Free Republic

Environmentalists' desired result: Destruction of food production to the point that food is no longer affordable. How to lessen the "surplus population"...Make sustenance so expensive they die of starvation Increasingly, city-dwellers seeking view lots or large acreage have been fleeing the metropolitan areas to build larger and even luxurious homes in rural America, often opposite agricultural operations. Once they’d invested in constructing homes and settled into their new digs, they were awakened to the realities of country living, including the sights, smells and sounds of working farms… and they didn’t like it. The offshoot was a plethora of nuisance suits...

Klaireth Díaz is a 1st-grade teacher at Elías Toro School, one of the biggest public schools in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela. Last year, she says, attendance was painfully low. Every day, of a class of 30 children at least 10 would be absent. “The reason was always lack of food,” she told Fox News Latino. She said she had a student who skipped class every single Thursday and when she asked his mother about it, she explained that Thursday was the day of the week assigned to her family to buy food at government-regulated prices – which involves standing...

Venezuelans are using a new euphemism for starvation. They call it “Maduro’s diet. If socialist Bernie Sanders ran a media outlet, we might see the above headline on a story about how starving Venezuelans have been eating tasty roadkill, vermin, and municipal waste in order to survive. Don’t laugh. Remember that Sanders said breadlines are a good thing. “You know, it’s funny. Sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is when people are lining up for food. That’s a good thing. In other countries, people don’t line up for food. The rich get the food and the poor...

KUWAIT CITY -- Kuwaiti prosecutors have drawn up a list of charges against ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and hundreds of his officials for alleged war crimes committed during Iraq's occupation of the Gulf nation, the prosecutor general said Wednesday. The list will be delivered to the Iraqi court that will try Saddam and other former regime members and the new charges will be added to the existing allegations, prosecutor general Hamed al-Othman said, according to the state-owned Kuwait News Agency. Saddam, who was captured in December 2003, already faces charges in Iraq that include killing rival politicians during his...

We all know that Venezuelan socialism has been a total disaster. People were reportedly eating dogs, cats, and birds for sustenance. Crime was spiking. Inflation is out of control—and there is what could only be described as gladiatorial battles to get the most basic supplies at the supermarkets. Energy shortages have led to rolling blackouts. Toilet paper is now a luxury item. Access to medicine has been a nightmare, with the country’s entire hospital system operating in deplorable conditions. It’s so bad that some places don’t have gloves or soap. Of course, many Venezuelans have resorted to looting to survive.

At least 50 animals have died in the last six months at the Caricuao zoo in Caracas, Venezuela, due to widespread food shortages that are affecting both man and beast in the socialist nation. Marlene Sifontes, a union leader for employees of state parks agency Inparques which oversees zoos, told Reuters that the zoo lost Vietnamese pigs, tapirs, rabbits and birds after the animals went weeks without eating. Others animals at the zoo are in danger of severe malnutrition. Lions and tigers, which should be on a carnivorous diet, are being fed mango and pumpkin just to get something in...

A humanitarian crisis, the likes of which have never been seen in the Western Hemisphere, is brewing in Venezuela and it will be inevitable in a few weeks. Much has been written recently about the crisis in Venezuela. During the last week, the world’s leading media outlets have amply reported the shortages of food, medicine and other basic supplies in the country. Unfortunately, despite some great reporting by various journalists, the true extent and the reasons for the country’s desperate situation have not yet been clearly understood by the media and the international community. The majority of those reporting on...

Doctors Now Have to Steal Food From Hospitals to Feed Their Own Families The increasing shortage of food and other basic products in Venezuela, on top of inflation, is now takingits toll on the health of the nation — most notably, on its malnourished children. Children frequently arrive to the San Felipe Central Hospital after having fainted from malnourishment, officials told the PanAm Post, and are given medicine to take three times a day, Mothers tell physicians they don’t have enough food in their homes, even after rationing. “Children under five months of age come in here with diarrhea and...

MEXICO CITY, Mexico — A recently launched government-controlled, home-delivery food distribution system in Venezuela has further riled the restive country, prompting fears that the state may withhold basic items from those who do not support it. The new system, known as Local Supply and Production Committees, or CLAP in Spanish, is meant to reduce hours-long lines outside of supermarkets. Lines, lootings and black market sales of everything from diapers to cooking oil have grown as shortages of basic commodities in the country have worsened in recent months.

Dozens of emaciated-looking Boko Haram members begging for food have surrendered in northeast Nigeria, the military and a civilian self-defense fighter said Wednesday. Seventy-six people including children and women gave themselves up to soldiers last Saturday in Gwoza, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) southeast of Maiduguri, according to a senior officer. All are being detained at military headquarters in Maiduguri, the birthplace of Boko Haram and currently the command center of the war against the Islamic extremists, according to the officer. He insisted on anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to journalists. ...

