Free Republic

I am Andrew Mwenda. I host this live radio show five times a week. I am particularly interested in the topic for this evening: The role of foreign aid in Africa. When British Prime Minister Tony Blair set up his commission for Africa, to find new solutions to solve problems on the continent, I was hopeful that it would breathe fresh ideas into the debate on Africa. I was disappointed. The commission came up with the same old failing mantras of doubling aid, canceling debt, and removing agricultural subsidies in the West. They're ignoring the reality! For the last forty...

See link. I have not excerpted the report as there are many interesting parts covering various topics and they are scattered throughout. Perhaps others can post what they find most significant. The MSNBC link does not include the report annexes.

TOKYO, April 22 — The young Japanese civilians taken hostage in Iraq returned home this week, not to the warmth of a yellow-ribbon embrace but to a disapproving nation's cold stare. Three of them, including a woman who helped street children on the streets of Baghdad, appeared on television two weeks ago as their knife-brandishing kidnappers threatened to slit their throats. A few days after their release, they landed here on Sunday, in the eye of a peculiarly Japanese storm. "You got what you deserve!" read one hand-written sign at the airport where they landed. "You are Japan's shame," another...

For the last two and a half years, a specter has haunted the government of Vladimir Putin. This is the possibility of a serious examination of the strange apartment-house bombings that took place in September, 1999 in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk and cost 300 lives. The bombings terrorized Russia. The Russian authorities immediately accused Chechen rebels of responsibility for the attacks and this galvanized public opinion in support of a second war in Chechnya. The war, in turn, made Putin, the former head of the Federal Security Bureau (FSB), an overnight hero and the leading candidate for the Russian presidency....

I was in Washington, D.C., this week and had a meeting with a senior officer of the World Bank, who is from Bombay. As we ate our dinner, the conversation turned to ethnicity. He told me he was from the Brahman caste. I told him I was Jewish and clearly not from the Brahman caste of our people (as if no one can figure that out). He commented that his wife was Jewish, and they are raising their kids in both identities. He then said something very upsetting but yet understandable to my ears. His oldest son, who attends an...

"Topic: Investigating antiquity loss from the Baghdad Museum" Video available on C-SPAN of previous live teleconference with Col. Bogdanos. He offered many more details than previously available about the museum looting.

KUWAIT CITY — In a memo sent two weeks before the fall of Baghdad, the Pentagon office charged with rebuilding Iraq urged top commanders of U.S. ground forces to protect the Iraqi National Museum and other cultural sites from looters. "Coalition forces must secure these facilities in order to prevent looting and the resulting irreparable loss of cultural treasures," says the March 26 memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times. The Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), led by retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, sent the five-page memo to senior commanders at the Coalition...

Looters at Iraq's National Museum of Antiquities pillaged and, perhaps, destroyed an archive of more than 100,000 cuneiform clay tablets -- a unique and priceless trove of ancient Mesopotamian writings that included the "Sippar Library," the oldest library ever found intact on its original shelves. Experts described the archive as the world's least-studied large collection of cuneiform -- the oldest known writing on Earth -- a record that covers every aspect of Mesopotamian life over more than 3,000 years. The texts resided in numbered boxes each containing as many as 400 3-inch-by-2-inch tablets. The Sippar Library, discovered in 1986 at...