Free Republic

It was a proud day in Medellín, Colombia. Mayor Alonso Salazar smiled as he announced the city's latest accomplishment, and a sycophantic press reported his happy message verbatim. The 12,000 desperately poor people of Medellín's Comuna 13, a shantytown set high atop a steep hill, had spent generations climbing up and down some 530 mountainside stairs to reach their homes. It has always been a 35-minute walk, each way, a challenge for even the healthiest among them. But it is no longer. What did the city do to alleviate the pain of its most destitute? The city of Medellín, long...

The head of the Sandinista Government in Nicaragua protected one of the world’s top drug barons and helped him to establish trafficking routes through the country, a former high-ranking officer has claimed. During the 1980s Daniel Ortega, the revolutionary leader and current President, gave Pablo Escobar, the head of Colombia’s Medellín cartel, access to drug corridors as well as sanctuary and a military guard, according to the allegations. Cuba and Panama, then led by Fidel Castro and Manuel Noriega, are also said to have participated in the deal, with Panama acting as a financial and money-laundering centre and Cuba protecting...

HOUSTON — In a case that has drawn international attention, Texas executed José E. Medellín on Tuesday night in defiance of an international court ruling and despite pleas from the Bush administration for a new hearing. The execution came just before 10 p.m. Central time, shortly after the United States Supreme Court denied a last request for a reprieve. Protesters for and against the death penalty clamored in the rain outside the Huntsville Unit, about 70 miles north of Houston, where Mr. Medellín was executed by lethal injection. “I’m sorry my actions caused you pain,” he said to the witnesses...

SCOTUS Tells Foreign Court to Butt Out by Ted Cruz Over the past few years many Americans have become deeply concerned that judges have begun relying more and more on foreign law to decide questions of U.S. constitutional law. One doesn’t have to be a constitutional scholar to object to foreign laws and foreign courts -- laws that are not enacted by our democratic government and judges who are not selected as our Constitution provides -- ruling on Americans’ rights and the powers of American government. These concerns are largely well founded, and reflect the increasing degree to which modern...

Prompted by an international tribunal's decision last year ordering new hearings for 51 Mexicans on death rows in the United States, the State Department said yesterday that the United States had withdrawn from the protocol that gave the tribunal jurisdiction to hear such disputes. The withdrawal followed a Feb. 28 memorandum from President Bush to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales directing state courts to abide by the decision of the tribunal, the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The decision required American courts to grant "review and reconsideration" to claims that the inmates' cases had been hurt by the...