable’s Office assisted the Humane Society officials in the seizure of the emaciated horses.

Officials received an anonymous tip about the horses. Observation of the horses revealed untreated wounds and obvious signs of rain rot on their coats, Humane Society officials stated in a press release.

Houston Humane Society Photo

Spokesperson Monica Schmidt called the environment where the horses were kept “deplorable,” the newspaper reported. “I think what makes it a little worse is the fact that usually we’re dealing with one or two horses, but when you’re dealing with eight that’s eight times the abuse and neglect,” she told the reporter.

Schmidt said it was one of the most severe cases of cruelty to horses her organization has seen in Houston. “And definitely there’s a lot of long-term neglect going on here,” she said.

No charges have been filed in the case. Schmidt told the reporter prosecution does not usually begin until after a civil lawsuit is filed. The “caretakers” of the horses will be given an opportunity to present their side of the story in a Harris County court on January 3.

Schmidt said she expects all eight of the horses to recover from their mistreatment. Two of the younger horses are reported to be small for their age. She said this could lead to their growth being permanently stunted.

Houston Humane Society Photo

The Humane Society has seen an uptick in reports of cruelty to horses in the area after they launched “Monty’s Task Force” to combat the abuse of horses in the Acres Homes area.

“I think people are fed up,” Schmidt concluded, “of driving down the street and seeing emaciated horses along the side of the road or of seeing a horse that died of starvation being dragged down the road for heavy trash pick-up.”

In July 2015, Humane Society officials seized 200 horses that were left starving near Conroe, Texas, Breitbart Texas reported. The seizure of the horses led to the arrest of Herman and Kathleen Hoffman on three charges of misdemeanor animal cruelty.

Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX.

A new study shows the college-graduate inhabitants of New York’s elite zip-codes are the most socially isolated Americans in the United States, and have the least familiarity with how ordinary Americans live.

Close behind are the parochial professionals in zip codes around Boston, Silicon Valley and Los Angeles, whose social bubbles leave them isolated from the hopes and fears of their fellow Americans, according to the study by Charles Murray, one of the nation’s leading policy experts, who now works at the D.C.-based American Enterprise Institute.

“America really does have a new elite that is isolated from and often ignorant about white mainstream America,” said Murray, who recently said a pause in low-skill migration might aid the most economically damaged districts in the United States.

The results are based on a survey of the 130,000 people who voluntarily completed Murray’s online test — see here — and it shows that familiarity with mainstream American lives slides down as the number of college graduates rises up in each zip code’s particular social bubble.

But the elite respondents’ understanding of ordinary Americans’ lives actually crashes in the top few districts with the highest percentage of college degrees and greatest “Socio-Economic Status” or ‘SES.’

The important point about the graph is that the top few percentiles are crucial for understanding our cultural divide. The people living in zip codes in the top two percentiles include almost all of those who run the nation’s culture, economy, and politics. And that’s where the bubble scores plunge…

The New York City area dominates, accounting for 34 zip codes in the top [most isolated] 100 [zip codes]. Manhattan alone has 18 zip codes in the top 100, including all the zip codes in the Upper East Side and Upper West Side. The zip codes surrounding San Francisco Bay constituted the next largest contribution, amounting to 29 zip codes. I have divided them somewhat arbitrarily between those associated with San Francisco and those of Silicon Valley. The Boston area had 15 zip codes and Los Angeles 8. That adds up to 86 out of 100. The entire rest of the country had just 14.

Here is a chart showing how knowledge drops in the most elite zip codes.

The most ignorant district is Fremont, California, near Silicon Valley. However, that zip code is somewhat of an anomaly because it includes many immigrants who did not grow up in the United States. New York’s Upper East Side, alongside Central Park, has the second-worst ranking. See the results here.

Murray’s test asks people a series of questions designed to reveal their familiarity – or ignorance — of mainstream civic reality in normal America.

Did you grow up in a family in which the chief breadwinner was not in a managerial position or a high-prestige profession (defined as attorney, physician, dentist, architect, engineer, scientist or college professor)?

Have you ever lived for at least a year in an American community with a population under 50,000 that is not part of a metropolitan area and is not where you went to college?

Have you ever walked on a factory floor?

