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Shrinking Detroit has 12,000 abandoned homes Sun Aug 14, 5:03 PM ET Rats or lead poisoning. When it comes to the threats from the broken down house next door, Dorothy Bates isn't sure which is worse. "When it's lightening and thundering you can hear the bricks just falling," the 40-year-old nurse said as she looked at the smashed windows and garbage-strewn porch. "If you call and ask (the city) about it they say they don't have the funds to tear it down." There are more than 12,000 abandoned homes in the Detroit area, a byproduct of decades of layoffs at...

Almost half a million NHS patients are waiting more than a year for hospital treatment, official figures showed yesterday. One person in eight who is admitted to hospital for a non-emergency procedure has to wait more than 52 weeks between being referred by a GP and being treated. There are also large variations in waiting times across the country. The figures were revealed yesterday as Andy Burnham, the health minister, claimed that the Government was on track to deliver on its "historic" promise effectively to abolish hospital waiting lists by the end of next year. Previous waiting list figures have...

First Supervisor Jake McGoldrick and now Supervisor Aaron Peskin. It seems both have been targeted for recall efforts by San Franciscans who are fed up with their anti-business, anti-private property, pseudo-Socialist policies. The kind of policies that have caused San Francisco to become one of the most expensive cities to live in the country, families and businesses to flee in droves, nice neighborhoods to go to pot (pun intended), crime to skyrocket, and bums, er, homeless to keep pouring in for the handouts and lenient enforcement. As I've written in the past, there are few too many members of the...

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has the following statistics about Venezuela, updated to March 2006. 1. Undernourishment has grown from 15% in 1997 to 18% in 2003. 2. In 1997 3.4 million Venezuelans were undernourished. In 2003 this figure had increased to 4.5 million. 3. Dietary consumption in kilocalories per person per day was 2380 in 1997, decreasing to 2350 in 2003. 4. Food exports in 1997 were 138 as compared to the base of 100 in 1990. In 2003 exports of food had fallen to 63 on the same basis, while imports had greatly increased....

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - They call themselves the Bounty Hunters, the Midget Locos, Project Gangster Blood and China Town Boyz and most of them don't expect to live beyond age 20. Forty years after the Bloods and the Crips put Los Angeles on the map, the number of gangs in Los Angeles County has swelled to about 1,000 and their estimated 88,000 members are drawn from every ethnicity -- Asians, blacks, Latinos, whites. "Los Angeles county and city is, unfortunately, the gang capital of America," Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca said as police on Thursday announced a crackdown on...

Growing up in North Korea, Hyok Kang was surrounded by desperate people who ate grass and bark before they died. Yet pervasive propaganda made them feel lucky to be there. The first time I ate chocolate was when I was five years old. My grandfather had relatives in Japan who were given exceptional permission to visit us. They came like extraterrestrials with their arms full of presents and food. I remember waving tins of condensed milk and chocolate bars under my friends’ noses. I was a horrid little boy. It was 1990 and I didn’t yet know what famine was....

For hundreds of thousands of poor people from the Andes to the Himalayas, the legacy of Cuba's ailing communist leader Fidel Castro will be not revolutionary war but eyesight. For decades, the now ailing Castro, who temporarily handed over power to his brother Raul on Monday, prescribed armed revolution to cure the Third World's ills. But more recently he has preferred to export doctors to treat poor people in the undeveloped world.

A former assistant to Fidel Castro and his brother Raul is now in Miami and he’s airing the Cuban leader’s dirty laundry – including why Fidel burns his underwear. Delfin Fernandez, 44, defected in Spain in 1999 on a trip to Europe to drop off Raul's daughter in Italy and pick up a Rotweiller in Germany for Fidel. He moved to Miami less than a year ago. "I was assigned to take care of the people closest to Fidel, so that they don't lack anything and don't feel threatened by anything inside or outside of Cuba,” he told the Miami...

