Afghanistan was supposed to hold its next parliamentary elections this May, but those were postponed until the fall for security, logistical and financial reasons.
At the Haiti donor conference it was announced that a new authority would be created to manage donor funds and reconstruction efforts. The so-called Interim Haiti Recovery Commission will be co-chaired by Bill Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive.
Post by Penelope Chester
In my September 2009 blog post on One Laptop Per Child, I argued that the program had largely failed to meet its expressed purpose of improving education for children in the developing world through the distribution of large numbers of low-cost laptops. I continue to believe that’s the case. OLPC’s grand goal has not, and is unlikely to be, achieved.
The United Nations’ highest human rights official in Afghanistan has publicly called on the Afghan government to repeal a recently publicized law that grants amnesty from prosecution to leaders of all warring factions during two more than two decades of conflict before 2001.
Following up on my previous post on the UN Human Rights Council, it is worth noting that the top republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee Ileana Ros-Lehtinen misrepresents the most recent session when she suggests that Israel--and only Israel-- came up for criticism during its most recent meeting. Here is part of a statement her office sent out via email last week.
“Stop the madness. Time for the U.S. to pull out of the UN Human Rights Council.
In the hallways of the Las Vegas Convention Center, where the US Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) annual gathering took place last week, cool apps, shiny gadgets, the 4G network and machine-to-machine (M2M) opportunities were dominating discussions. But a closer listen revealed a growing conversation about how the wireless industry is using its networks and devices to transform healthcare.
Yesterday, in a new report, Human Rights Watch condemned the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) for its December 2009 killing of “at least 321 civilians, abducting 250 others, including at least 80 children, during a previously unreported four-day rampage in the Makombo area of northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo.”