Free Republic

World Bank President Robert Zoellick appeared at the ministers' side during the news conference to express his support for the new measures and the seriousness of price swings. "We are not going to be able to stop food prices from going up and down, but we can smooth out the swings and we can protect the poor whether they are small farmers or consumers," he said. One of the key aspects of the new accord is the Agricultural Market Information System that would stave off panic food speculation by making instantly available to all countries the state of world food...

KHARTOUM -- At least 10 African Union (AU) troops have been killed and 50 reported missing from their base in Sudan's western Darfur region, in the bloodiest attack on the peacekeeping force, the AU said Sunday. "At least 10 soldiers were killed, seven wounded, and dozens are missing," African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) spokesman Noureddine Mezni said of the attack Saturday night on Haskanita base in southern Darfur. An AU statement said 50 personnel were missing after a "sustained attack by a large-and-organized group of heavily-armed men," who broke into the camp with 30 vehicles, forcing AU troops to...

artin Amis's ''Koba the Dread'' has got to be one of the oddest books about Stalin ever written, indignant, angry, personal and strangely touching. Amis has read what he describes as ''several yards of books about the Soviet experiment,'' including ones by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Robert Conquest, Vasily Grossman and Dmitri Volkogonov -- a small but choice percentage of the vast literature on Stalin and his crimes. Having digested those several yards, Amis sets out to summarize Stalin's lies and murders (which he figures at roughly 20 million), the prison system, the slave labor projects, the purges and show trials...