One of the major causes of death in the world is malaria, but the World Health Organization estimates that 20 percent of the one million deaths from malaria are dying because the medicines that they are taking are substandard or outright counterfeits. If you include fake antibiotics and fake drugs used to treat tuberculosis, the […]

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You may or may not know that the largest film industry in the world is not Hollywood, but Bollywood: the film industry of India. But do you know which country has the second largest film industry in the world?
Nollywood.
The Nigerian film industry.
According to Wikipedia the industry is a $250 million dollar industry which produces […]

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When last Zimbabwe was in the news, people were dying of cholera, there was a huge inflation rate that made the local dollar worthless, and the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC party, along with an MDC offshoot, had agreed to make a unity government with the President Mugabe.
But although the verbal agreement was that Tsvangirai’s […]

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 Millions of refugees live in temporary camps all over the world today, and few westerners know or care about their problems.
Although most of these refugees will eventually return to the country of their origin, one question is what does one do with those who for political reasons cannot or are not allowed to go home? […]

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The father of the “green revolution”, Norman Borlaug, has died.
Some of use are old enough to remember when famines in Asia were common, and when the “Population bomb” types were predicting mass starvation of millions of poor people.
The famines didn’t happen, because Borlaug, and other agricultural scientists, developed high yield wheat and grains, along with […]

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The headlines are not helpful. This one is from CBS News:
“Mutant Polio Virus Spreads in Nigeria
124 Children Afflicted This Year By Paralyzing Disease, Believed To Be Caused By Same Vaccine Used To Fight It
And other new sources print the same story with even more frightening headlines…
Reality check please.
Let’s talk about Polio. I’m old enough to […]

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The Anchoress today linked to a story in the National Catholic Reporter about a woman in North Korea who was executed for the “crime” of distributing Bibles.
Well, the gulags and executions in North Korea are an under-covered story in the West, at least until National Geographic’s roving reporter got arrested for “spying” a couple months […]

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White House Photos, Lawrence Jackson. The President discusses Iran during his opening remarks at the Press Conference at the White House, June 23, 2009.

FreeMediaOnline.org,  Free Media Online Blog,  GovoritAmerika.us, Commentary by Ted Lipien, June 26, 2009, San Francisco – Ronald Reagan’s strong response to the imposition of martial law  against the independent Solidarity trade union in Poland in 1981 was distinctly different […]

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Self-styled pro-family advocate, Scott Lively, has made a career of drawing parallels from Nazi Germany to modern homosexuality. He has gone around the world with the message that homosexuals were responsible for Nazi totalitarianism. Throughout the next month or so, I will provide counter arguments to Lively’s thesis.
In this article, however, I raise the thesis […]

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The New York Times has an article on the obstacles to safe childbirth in Tanzania.
I worked in two other African countries thirty years ago, and it doesn’t look like much has changed in these isolated and poor rural areas.
… Only 20 percent of women in the area give birth at the hospital, and many do […]

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Lawyers representing the British-based oil firm Trafigura have taken their first steps toward suing BBC’s current affairs television program, BBC Newsnight, for “libelous statements” in their May 13 investigative report, Dirty tricks and toxic waste in Ivory Coast .
The company’s law firm has yet to specify what statements in the report they […]

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In Africa alone, 800,000 children die of malaria each year.
The death rate was actually once lower, but then economic problems, and the banning of DDT caused a rebound of disease carrying mosquitoes, and a resurgence in these diseases.
But it’s not only malaria: Southeast Asia has had a rebound in Dengue fever in the last few […]

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Yeserday I reported that Human Rights Activist Jestina Mukoko and 17 others, mainly members of the opposition party, had been rearrested and denied bail for the “crime” of “treason”.
This resulted in a huge international outcry. The original arrests occurred last December,when many were abducted by unknown abductors, and only after one month was it admitted […]

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Human Rights Activist Jestina Mukoko and 18 others have had their bail revoked and were rearrested by the Zimbabwe government.
Jestina Mukoko is a journalist and head of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, which has monitored the violence against civilians and intimidation of voters during previous political campaigns.
Others who had their bail revoked include several opposition MDC […]

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The incumbent head of state of Algeria, Abdelaziz Bouteflika , has won the presidential election for the 3rd term on Thursday by securing an overwhelming 90.24% of the cast votes, according to the Interior Minister of the country.”Abdelaziz Bouteflika won 12,911,707 votes” or “90.24% of the votes cast,” said Interior Minister Yazid Zerhouni during a press […]