Have you ever held a job that caused something to hurt at the end of the day?

Have you ever had a close friend who was an evangelical Christian?

Murray will soon release another study of the data showing the wealthy SES zip-codes with the least ignorance about their fellow Americans. That data, he said, “for the elite among you, [will show] places where you could raise your kids with a somewhat lower probability that they grow up to be isolated elitist snobs.”

Take the test here.

Despite the U.S. Congress passing the Consolidated Appropriations Act in December 2015 to slather another $9.3 billion of taxpayer credits on new solar power added to the electrical grid, California solar installments peaked in 2015 and are now headed south.

The extension of the federal Solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC) through 2021 was quietly tucked into 3 pages of the 887-page continuing resolution that allowed Congress to spend about $3.85 trillion this year. The nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that extending solar tax credits will cost taxpayers $9.3 billion.

As a result of massive taxpayer-funded subsidies, solar installations added 9.5 gigawatts of utility-scale power in 2016. That gave solar a nation-leading 40 percent share of all new electrical power capacity, dwarfing the 8.3 gigawatts of new fossil fuel capacity added in 2016, according to the Energy Information Agency.

California dominates solar power in the U.S., with 13,241 mega-watts of capacity, accounting for an overwhelming 44 percent national market share. Due to a marketing blitz by companies like SolarCity, about 71 percent of all solar capacity in the Golden State consists of residential installations.

California sought to continue its leadership in solar installations after Governor Jerry Brown passed SB 350, titled the “Clean Energy and Pollution Reduction Act of 2015.” The bill established 2030 targets to increase retail sales of renewable electricity to 50 percent and a requirement to double the energy efficiency savings in electricity and natural gas end uses by 2030.

With supposed experts claiming a huge amount of solar demand was being undermined due to the expiring of the federal investment tax credit, the renewal was expected to create another California boom. But the number of residential solar installations appears to have peaked in 2015 at 148,000 new installations, and the numbers fell for the first time in a decade, to 140,000 in 2016, according to the state.

A big selling point for renewing the solar investment tax credit was the promise that the cost of producing solar electric power would crash. But according to the California state website, the cost only fell by 2 percent from $.50 a kilowatt in 2015 to about $.49 a kilowatt in 2016.

Compared to natural gas on a national basis, solar costs 50 percent more to produce electricity than natural gas. That does not adjust for the fact that solar electric generation is availability for only an average of eight hours per day. During the other 16 hours a day, which includes peak the period of peak daily residential use during evening hours, the electrical grid must have 100 percent standby fossil fuel power generation capacity.

Another serious downside for solar power is that during sunny days in the spring and fall, when Californians are not using much air conditioning, the daily demand for electricity is low. As a result, the surge of midday solar power is more than the California electric grid can use.

Balancing solar power availability and consumer demand has become a major challenge for the Independent System Operator that manages California’s electric grid for about 30 million people. Nancy Traweek, who directs system operations, recently warned, “It’s constantly solving a constant problem, meaning you’re always trying to balance.”

Photo: file

Breitbart Senior Editor MILO confirmed on Instagram Friday that he will also be the voice for his upcoming book Dangerous in the official audio version.

Posting an image of Hillary Clinton’s audio book Hard Choices with a reduced from $34.99 to $4.99 price sticker, MILO commented, “nope still an easy choice… btw YES I AM RECORDING THE AUDIOBOOK VERSION OF MY BOOK WHO ELSE COULD IT BE.”

On Thursday, Red Alert Politics predicted that MILO’s book would quickly sell more copies than Hillary Clinton’s Stronger Together, which sold less than 3,000 copies in its first week.

“Progressives are uncomfortable that the ideology they reject is becoming more mainstream and a larger segment of American life. They’d be much happier if publishing companies spent money giving liberal politicians and activists big advances for books that nobody reads or buys like Hillary Clinton’s Stronger Together (sold less than 3,000 copies its first week),” wrote Red Alert. “The best liberal freakouts are yet to come, wait until Yiannopoulos sells more copies of Dangerous than Clinton did of Stronger Together.”

Following Red Alert’s prediction, MILO’s book rose quickly through Amazon’s charts, becoming the number one bestselling book on the site just one day after being announced, and over two months before it is even released.

