Free Republic

Cathy Smith, the onetime girlfriend of singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot who might have been best remembered for inspiring the hit song “Sundown” had she not met up with John Belushi at the Chateau Marmont on March 5, 1982, died Aug. 18 at the age of 73. Her death was reported by Canada’s The Globe and Mail. The longtime resident of Maple Ridge, British Columbia, had been on oxygen and in failing health the past few years, the newspaper said. Smith, who had been a back-up singer (and occasional drug supplier) to the Canadian rockers who would later become The Band (she...

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican security forces fought an hour-long gun gunbattle Saturday with suspected cartel gunmen in Villa Union, a town in Coahuila state about an hour’s drive southwest of Eagle Pass, Texas, leaving at least 14 people dead, officials said. Coahuila state Gov. Miguel Angel Riquelme told local media four of the dead were police officers killed in the initial confrontation, and that several municipal workers were missing. He said the armed group stormed the town of 3,000 residents in a convoy of trucks, attacking local government offices and prompting state and federal forces to intervene. Ten alleged...

At age 75, the legendary songwriter and beloved recording artist Gordon Lightfoot is still working hard and enjoying it more than ever. The creator of such standards as If You Could Read My Mind, Early Morning Rain, Carefree Highway and Sundown still performs upwards of eighty concerts a year in North America. "We love the work" is the joyful mantra his associates hear him say all the time. Even after waking up from a six-week coma following a burst abdominal artery in 2002, Gordon worked from his hospital bed and polished the final tracks for his twentieth album. It would...

The catastrophe, when it comes, will be beautiful at first. It is a balmy evening in late September 2012. Ever since the sun set, the dimming skies over London have been alive with fire. Pillars of incandescent green writhe like gigantic serpents across the skies. Sheets of orange race across the horizon during the most spectacular display of the aurora borealis seen in southern England for 153 years. And then, 90 seconds later, the lights start to go out. Not the lights in the sky - they will dazzle until dawn - but the lights on the ground. Within an...

In the 1980s my wife, a social worker, visited a nursing home on Sand Mountain, a large mountainous plateau in north Georgia that stretches westward into northeastern Alabama. When she mentioned that she noticed there were no black people in the facility or the nearby communities, one of the older residents told her of a sign that had been posted for years on the main highway at the foot of the mountain: “Nigger don’t let the sun set on you on Sand Mountain.” Although the sign had been removed, she acknowledged, Sand Mountain remained a place where no black people...