In the wake of today's crash of an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737-800 shortly after taking off from Beirut, here are some key facts about Ethiopian Airlines

The wealth of sublime music produced in Ethiopia in the 1970s (before a military junta stopped the party) seems to have no end.

Millions of women around the world are subjected to genital mutilation. But, in Ethiopia, the practice is slowly disappearing, writes Paul Vallely

It would be easy to get the wrong impression about Kibnash Tolossa. She sells doughnuts for a living from a corrugated lean-to in front of her home. The floor is mud. The green-painted walls look as if they have not had a lick of paint for a decade. The half-dozen little tables under the canopy are ramshackle affairs, as are the chairs and benches which surround them.

Hayley Yelling was as surprised as anyone after winning the European Cross-Country championships in Dublin yesterday, just a few weeks after coming out of retirement.

Your worrying report on Colombia suggests the perfect scenario for the next Iraq ("The US builds up its bases in oil-rich South America", 22 November). Not only does it offer the US generals a chance to get back at "those infuriating commies" in the south, it also provides the next scenario necessary for the perpetual state of war needed by the military complex and arms suppliers.

"Dedicated to the hustle," as Ben Ratliff writes of South Side rock'n'roll innovator Bo Diddley, breezy, bruising Chicago has always had to battle for the cultural limelight against its swankier coastal rivals.

A UN-recognised government that controls only three districts of the capital, propped up by international peacekeepers. A raging Islamic insurgency that has rallied support by denouncing its opponents as foreign stooges. Rebel strongholds where medieval justice is meted out and teenage boys have hands and feet chopped off, while women and girls are stoned to death in public. Suicide bombings that kill dozens. Kidnappings and targeted killings that terrorise aid workers and journalists.

A quarter of a century on from the famine that mobilised Band Aid, Ethiopia faces another food crisis. There will be those who will seize on our report today to say: "See! Nothing can be done; foreign aid is a waste of money." The Independent on Sunday takes the opposite view.