Free Republic

Emotions that simmered for nearly a year over the renaming of a historic major thoroughfare in Kansas City, Missouri, for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led to a tense scene at a black church as get-out-the vote efforts wound down ahead of residents going to the polls. About 100 supporters of keeping the King name for the 10-mile (16.1-kilometer) boulevard were at a rally to court voters Sunday when opponents walked into the Paseo Baptist Church and stood along its two aisles. Those against the King name stood silently and did not respond to calls for them to sit...

In April 1959, when I was all of fifteen and a student at Scarsdale High, I made the trek with by buddies from the 'burbs to the city to see our new hero Fidel Castro speak in Central Park. It's fifty-seven years ago now, but I still remember that night well. How could I forget? It was high drama the likes of which I had never seen, people streaming in from all over New York, klieg lights splayed across Sheep Meadow. The Daily News reported thirty-five thousand people squeezed into the park. I couldn't get up that close, but close...

Kim Jong-Il was born Yuri Irsenovich Kim. His official biography states that he was born on a sacred mountain (Baekdu Mountain, the legendary birthplace of Korea’s first kingdom) on February 16, 1942, where his father was serving in a secret military base, attempting to overthrow the Japanese. Further, it states that his birth was marked by a double rainbow over the mountain, a new star appearing in the sky, and, before his birth, a swallow foretold his coming. Besides the obvious parts of this that aren’t true, he also was not born on Baekdu Mountain in 1942, but rather was...

THE Kremlin said it may call a referendum on the closure of the Lenin mausoleum - where the mummified body of the father of the Russian Revolution once lay in honour. "It's obvious that having this necropolis in the centre of the country is a nonsense," Vladimir Kozhine, a Kremlin policy-maker said in the official Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper due to appear tomorrow. "But as for knowing whether it should be there or not, that's for others to decide and the best way for that is a referendum. "If 80 per cent of people say that Lenin's body should be buried,...

LEFTIST leaders and sympathisers marked the 40th anniversary of the death of revolutionary icon Ernesto Che Guevara today in Cuba, where he is buried, and Bolivia, where he was killed in 1967. Cuba's Acting President, Raul Castro, led the main event under a giant bronze statue of the guerrilla fighter in the town of Santa Clara, some 300 kilometres (186 miles) east of Havana. Convalescing Cuban leader Fidel Castro, 81, was absent, but a homage he penned was read in public. The Argentine-born doctor-turned-guerrilla was "a flower torn up prematurely by the stem. I bow my head to pay tribute...

HAVANA - A military parade marking the 50th anniversary of the date Fidel Castro and fellow rebels landed in Cuba to launch their revolution started Saturday without the ailing leader. Many Cubans still hoped that Castro would make at least a brief appearance during a huge military parade in Havana on Saturday morning to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. The commemoration culminates five days of celebrations for Castro's 80th birthday, but he has yet to make an appearance. The Cuban leader turned 80 on Aug. 13 but delayed the celebrations to give him...

BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro - A Socialist Party aide of Slobodan Milosevic said Saturday that the ex-president was defiant just before his death. "He told me, 'Don't you worry: They will not destroy me or break me; I shall defeat them all,'" said Milorad Vucelic of the Socialist Party, recounting a phone conversation with Milosevic late Friday. "But it was obvious he was very ill." Milosevic, who was found dead Saturday in his cell at the Netherlands-based war crimes court near The Hague, was daily in contact with Socialist party officials in Belgrade as he carried out his own defense before the...

MOSCOW (AP) - Former President Mikhail Gorbachev warned the Kremlin against quickly burying the embalmed body of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin, saying the nation isn't ready yet such a move, a news agency reported Tuesday. Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union before its 1991 collapse, said that Lenin's body eventually should be laid to rest at a proper moment in line with his own will, but added that "this moment has not come yet," the ITAR-Tass news agency reported. In what appeared to be the Kremlin's attempt to gauge public reaction to the divisive issue, Georgy Poltavchenko, a...

Vu Ky, the private secretary of President Ho Chi Minh, has died at the age of 84. Nguyen Thi Tinh, director of Ho Chi Minh Museum writes about the man. Among the important contributions facilitating the work and daily activities of President Ho Chi Minh, there are the contributions made by his close assistants. Mr Vu Ky, the private secretary of Uncle Ho, was one of them. Vu Ky was born from a civil servant’s family and grew up when the patriotic movement under the leadership of the Party developed into wide-spread national salvation movement. As a young man Vu...