Free Republic

MANAGUA (Reuters) - Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, angry because the United States is rethinking an aid program, pressed Washington on Monday for billions of dollars in war reparations dating back to a 1980s civil war. The International Court of Justice, based in the Hague, ordered the United States in 1986 to pay reparations to Nicaragua for training, arming and financing Contra rebels and mining Nicaraguan ports during a conflict that killed tens of thousands of people. "The United States has not honored the judge's order," Ortega said on national television. The World Court never set a figure for compensation but...

CALABOZO, Venezuela – The foremen bark out instructions in broken Spanish, saying "aqui" and "mas" as they direct crews to lay water pipes and smooth out cement. But on their lunch break, they switch into Farsi — the language of Iran. Their Iranian company is building thousands of apartments for Venezuela's poor. Iran is also helping to build cars, tractors and bicycles in Venezuela and has opened new embassies in Bolivia and Nicaragua.

NICARAGUA may be a small country but it is an emblematic one. In 1979 the leftist Sandinista movement overthrew a corrupt dictatorship. In response, the United States organised the Contra guerrillas. In 1990 the Sandinistas agreed to hold free elections, which they lost. But their leader, Daniel Ortega, has returned to power, having won a presidential election in 2006 against a divided opposition. Now, armed with an alliance with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, he seems determined to snuff out Nicaragua’s young democracy. In the months before municipal elections on November 9th, Mr Ortega’s government manoeuvred to disqualify two opposition parties from...

Ortega said the current crisis would hit remittance flows to Nicaragua, as immigrants sending money home to relatives lose their jobs in the United States due to the slowdown.

We are all now very familiar with the aptly-named triple threat posed by Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. But there's another gathering storm closer to home and the media only feigns interest. Cuba's old news. And Venezuela's rants against colonialism and America have reached the level of parody. But recently Bolivia has stepped up and is trying to play with the big boys.

WASHINGTON -- Millions of American boys have dreamed of hitting a grand slam or pitching a no-hitter at Yankee Stadium because baseball's greatest have performed there. Talented musicians and singers aspire to New York's famed Carnegie Hall, for they know it represents the pinnacle of their profession. For gifted physicians and medical researchers, the Mount Everest of medicine is the Mayo Clinic. But certain institutions can bring out the worst in people. For the professional peddlers of anti-Americanism, haters of free enterprise, and true believers in global government, there is only one place that it really pays to perform: the...

Russia offered aid to the leftist government of Nicaragua on Wednesday, a former Cold War ally, as part of a push to increase its influence in Latin America after years on the sidelines in the region. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin was in the Central American country following a tour of Cuba, where he promised to help areas devastated by recent hurricanes. Sechin said his country wants to promote trade, energy and education projects while increasing "political cooperation" with Nicaragua. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, a former Marxist guerrilla, had close ties to Moscow when he first governed the country...

A new session of the United Nations General Assembly has opened in New York, with a sharp attack on the United States by the assembly's president, former Nicaraguan foreign minister Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann. VOA's Walter Wisniewski reports from our New York newscenter. The past year's General Assembly of the United Nations has come to a close, and the new, 63rd session of the General Assembly is now formally open. World leaders will address the annual U.N. meeting next week, but the Assembly's incoming president caught diplomats' attention Tuesday with his opening remarks, a scathing attack on U.S. policies. The General...

A bitter political-cultural confrontation that exploded in Nicaragua in late August could mark the final end of the passionate romance between the world’s leftist intellectuals and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. Ortega, you may recall, was the leader of the Sandinista National Liberation Front when it seized power after overthrowing the 40-year Somoza family dynasty. A dashing young revolutionary who electrified liberals and leftists around the world, Ortega served as Nicaragua’s president for most of the 1980s. He lost power in 1990, but after 16 years in opposition, he was elected president again in 2006. For years — in and out...

Recognition a Lonely Exercise for Moscow 05 September 2008 By Nabi Abdullaev / Staff Writer Ten days after Russia recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, the only other country to have followed suit as of Thursday was that Cold War battlefield of the 1980s: Nicaragua. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega's announcement this week of his Central American nation's recognition of the breakaway Georgian regions was a "pleasant surprise," a Foreign Ministry spokesman said Thursday. Closer to home, however, Russia's allies among former Soviet republics have remained reticent on the issue. The Collective Security Treaty Organization, a Russia-led alliance of...

