Free Republic

(HAVANA) — First comes the stink of diesel, then a metallic roar, and finally a tower of black smoke that tells you the "camello" — the camel — has reached your stop. These hulking 18-wheeled beasts, iron mutants made of two Soviet-era buses welded together on a flatbed and pulled by a separate cab, have long been Havana's public transport nightmare — bumpy, hot and jammed with up to 400 passengers at a time. But their gradual disappearance is a telling sign of change in the twilight of the Fidel Castro age. The last "camello" is expected to go out...

LONDON - A patient was told there was no reason why he couldn't have surgery in a hospital, despite the smell caused by a dead rodent trapped in the building's ceiling. Andrew Cowper was due to have an operation at the Queen Elizabeth II hospital in Hertfordshire when staff "were made aware of a dead rodent in the single storey unit's roof space," the hospital said in a statement. The hospital said its experts concluded that the dead animal was outside the operating theater and posed no risk. But "despite being told that the trust's infection control experts had stated...

LOS ANGELES -- The Detroit area, hit hard by the double-whammy of unemployment and a slumping housing market, had the highest foreclosure rate in the nation last year, with several cities in California ranked close behind, an analysis of foreclosure activity in the country's largest 100 metropolitan areas shows. Some 4.9 percent of the households in the Detroit metro area were in some stage of foreclosure in 2007 -- 4.8 times the national average, according to the study being released Wednesday by mortgage research company RealtyTrac Inc. Stockton, Calif., ranked second with about 4.8 percent of its households in some...

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Imagine living in a city with the country's highest rate for violent crime and the second-highest unemployment rate. As an added kicker you need more Superfund dollars allocated to your city to clean up contaminated toxic waste sites than just about any other metro. Unfortunately, this nightmare is a reality for the residents of Detroit. The Motor City grabs the top spot on Forbes' inaugural list of America's Most Miserable Cities.

SEATTLE -- Reports of alleged abuse and fraud, and a federal investigation, have prompted a shake up at the Port of Seattle, and now port commissioners vow to change the way they operate. Public outrage was so widespread, a 2-hour meeting Tuesday lasted hours longer A state audit detailing $97 million of waste by the port is what provoked the outrage. Then came news the Department of Justice had launched a criminal investigation. "I think somebody needs to step out and hold these people accountable," said King County resident Stephanie Dotson. "I know I'm one small voice, but by God,...

Warfare: Quick, which nation shows average civilian deaths at 33 a day in the last third of 2007? Now name the one where civilian deaths average 19 a day? If you guessed Iraq and Venezuela, you'd have it backward.Shocking? Of course. But true. With even Venezuelan officials admitting their country clocked 12,249 murders in 2007, Hugo Chavez's socialist "sea of happiness" resembles a war zone. In December alone, Venezuela had 670 murders while Iraq had 476 — and that number is falling fast. This is Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, the place wildly praised by Hollywood eminentos like Oliver Stone and Sean...

Berkeley is one of the most affluent, lively cities in the Bay Area, but its downtown looks more like Tombstone, Ariz., on a slow day. Shuttered businesses dot the streets like tumbleweeds in a ghost town: Barnes and Noble. Gateway Computers. UC Theater. Soon to join their grim ranks: Ross Dress for Less and Shoe Pavilion. "Berkeley's downtown plan has resulted in a wonderful, vibrant, mixed-use community. It's called Emeryville," said Will Travis, chairman of the city committee charged with revitalizing the beleaguered commercial district around Shattuck and University avenues. In a few years, downtown Berkeley could look a bit...

Strange, secretive, and desperately poor, North Korea tests the limits of social control.PYONGYANG—Here is the locked ward of the political asylum, the place where politics has actually become an official state religion, and power is worshipped, directly and literally, in the form of a colossal bronze idol to which the people come and bow with every sign of reverence. Nothing in the modern world compares with North Korea, though it gives us some clue about how life must have been under the pharaohs, in Imperial Japan before Hiroshima, or in the obliterated years—conveniently erased from memory by blushing fellow travelers—when...

Caption says: "This was today, at Urbina's main street. First time I see anything like this. The line stretched for four blocks. Those present told me they had been standing there since 5:00 AM. They had to wait an average of five hours to get their food rations, among which the most coveted was milk." There have been reports of milk and milk product shortages for over a month. More pictures at link. NoticieroDigital.com is sort of a Venezuelan FreeRepublic, except that they allow posts from moonbats, which at times make for great fun. Comments are in Spanish.

