Free Republic

CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez returned to the national spotlight on Valentine's Day to tell U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that he misses her verbal attacks. "It had been days since she had given me any attention. How are you, Condoleezza?" Chavez asked in a speech Wednesday to pensioners in the capital of Caracas. It was Chavez's first response to Rice's testimony last week to a U.S. congressional committee that the Venezuelan leader was "destroying his own country" economically and politically — an apparent reference to a centralization of power in Venezuela and moves to nationalize key...

SUPPORT for Zimbabwe's President, Robert Mugabe, is eroding due to a hyperinflation crisis that is being blamed for doctors' strikes, electricity blackouts and an outbreak of cholera. The price of meat, cooking oil and clothing has increased by 223 per cent in the past week, according to a survey by Zimbabwe's central bank. The annual inflation rate is now racing at 1200 per cent. Doctors at government hospitals have been off the job for seven weeks, demanding pay increases of 9000 per cent. The Government has fired them and threatened arrest, but the strike has now spread to nurses. Meanwhile,...