Free Republic

The most politically damaging video to emerge from the massive wildfires burning Los Angeles could have been of Mayor Karen Bass staring blankly into a camera like a deer in headlights as reporters asked her if she had anything to say to the thousands of people whose homes were incinerated. However, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) did one worse than Bass by telling CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “The local folks are going to have to figure that out,” after Cooper asked why so many fire hydrants in the city had no water to douse the flames threatening homes. Newsom shouldn’t have been...

It was the summer of 1996. Chicago was on a high. Michael Jordan had come out of his brief retirement to lead the Bulls to the best-ever season at the time, winning the first of what would be a “three-peat” of NBA championships. Crime was down. The economy was soaring. Notorious slums were being cleared, hopefully to be replaced by mixed-income developments. A guy named Daley was the mayor. A guy named Obama had yet to be elected to anything. I was 19 years old, and I was covering the Democratic National Convention for Harvard’s college radio station. It was...

President Robert Mugabe declared that “Zimbabwe is mine” and vowed never to give it up. To bolster his claim, the 84-year old dictator revealed that the terms of his will decree that the entire country is to be interred with him in the event he should die.

Thriving city becomes the capital of chaos and misrule Harare's citizens at the mercy of food and fuel shortages and brutal police Andrew Meldrum in Harare Thursday May 8, 2003 The Guardian In Harare these days you never know where you are going to end up when you take a taxi. A dozen passengers crammed into a taxi van recently complained angrily among themselves about Zimbabwe's high inflation, critical fuel shortages and the police who shoved them when they were stopped at roadblocks. When one man tried to defend the police, a woman retorted: "The police are just Mugabe's dogs."...