Free Republic

Part of the solution to the complex problem of African poverty rests on Western economies dropping trade barriers on agricultural products from the Third World. Mark Micallef looks at the World Trade Organisation's promise of a global free trade pact against the background of a growing influx of economic refugees. More people will have died from extreme poverty during this week than were killed by the South-East Asian Tsunami last December. The United Nations Development Programme estimates that a harrowing 30,000 people die from extreme poverty each day. Some 1.2 billion people - one in every five people on Earth...

Big Media Won't Touch Agenda 21 Nancy Levant I keep waiting, and waiting, and waiting for Bill O’Reilly or Shaun Hannity or Oprah Winfrey or somebody…..anybody, who has daily access to the multitudes, to say the words, “Agenda 21.” I’m still waiting, and for the life of me, I don’t understand the refusal to talk about the greatest threat to America that has ever existed. However, it dawns on me that wrapping a brain around Agenda 21 requires time, effort, interest, and a lot diligence. No one told me about Agenda 21. I found it by accident on the Internet....

In rural areas of Bangladesh, most girls marry at a very young age — not because they wish to, but because their families cannot afford to send them to school. In some districts, however — Narshingdi, for instance — that is changing. Girls' enrollment in secondary schools there has more than doubled, and in three years the proportion of married women in the 13-to-15 bracket dropped to 14 percent from 29 percent. Families are getting smaller, and more women are employed, with higher incomes. The benefits will reach far beyond individual girls; they will include lower birth rates, better health...