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Adoption is about childless couples getting children, right?
Wrong.
Adoption is about a child without a family getting a stable, permenant family to care for him or her.
It’s better for a rich person to adopt a child than to let them live in poverty, right?
Not always.
The “cure” for poverty is…money, not adoption.  In the case of poor […]

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I got an email from a UK student who was doing research on why so few women were political bloggers.
I have several blogs, but only two are political: my African blog on Zimbabwe, and my personal blog.
Why do I have these blogs?
Well, the first is my “activism” blog, a way to protest.
Most people know about […]

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Last week, the new Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, Morgan Tsvangirai, was injured and his beloved wife killed when his car was hit by a truck on a busy highway outside of Harare.
At the time of the accident, news reports played down that this was an assassination attempt, pointing out that the truck was carrying HIV […]

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Last week, when Retired General Vitalis Musungwa Gava Zvinavashe died, he was mourned by many on both sides of the political spectrum.Indeed, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai attended the funeral, even though he himself is in mourning after the tragic death of his wife.
As the (government controlled) Herald  pointed out, he joined the revolution against the […]

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It was only last month that Morgan Tsvangirai was sworn in as Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, as part of a coalition government with President Robert Mugabe, after two disputed elections and months of negotiations.
The terrible news today is that the new Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, Morgan Tsvangirai, has been injured in a motor vehicle accident, […]

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Too many people see cute monkeys of all sorts as wonderful pets.
They tend to watch the trained chimps on TV and movies, and say: Oh, how wonderful.
The dirty little secret is that too often these stage monkeys are pre pubertal teenagers. When the male chimps hit puberty, watch out.
Testosterone is the hormone of aggression, and […]

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The esteemed British medical journal, the Lancet, has gotten a black eye in the news lately for articles that were poorly screened and were biased for political/personal reasons.
The first one is the 1998 study linking MMR vaccine with Autism.
This study has had devastating effects on three fronts: One, the terrible guilt by parents who are […]

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Jimmy Carter has done it again: pushing peace with a murderous government who has a history of killing their political opponents, and who has broken agreements in the past.
Jimmy Carter also speaks of hope.
In a statement Saturday, the members of The Elders founded by former President Nelson Mandela said they hoped the deal would ease […]

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Only last week, David Brooks was praising President Obama, and actually cited the fact that he allowed Dr. Mark Dybul to stay as an example of Obama’s bilateral approach to government:
Dybul is one of those heroes one meets too rarely in government. He worked as an AIDS doctor in San Francisco in the 1980s and […]

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Months ago, we had hope for our friends in Zimbabwe.
But every week, reports coming out are worse.
The talks between the government of President Mugabe and the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai are “stalled”, and often reporters seem to think this means both sides are at fault.
After all, essentially the government is not working and the economy […]

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The good news coming out of Africa today is that Rwanda has arrested General Laurent Nkuda, and is planning to turn him over to the DRCongo so that he can be prosecuted for war crimes.
Human Rights Watch noted in January 2006:
“An arrest warrant was issued against Nkunda for war crimes, crimes against humanity and insurrection […]

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There are scattered reports that the dreaded Bubonic plague has killed 40 Al Qaeda members hiding in rural Algeria.
The new epidemic began in the cave hideouts of AQLIM in Tizi Ouzou province, 150km east of the capital Algiers, the Sun reports…
The group now fears the highly-infectious disease could have spread to other al-Qaeda training camps […]

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A news article in the Christian Science Monitor describes an Anthropology class that teaches students to understand cultural change by making up fake cultures, and then going into the “big bad globalist conqueror versus poor natives who lose their wonderful culture” mode to teach them about globalization.
The people of Mekka’ kneel in the dirt, sorting […]

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Reporters in third world countries know reporting the wrong thing can be dangerous. Here in the Philippines, for example, our press knows that spilling the beans on a corrupt politician may result in being shot at by an unknown hitman on a motorcycle.
But in Zimbabwe, things are more open: according to the Zimbabwe Times, the […]

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People in Zimbabwe are now predicting that Mugabe will use the Cholera Crisis as an excuse to declare a national state of emergency so that he can “legally” impose brutal Military Rule under Martial Law in Zimbabwe.  This is something every ordinary citizen of Zimbabwe dreads.  (See“…Soldier’s Mutiny?” on December 9). 
This week, Daily Mail reporter […]

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