No child left inside? Hundreds of students in Richmond, Va. were supposed to start classes at Barack Obama Elementary School on Monday. Instead, the school was closed indefinitely due to extensive “mold growth” on the premises, our Andrew Stiles writes. Pest control was also called to deal with a rat infestation. “Some parents who were inside the building moments before the closure was announced described seeing mold throughout the school, including on student laptops sitting in storage. Clearing the mold is expected to take several days, with students and staff potentially able to return by the end of the month,” writes Stiles. “Frustrated parents sounded off at a town hall meeting later that day. ‘Let’s just be honest, we’ve known Barack Obama’s had mold issues from as far back as at least 2024, if not earlier than that,’ one said as local officials complained about lack of funding and one of the wettest summers they’ve ever seen from the standpoint of water, which created ‘the perfect awful soup’ for mold to flourish.” “This week’s mold and rodent debacle in Richmond is merely the latest indignity to befall a school named after the 44th president. In August 2009, school board officials in Asbury Park, N.J., voted to rename a local elementary school after Obama, who had been in office for just seven months. He hadn’t even won the Nobel Peace Prize yet. Asbury Park’s Barack H. Obama Elementary School debuted its new name in 2010, then shut down permanently the following year due to low enrollment.” Former Obama chief of staff and then-Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel attempted to open a prep school named after Obama in 2014, but liberals complained that it wasn’t being built in the predominantly black neighborhood where Obama launched his political career. “As of today, the school does not exist and never will.” READ MORE: No Child Left Inside: Obama Elementary School Shuttered Over ‘Mold Growth,’ Rat Infestation Additional reading: The Trump administration declared the radical left-wing British group Palestine Action, which has carried out acts of violence targeting companies in the U.K. that it claims are linked to “Zionism,” a designated terror organization, the Telegraph reported. The designation means the group’s founders will face lifetime bans from the United States. A left-wing alderman in Chicago, Bryon Sigcho-López, stands accused in recently released divorce records of spending “incredible” amounts of money on prostitutes and porn. Sigcho-López didn’t just deny the allegations—he said the watchdog group that petitioned to have the records unsealed is part of the “pro-Israel lobby” and should spend its time “fighting for the release of the Epstein files and going after the pedophiles who infiltrate our government.” If the alderman gig doesn’t work out, at least Sigcho-López has a backup as an Abdul El-Sayed staffer. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries met with President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to discuss “affordability”—and the Left is crushing him for it. Taking the meeting was “definitely a signal about the kind of speaker Jeffries would be” and “reinforces the worry from our base that Jeffries’ instinct is to negotiate with the Trump power structure rather than draw lines and fight it,” the executive director of the left-wing group Our Revolution, Joseph Geevarghese, told Axios. Eighteen years after its launch, the infamous California high-speed rail project “now costs billions more than planned, is years behind schedule and has yet to lay its first track,” the Wall Street Journal reported. That might never change: The segment of the project set to be completed first, a portion of track that runs through the Central Valley, is facing opposition from locals who say the track will divide their town without offering any benefits. California has spent $15 billion on the project so far. Check out our full Thursday lineup below. Soros-Funded Fake News Site Falsely Identified Abdul El-Sayed as ‘Veteran’ in Mailer Sent to Michigan Voters Michigan Democratic House Candidate Called Fatal Baltimore Bridge Collapse a ‘Climate Activist’s Dream’ (and Praised the Houthis) in Bizarre Podcast No Child Left Inside: Obama Elementary School Shuttered Over ‘Mold Growth,’ Rat Infestation Owners of Talkin’ Tacos Halal Food Chain Gave More Than $10K to Neo-Nazi Dan Bilzerian’s Jew-Bashing Congressional Run Thanks for reading the Washington Free Beacon! Subscribe for free to receive new posts. Subs