In the era whose secret he uncovered, a journalist's office would have looked just like the one where Yang Jisheng works now. The tiled floor, the grimy window panes, the desk piled two feet high with papers, envelopes and books. The Mao-era radiators. The cigarette ash and the dust. Under Mao Zedong, Yang's good fortune was to find a job as a reporter with China's state-run Xinhua news agency. His misfortune had been to see his father die of hunger in 1961, at the height of the famine that killed an estimated 36 million people: "When my dad died, I...

Founder of today’s China killed 45 million of his own people (TibetanReview.net, Sep05, 2010) Recently declassified Chinese Communist Party archives show that the Great Helmsman, Chairman Mao Tsetung's regime cased the greatest "man-made famine" the world has ever seen, reported the ANI news service Sep 3, citing a new publication from Hong Kong. Mao's Great Famine, by Frank Dikotter, Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, is reported to show that 45 million Chinese people were killed between 1958 and 1961. Chinese propaganda posters of the late 1950s show smiling young workers marching jubilantly towards unity under the...

"I believe that anyone who has a job and works full time, they should be able to pay the things that sustain life: food, shelter and clothing. I can't even do that."That rather depressing quote is from 61-year old Rebecca Cornick. She’s a grandmother and a 9-year Wendy’s veteran who spoke to CBS News. Rebecca makes $9 an hour and her plight is representative of fast food workers across the country who are campaigning for higher pay. The fast food worker pay debate is part of a larger discussion as "states and cities across the country [wrestle] with the idea of...

Conventional agriculture is causing enormous environmental damage in Germany, warns a study by the country’s Federal Environment Agency, saying a transition to organic farming and stricter regulation is urgently needed. EurActiv Germany reports. Spanning over 50% of the country, agriculture takes up by far the biggest amount of land in the country, and is one of its most important economic sectors. But intensive farming still harms the environment to an alarming extent, according to a study conducted by the Federal Environment Agency (UBA). The use of pesticides and fertilizers, as well as intensive animal husbandry, have a negative impact on...

REMEMBRANCE of EASTER 2005 Crowd my eyes, you bevies of daffodils, And you forsythias in throngs of cheer, Dandelion galaxies and fountains of trees. Fill my mouth with the breath of hyacinths, you purple air And you roistering breeze. And you quince-buds so eager, you swelling seeds, You squirrels running stitches across the loom Of woven grasses, inflorescent weeds; Jasmine-bush, loop me with your lariats of perfume. Fill me, small birds, with your versicles, And chuckled replies. She is bleeding from the mouth and eyes. Sate me then, Sun, all dapple and spangle Crowd out all else Lade me...

Charles L. Bosk, a writer and researcher, spent time in a pediatric hospital where doctors and nurses took care of disabled and/or premature babies. Sometimes, when disabled babies were born (despite the program’s efforts to detect and abort them), the parents didn’t want them. Bosk wrote about a couple that chose not to treat their disabled baby with routine surgery, but instead allowed the child to die: She [the woman who counseled the parents] reported that the parents had decided not only that they did not want to repair the child’s oomphalecele, but they wanted the child to die, and...

When Ukraine resisted Soviet attempts at collectivization in the 1920s and '30s, the Soviet Union under Stalin used labor camps, executions, and starvation: Holodomor Released known picture of peasant uprisings before the Famine. Photos electronic archive Ukrainian liberation movement Removing vegetables from the villagers. The village of Novo-Red History of the Security Service of Ukraine in cooperation with the Center for Studies of the liberation movement laid out in free access to a unique picture of the peasant uprising that preceded the Great Famine and Genocide diaries of eyewitnesses. Now you can view and download the electronic archive of the...

Reporter Nelufar Hedayat looks at the terrible conditions dogs are forced to live in just to keep the black market in dog meat supplied A shocking new TV documentary will reveal how hundreds pet dogs are being stolen every day in Vietnam for the lucrative dog meat trade. Unreported World shows disturbing evidence of how dogs are stolen, force-fed, kept in cramped cages and slaughtered for meals. Here, reporter Nelufar Hedayat exclusively reveals the horrors she witnessed. The smell of dog and filth permeated the whole room along with frantic, high-pitched barking from the hundreds of dogs crammed into the...

The Yazidis, members of an ancient religious sect, fled when the Islamic State overran their homes. Now they’re trapped with no food or water. Will the U.S. step in to help save them? One week is as long as the average person can survive without water. In extreme temperatures, it may be less. So time is running out for the 10,000 to 40,000 Iraqis, mostly religious minorities, who have been trapped for days in barren mountains without food or water. They face a choice: return to their towns captured by ISIS forces and risk being slaughtered or stay in the...

A British medical journal announced a finding last month that might be the best news in the history of the world: Nearly one out of three people in the world is overweight. Members of the media responded to this thrilling discovery by lamenting the globe’s growing waistline. Pundits rushed to condemn widespread access to inexpensive food. Everyone seemed so excited to attack obesity that no one noticed the report’s incredible story of human achievement and hope. Throughout history, malnutrition and hunger-related health issues have killed more people than any other cause. Over the course of the past half-century, however, the...