MOSCOW - There is a "high degree of probability" that bone fragments found recently near the Russian city of Yekaterinburg are those of a daughter and son of the last czar, forensics experts said Friday. If confirmed, the find would fill in a missing chapter in the story of the doomed Romanovs, who were killed after the violent 1917 Bolshevik Revolution ushered in more than 70 years of Communist rule. The fragments were found by archaeologists in a burned field near the Ural Mountains city where Czar Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, and their five children were held prisoner by...

(PYONGYANG, North Korea) -- As soon as you settle into the seat of the Air Koryo flight from Beijing to Pyongyang, it’s obvious that North Korea is a nation like no other. The plane is a Soviet-made relic with whining engines and small overhead bins. The flight attendants pass out sandwiches in plastic throwaway containers, then collect the containers and plastic cups to be reused. North Korea is so poor, and so determined to be self-reliant, that it salvages what the rest of the world considers trash. In contrast to booming, chaotic China, North Korea is an oasis of cleanliness,...

China's national anthem promises its people "will no longer be slaves". But a list of new slang expressions compiled by its Ministry of Education suggests the country's economic reforms have simply multiplied the ways its people can fall into serfdom. Among the most popular phrases used by the country's growing middle class are an expanding variety of equivalents to the English "wage slave". The most common is "house slave", meaning someone who struggles to pay off the mortgage. But there are also "car slaves" who, unlike lucky government cadres, have to pay all their own petrol, servicing, and road toll...

This week Mattel recalled nearly two million Chinese-made toys over concerns they contain excessive levels of lead paint and loose parts. Dirt-cheap labour and a massive expansion in capacity means China makes more than three-quarters of the world's toys, with an export value in excess of £7 billion. But increasingly, there is evidence of inadequate safety standards, poor quality control and slave labour. Here, in an extract from his book about the toy industry, Eric Clark reveals the real cost of cheap toys from China. Behind high fences, sprawling factory compounds stretch mile after dusty, depressing mile along the congested...

EUGENE -- A 33-year-old man who was trying to hang himself from a construction crane not only failed but then survived an 85-foot fall when his rope broke. According to a news release from Eugene police, the man had climbed out on a construction crane at a job site at 265 W. Eighth Ave. about 6:30 this morning and wrapped a flag from the crane around his shoulders. Eugene police, firefighters and emergency medical workers were called, and members of the Crisis Negotiation Team also came to the scene. They were trying to start talking to the man when he...

I escaped North Korea after famine, violence By Sergey Soukhorukov in Dandong, Sunday Telegraph Last Updated: 1:04am BST 05/08/2007 Like most of her fellow "massage girls" at her brothel in the Chinese city of Dandong, Ban Yong Mee has a smile that is purely for business. On the days it becomes difficult to maintain, she need only remember why she fled here from neighbouring North Korea. "Most of us had absolutely nothing to eat," she said, recalling the famines in the communist state that killed an estimated 300,000 people between 1995 and 1998. "We went to the hills to look...

Now in their 70s and 80s, children of the victims of Josef Stalin's political repressions remembered one of the darkest pages of Russia's history at a ceremony Wednesday in central Moscow. Several hundred people laid flowers and lit candles to honor the victims of the Great Purge of 1937, when millions were labeled "enemies of the state" and executed without trial or sent to labor camps. The 70th anniversary comes as the Kremlin, focused on restoring Russians' pride in their Soviet-era history, has been trying to soften public perception of Stalin's rule and hushing up the full horror of his...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - An office worker for the US city of Detroit is suing for her colleagues to be banned from wearing perfume which gives her such severe headaches, nausea and coughing fits that she must leave work. Court documents showed Thursday that Susan McBride suffered so acutely from allergy to the chemicals in scents, lotions and sprays that she had to go home sick when a heavily perfumed co-worker shared her office at the city's historic districts department. Her sensitivity is such that she avoids the detergent sections in shops and cannot sit near perfumed people in a movie...

Shrinking Detroit has 12,000 abandoned homes Sun Aug 14, 5:03 PM ET Rats or lead poisoning. When it comes to the threats from the broken down house next door, Dorothy Bates isn't sure which is worse. "When it's lightening and thundering you can hear the bricks just falling," the 40-year-old nurse said as she looked at the smashed windows and garbage-strewn porch. "If you call and ask (the city) about it they say they don't have the funds to tear it down." There are more than 12,000 abandoned homes in the Detroit area, a byproduct of decades of layoffs at...

Almost half a million NHS patients are waiting more than a year for hospital treatment, official figures showed yesterday. One person in eight who is admitted to hospital for a non-emergency procedure has to wait more than 52 weeks between being referred by a GP and being treated. There are also large variations in waiting times across the country. The figures were revealed yesterday as Andy Burnham, the health minister, claimed that the Government was on track to deliver on its "historic" promise effectively to abolish hospital waiting lists by the end of next year. Previous waiting list figures have...