Nicaragua has recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia, backing the Russian stance on the breakaway Georgian regions and siding with other leftist Latin American countries to defy Washington. The Nicaraguan president, Daniel Ortega, a former Marxist guerrilla leader who had close ties to Moscow during the Cold War, has criticized the Georgian attempt to regain control of South Ossetia and supported the counterattack by Russia. Venezuela and Cuba have sided with Russia in the dispute, but Ortega went further in fully recognizing the regions' independence. "The government of Nicaragua recognizes the independence of the republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and...

Their lives and their fates could hardly have been more different. William Walker graduated from college when he was 14 and later earned a medical degree and passed the bar. Cornelius Vanderbilt quit school after the sixth grade and is known to have read only one book in his entire life. Walker was executed by firing squad when he was 36, his body thrown naked into a shallow grave far from his native Nashville, Tenn. When Vanderbilt died in bed at the age of 83, he was the richest self-made man in the world. His tomb on his native Staten...

What nice things oil buys.

Mr. Ortega refers to the FARC as "brothers." His help would be welcomed by the rebels, who have suffered a string of recent setbacks, including the deaths of three of its top members and the recent rescue by Colombia's military of some of the group's most prized hostages. Latin America's oldest and largest insurgency, the FARC funds itself through drug trafficking and kidnapping. It holds about 700 hostages, most for ransom. ... Mr. Ortega agreed to mediate the conflict, much to the annoyance of the Colombian government, which resents the sympathy with which Mr. Ortega and some other Latin American...

Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega charged Saturday that the opposition was "openly conspiring" with US help to overthrow his government, and threatened to unleash "weapons of war" if they did not stop. Thousands of Nicaraguans marched against Ortega last month after the Electoral Tribunal disqualified two political parties from the November municipal and the 2011 general elections. "We want peace, but we're also prepared to raise the steel weapons of war if they try to overthrow the people's government, the power of ordinary citizens," Ortega said on the 29th anniversary of the rebel uprising that overthrew the Anastasio Somoza dictatorship. The...

Question of the Day: John McCain Supposedly Roughed Up . . . By Debbie Schlussel . . . an associate of Communist Sandinista Dictator Daniel "Gucci Glasses" Ortega of Nicaragua, and this is a "bad thing" because . . .? Sorry, but if true--and he's now denying it--this enhances my respect for John McCain a gazillion-fold and makes me happier to vote for him in November. It probably is true because the John McCain of 1987 was a true conservative, a lot different than the one of today. A brief refresher: Daniel Ortega was (and remains) a Communist thug. He...

President Daniel Ortega, who led the 1979 revolution in Nicaragua, says Barack Obama’s presidential bid is a “revolutionary” phenomenon in the United States. “It’s not to say that there is already a revolution under way in the U.S. … but yes, they are laying the foundations for a revolutionary change,” the Sandinista leader said Wednesday night as he accepted an honorary doctorate from an engineering university. Ortega led a Soviet-backed government that battled U.S.-supported Contra rebels before he lost power in a 1990 election. He returned to office last year via the ballot box. In statements broadcast on Sandinista Radio...

Team rescued 120 women from grim conditions when it dismantled the operation in Houston The farewell party was in full swing at midnight when police came for Maximino "El Chimino" Mondragon, his accomplices and his victims — scantily dressed women and girls he forced to sell beers and sexual favors under the flashing lights of a revolving crystalline disco ball inside his strip mall bar off Hempstead Highway. Mondragon was celebrating his retirement at El Potrero de Chimino bar, also known as the Wagon Wheel. He had a one-way ticket back to his native El Salvador and blueprints in the...

United Nations: It's said that the U.N. is only as good as its members. But putting a Nicaraguan dinosaur communist at the presidency of the General Assembly takes it all a step lower. Already, the America-bashing is back.Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, Nicaragua's foreign minister until his Marxist Sandinista party was booted in 1990, has now got a new gig leading the U.N. General Assembly. Oh, lucky us. A Maryknoll priest of the old liberation theology school, the 75-year-old rifle-and-cassock radical is famous for taking the U.S. to the International Court of Justice in The Hague in 1986 over President Reagan's arming...

The General Assembly of the United Nations voted this week to elect Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann as its new president. Readers with a long memory will recall Father D'Escoto (he's a Catholic priest) as Nicaragua's foreign minister during the Sandinista regime of the 1980s. He's also the winner of the 1985 Lenin Prize. Only at the U.N. does that count as a recommendation.continued