Free Republic

While at best, Clinton’s clean cookstove campaign seems slimy, and may be illegal, one might cast a blind eye if the program achieved its aggrandizing goals. Hillary Clinton’s “trustworthiness” problem is fed by a long history of “varying credibility,” as a recent Politico story delineated, including cattle-futures trading, law firm billing records, muddled sniper fire recollections and e-mail use. While providing pertinent points, the Politico list is just a sampling. One missing item on the “mistrust” litany is a project she reportedly cooked up as Secretary of State, but that was shaped by her family foundation. State Department staff sent...

Cereal fields in Ethiopia's Arusi-Bale plains, where the commodity exchange has facilitated trade between buyers and sellers. While government leaders, NGOs and corporations devise strategies to churn out more food for future generations, Eleni Gabre-Madhin is taking a different approach. Concerned by a 2002 famine in her home country of Ethiopia that followed bumper crops in 2000 and 2001, the Stanford-educated economist decided it was time to go beyond food production and take a hard look at distribution. The result? Africa's first commodity exchange. As the founder and outgoing CEO of the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX), Gabre-Madhin established a reliable...

People in developing countries have lower IQs because their bodies divert energy from brainpower to fighting disease, researchers claimed today. In hot nations blighted by deadly infections, the priority is survival and populations have evolved to develop stronger immune systems rather than intelligence, according to the controversial theory. Some critics warned the study could become an excuse for racism if it was used to suggest that people in the Third World are not as intelligent as those in cooler, richer climes. Others pointed out that the ancient Persians, Greeks and Romans lived in hot climates and still boasted extraordinary civilisations....

It is time to dump the phrase 'developing world'. 'Developing' is a misnomer, given that many countries are not developing at all, but remaining economically static. A few are falling backwards. The previous phrase 'third world' is also pretty useless, since the 'second' (communist) world imploded. I propose a new terminology: globalised, globalising and non-globalised. I recognise that there are many countries that would be difficult to classify - but that is a problem with all such terminology. The 'globalised world' refers to successful capitalist economies, engaged with international trade. The 'globalising world' refers to those less successful economies, which...

The Bush years have seen an economic boom take place among the world's developing nations, according to my analysis of the CIA world fact book, and www.indexmundi.com, an internet site which keeps historical record of past CIA world fact books. This article is merely describing a positive trend that appears to be benefiting billions of the world’s poor. I make no inference as to why it is happening, apart from the title tease; I do find it ironic, however, that it is occurring at this time: Among those who most vocally profess concern for the world’s poor, their most hated...

N THE LAGOS-IBADAN EXPRESSWAY, Nigeria — For many, this highway leads to the future of the Christian faith, and at 9 o'clock on a Friday night, traffic is heavier than a Los Angeles rush hour. Hundreds of thousands of Nigerians, from street vendors to computer consultants, sit through the exhaust and the squealing horns to reach evangelical campgrounds with churches as large as airplane hangars. The names are as spectacular as the hopes they sell: Mountain of Fire and Miracles, Deeper Life, and the largest and oldest, the 12,000-acre Redemption Camp. Advertisement The worshipers are drawn by a program of...

International efforts to stamp out graft among public officials have made little progress, laments a new study. Corrupt politicians and greedy businessmen are not just enriching themselves, but hampering economic development THE United Nation's summit on sustainable development, now under way in Johannesburg, is a rallying point for a plethora of causes, some more deserving than others. The latest to join the throng—with some justification—is Transparency International (TI), a non-governmental organisation that fights corruption worldwide. But those striving to break the cycle of poverty and graft in the developing world will find little to encourage them. TI’s latest Corruption Perceptions...

In The True Believer, Eric Hoffer wrote: "The discontent generated by backward countries by their contact with Western civilization is not primarily resentment against exploitation by domineering foreigners. It is rather the result of a crumbling or unmaking of tribal solidarity and communal life. ...The Western colonizing powers offer the native the gift of individual freedom and independence. They try to teach him self-reliance. What it all actually amounts to is individual isolation. It means the cutting off of an immature and poorly furnished individual from the corporate whole and releasing him, in the words of Khomiakov, "to the freedom...