Free Republic

Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces said Monday they shot down a cargo jet in the country’s far western reaches of Darfur, a claim that Russian diplomats said they were trying to investigate in the war zone. Few details of the purported shoot-down were immediately available. Mobile phone footage showed what appeared to be a debris field with fighters showing off what appeared to be identity documents recovered from the crash.

AP — About 200 women ages 18-22 from across Africa have been recruited to work in a factory alongside Russian vocational students assembling thousands of Iranian-designed attack drones to be launched into Ukraine. In interviews with The Associated Press, some of the women said they were misled that it would be a work-study program, describing long hours under constant surveillance, broken promises about wages and areas of study, and working with caustic chemicals that left their skin pockmarked and itching. The AP analyzed satellite images of the complex in Russia’s republic of Tatarstan and its leaked internal documents, spoke to...

"Preppy Gun Moll" Afrika Owes copped a plea to "gun-running" charges today, in exchange for a wrist-slapping sentence that could have her back on the road to college by fall. Owes, 17, pleaded guilty to four counts of conspiracy and weapons possession before Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Edward McLaughlin, who read her a passionate sermon in hopes of getting the wayward prepster back on the right path. The Deerfield Academy scholarship student was busted for running with a 137th Street-based drug gang, ferrying guns among ring leaders.

Bones of “Ardi,” New Human Evolution Fossil, “Crushed Nearly to Smithereens” Another new alleged missing link has been found, if you consider something discovered in the early 1990’s new. This fossil seems to have spent almost as much time under the microscope at Berkeley as it did in the ground in Ethiopia, when it was first buried about 4.4 million years ago. Why did it take over 15 years for the reports on this fossil to finally be published, besides the fact that it allowed more time for planning the now-customary PR campaign? A 2002 article in Science explains exactly...

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has warned Barack Obama of the risk of squandering the goodwill he says the US president's election has generated. In an article for BBC News, he says it would be "wonderful" if Mr Obama apologised for the invasion of Iraq. He also says he prays that Mr Obama will be tough on African dictators. The Nobel Peace Prize winner adds that the UK's standing in the world has suffered because of its co-operation with the US in the "war on terror". [snip] He calls Mr Obama's election an "epoch-making event that filled the whole world with hope...

<p>There is new hope that slowing the spread of AIDS in Africa, where an estimated 30 million people are dying from the disease, may be as simple as ABC.</p> <p>ABC stands for "Abstinence, Be Faithful, or use Condoms," in that order of emphasis. It is also what public health experts call the program begun in Uganda in 1986, when HIV infections and AIDS began washing over Uganda's citizens like a plague. Many Western experts derided the project when it began, but today it is considered the brightest success story in the course of the pandemic.</p>