Sunday 7 March 2010
March 6, 2010 (KHARTOUM) – The Sudanese government discounted statements made by US ambassador to the UN Susan Rice saying that she is isolated in her positions within the UN Security Council (UNSC).
On Thursday Rice said there is a continuous pattern of weapons flowing to Darfur, acts of sexual and gender-based violence committed with impunity, military over-flights and offensive actions.
(AFP) – 3 hours ago
KHARTOUM — Clashes between rival Arab tribes in the Darfur region of western Sudan have killed at least 21 people since March 3, a local official said on Sunday.
Eleven people died in fighting between the Misseriya and Nuwayba tribes that broke out on Wednesday and 10 others were killed in renewed clashes on Saturday, said West Darfur province’s governor, Abu al-Qassim Amam al-Hajj.
Saturday, March 06, 2010 |
Jonathan Cohen at 4:05 PM ET
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[JURIST] Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa [official profile] on Saturday rejected [press release] the plan of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon [official profile] to appoint a panel of experts to look into alleged rights abuses in the island nation’s civil war, saying it “is totally uncalled for and unwarranted.” Rajapaksa said that establishing this panel:
would certainly be perceived as an interference with the current general election campaign being held island wide; where the people of the North and of the East who were not free to participate in such elections earlier were being given the opportunity to do so, respecting the highest standards of democracy.
The near-simultaneous explosions occurred on Thursday night. The first blast, which took place at a car-washing yard, left four people wounded, while the second explosion at a bus station in the capital city injured 12 others.
Thursday’s attacks come less than a month after similar grenade attacks killed two people and wounded at least 30 others in Kigali on 19th February. The attacks at that time were attributed two high-ranking officers now in exile.
The Genocide Vote: The White House is moving to block a full House vote on a resolution condemning Turkey for the 1915 killings of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians. The resolution, which would officially recognize the Ottoman Empire-era murders as “genocide,” narrowly passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the White House made the move to pacify Turkey, the only Muslim ally in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and a member of the United Nations Security Council. But Armenians were upset that the president was undermining his campaign promise to recognize the killings as “genocide.”
In the tradition of presidents past, Mr. Obama is expected to speak on the killings on April 24, the day the first victims were arrested in 1915. Both Turks and Armenians will be watching to see if he will use the term “genocide.”
(AFP) – 1 hour ago
KHARTOUM — Gunmen abducted more than 40 peacekeepers in Sudan’s Darfur region before freeing all but two of them a day later, the United Nations and African Union mission said on Saturday.
“The convoy was captured on Friday and taken to an unknown destination. This morning the members of the mission were released. They are in a secure place, but two members are missing,” mission spokesman Kemal Saiki said.
“We don’t know who is responsible for this act,” he said, adding the peacekeepers were to assess fresh fighting between government forces and rebels in Darfur’s central Jebel Marra plateau.
Amnesty International says it opposes the DRC government’s call for U.N. forces to withdraw from the country by the middle of next year.
U.N. troops (MONUC) and government forces are currently involved in another joint operation to try to drive out Rwandan Hutu rebel forces in the east of the country. Similar offensives also have been launched in the past against the Ugandan LRA rebels in the country.
The eastern DRC has been marred by conflict for many years resulting in millions of deaths, most of them civilians. The human rights group says, “Massacres, rapes and looting continue in the country unabated.”
| Written by Selwyn Duke |
| Friday, 05 March 2010 01:00 |
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Yet that dark time birthed another quiet hero, one who saved as many as 860,000 Jewish lives. Today, however, few know of his accomplishments, few sing his praises. And Steven Spielberg will undoubtedly never make a movie lauding him. On the contrary, this man is roundly maligned as a WWII villain who was at best indifferent to the plight of the people in the Nazis’ crosshairs. This man is Eugenio Pacelli. But he is better known as Pope Pius XII. By the lights of the popular culture and the increasingly unpopular media, it is a “fact” that Pius was practically a Nazi collaborator. British journalist John Cornwell’s book Hitler’s Pope got a lot of press after its 1999 publication, and self-professed “anti-theist” Christopher Hitchens never misses a chance to highlight the papacy’s supposed WWII sins and silence. It has become atheist boilerplate, the barbarous vehicle through which barbarian historians sack modern-day Rome. |
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Police in Rwanda say there have been two grenade attacks in the capital – one near Kigali’s genocide memorial. At least 16 people were wounded in the near-simultaneous blasts on Thursday night. One person was killed in similar attacks last month in Kigali, blamed on two high-ranking officers now in exile. Earlier this week, one of them – Lt Gen Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, a former chief of staff and ambassador to India – denied the allegations. He told the BBC that the Rwandan authorities had staged grenade attacks and then accused him of being behind them. |
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The word “hero” so often conjures up images of the brash and the bold. We may think of Audie Murphy’s WWII exploits, the Spartans at Thermopylae, or the doomed holdouts at the Alamo. But then there are the quiet heroes, people such as Oskar Schindler. Ever since Schindler’s List hit the silver screen in 1993, his clandestine efforts resulting in the rescue of almost 1,200 Jews from Nazi death camps have been well known.