“Milo” became the number one trending topic on Twitter in the U.S. on Thursday, following MILO’s announcement of the book, with its publisher Simon and Schuster reaching the third most trending topic, before both suddenly disappeared from the Trending Topics section.

Numerous celebrities and media figures have complained on Twitter about MILO’s book deal, including Sarah Silverman, who posted: “The guy has freedom of speech but to fund him & give him a platform tells me a LOT about @simonschuster YUCK AND BOO AND GROSS.”

Think Progress editor Judd Legum was also not happy to hear news of the book, falsely accusing MILO of being a “white nationalist,” a lie mirrored by the Washington Post‘s Gabe Ortiz, while celebrity blogger Perez Hilton called MILO a “walking sack of maggots.”

Since the announcement of Dangerous by MILO, The Chicago Review of Books have also announced that they would boycott every book from publisher Simon and Schuster in 2017 as a protest against the book being published.

“They said banning me from Twitter would finish me off. Just as I predicted, the opposite has happened,” said MILO in a comment to the Hollywood Reporter about his book. “Did it hurt Madonna being banned from MTV in the 1990s? Did all that negative press hurt Donald Trump’s chances of winning the election?”

“I met with top execs at Simon & Schuster earlier in the year and spent half an hour trying to shock them with lewd jokes and outrageous opinions,” he continued. “I thought they were going to have me escorted from the building — but instead they offered me a wheelbarrow full of money.”

“Every line of attack the forces of political correctness try on me fails pathetically,” MILO concluded. “I’m more powerful, more influential, and more fabulous than ever before and this book is the moment Milo goes mainstream. Social justice warriors should be scared — very scared.”

DANGEROUS is available to pre-order now via Amazon, in hardcover and Kindle editions. And yes, MILO is reading the audiobook version himself! 

Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook.

François Hollande denounced populism and nationalism ahead of upcoming French presidential elections, but Marine Le Pen hit back saying after Trump and Brexit, the French share the worldwide “aspiration for independence” in the fight against globalism.

In his New Year’s Eve address, President Hollande, who earlier in December said that he will not be seeking reelection in 2017, alluded to Front National candidate Le Pen when he warned against what he called “rising extremism,” citing Brexit in the U.K. and the election of Donald J. Trump in the U.S.

“There are periods in history when everything may change dramatically. We’re in one of those times,” said the Socialist Party member.

“In five months you will make a choice … France is open to the world, it is European, it is fraternal. How can we imagine our country huddled behind walls, reduced to its only domestic market, returning to its national currency and in addition, discriminating against its children according to their origins?”

“It would no longer be France!” added the country’s least popular president since World War II.

French President François Hollande (AFP/Francois Mori)

Le Pen, who is predicted to make it to the second round of elections, blasted Hollande, saying, “Like many other political figures, [Hollande] completely renounces the restoration of democracy and independence which is so ardently the wish of the French people.”

“These last words of the year offer at least a relief,” she said. “We know that next year we will not have to undergo such a slew of platitudes and statements in total mismatch with the reality of the country and the sufferings of the French.”

“To speak of isolation for a project that is, on the contrary, in the sense of history, after Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, a return of peoples’ global aspiration for independence, is a manifest misunderstanding of the evolution of the world and of the deep desires of its peoples, including the French people,” Le Pen added.

The populist party leader concluded, “The president’s wishes finally remind us that on the threshold of this New Year, a very clear alternative will be presented to the French. Either the pursuit of the globalist and Europeanist model” or a “commitment to return [sovereignty] to the people.”

Les Républicains (The Republicans) Presidential Candidate François Fillon (AFP Eric Feferberg)

The first round of the 2017 French presidential election will be held on 23 April. Should no candidate win an outright majority, a run-off between the top two candidates will be held on 7 May.

Along with Le Pen, The Republicans’ candidate François Fillon is expected to progress to the second round. Fillon, who recently stated that France is not a multicultural country, served as prime minister under former President Nicolas Sarkozy and according to polls is the favourite to be the next French president.

The Socialist Party primaries are set for 22 January and former Prime Minister Manuel Valls has announced his presidential bid. The Socialist Party is not expected to progress beyond the first round of voting in April.