BEIJING, March 10, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A Chinese official has recommended to parliament that the country begin experimenting with euthanasia as a precursor to legalization. Zhao Gongmin, a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher, claims that public opinion strongly supports the practice, with supposed surveys showing as much as 80 percent support. “I think it is only a matter of time for euthanasia to become legal,” Zhao said, according to a Shanghai Daily report. “Therefore, we should allow some experiments on the local level for the purpose of accumulating experience.”“Conditions are not ripe yet for nation-level legislation on euthanasia, but...

HAVANA - Over the past 10 years I've crossed Cuba many times -- by train, bus, motorcycle and '57 Chevy, transported on the backs of produce wagons and horse-drawn carts, standing in peso trucks shoulder-to-shoulder with locals, and squeezed atop water carriers. Along the central motorway, down dusty trails that pass obscure rural villages, through seemingly impassible roads after torrents of rain, my drivers took a foreigner aboard, even if it was forbidden. Some even took me into their homes and allowed me to witness their lives. Their kindness will stay with me always. So will their terrible plight. When...

Cubans defect in Toronto Leave patriotic choir on tour By TOM GODFREY, TORONTO SUN More than 20 members of Cuba's world-famous national chorus are singing songs of freedom today after defecting in Toronto. Members of the National Chorus of Cuba dodged security officers and jumped into waiting cars, some on Sunday and others yesterday, said Cuban exiles who planned the defections. "These people are scared for their lives," said Ismail Sambra, president of the Cuban Canadian Foundation. "They are worried about their families back home. "It took a lot of planning to get this far." The highly acclaimed 40-member group,...

News flash: Cities aren't what they used to be. Follow-up question: What is? This rather obvious query popped into my head Sunday after reading Joel Kotkin's sniffish dismissal of San Francisco as an "ephemeral city," one that "differs dramatically from traditional urban centers." Instead of smokestacks and stevedores we have tapas and trust-fund liberals. He's absolutely right, and he totally misses the point. If San Francisco is a far cry from the boisterous Big Cities of yore, that's because Big Cities continue to evolve. The successful ones still draw strength from immigration and a central address, but they're no longer...

Berkeley may be the home of the Free Speech Movement, but expressing emotion with a car horn is apparently not a protected form of communication there. An Oakland woman alleges that Berkeley police violated her First Amendment rights when an officer ticketed her last year for honking in support of a labor union's picketing outside the Claremont Resort and Spa to protest rising health care costs and other issues. Carol Harris, 51, is appealing her $143 "unreasonable use of horn'' citation to Berkeley's Police Review Commission, which will consider the case on Thursday. Harris was among nearly 40 motorists who...

Glimpse of World Shatters North Koreans' Illusions By HOWARD W. FRENCH ANJI, China - Sitting on a bare floor in a chilly one-room apartment, Lee Hae Jon and her younger sister, Hae Sun, struggled recently for words to describe their lives since they clandestinely made their way here from North Korea five years ago. Their mother married a Chinese man and disappeared from their lives without a trace. Since then, a Chinese widow of Korean descent has taken the girls into her apartment and kept them clothed and fed. But for five years, the teenage sisters have not dared to...

THE GREAT DIVIDE | RURAL WASTELANDS UANGMENGYING, China - Wang Lincheng began his accounting at the brick hut of a farmer. Dead of cancer, he said flatly, his dress shoes sinking in the mud. Dead of cancer, he repeated, glancing at another vacant house. Mr. Wang, head of the Communist Party in this village, ignored a June rain and trudged past mud-brick houses, ticking off other deaths, other empty homes. He did not seem to notice a small cornfield where someone had dug a burial mound of fresh red dirt. Finally, he stopped at the door of a sickened young...

Pyongyang, August 17 (KCNA) -- Workers and office employees of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea are enjoying summer holidays at rest homes together with their families. Nearly twenty reconstructed rest homes in Sokam, Lake Sohung, Onpho, Kuam and other scenic spots have received holiday-makers. The holiday-makers at the Onpho Rest Home in Kyongsong County, North Hamgyong Province, and the Majon Rest Home in Hamhung City, South Hamgyong Province, are playing various kinds of sports games and amusements and swimming and boating in the sea. The Kuam Rest Home in Hwayang-ri, Chongdan County, South Hwanghae Province, has also opened the...