Free Republic

On this date in 1979, the American Broadcasting Company journalist Bill Stewart was executed at a somocista checkpoint during Nicaragua’s bloody civil war. And what is more, the deed was caught on film — pre-emptively balking the crumbling Nicaraguan dictatorship of the ability to, say, blame the killing on the Sandinista rebels. Stewart was stopped in a marked press vehicle in Managua, ordered to lie down, and then kicked and shot through the head while colleagues looked on. Though his summary execution by national guardsmen was taped by fellow journos in the convoy, the reasons for it are well into...

With the embers still raining from blackened skies choked by California’s massive wildfires, the effort turns to rebuilding Paradise — a town of almost 30,000 that was wiped off the map. But experts warn that with megafires the new normal in a warming global climate, housing in the western United States is going to need a revolutionary rethink along the lines of villages dotting Europe’s wooded slopes. “I think people are thinking about if there is a way we can design the new Paradise that can look like more of a European village or a ski town, and not have...