"Somalia is in the grip of famine and chaos but officials there are inspecting bras". "..[T]he extremist ideology assumes that humans are a group of wild beasts that are completely incapable of controlling their instincts". In an editorial in The Independent, Alaa Al-Aswany discusses fundamentalist gender bias.
posted by gallois on Oct 29, 2009 - 51 comments

"By the time Emmanuel Jal was 13, he was a veteran of two civil wars and had seen hundreds of his fellow child soldiers reduced to taking unspeakable measures as they struggled to survive on the killing fields of Southern Sudan. After a series of harrowing events, he was rescued by a British aid worker (Emma McCune) who smuggled him into Nairobi to raise him as her own. To help ease the pain of what he had experienced, Emmanuel started singing..." [more inside]
posted by Kerasia on Jun 3, 2009 - 4 comments

A Handy Guide to What the Hell Just Happened in Darfur. [more inside]
posted by lullaby on Mar 12, 2009 - 47 comments

Out of Africa. As award-winning Globe and Mail Africa correspondent Stephanie Nolen bids farewell to a place she's come to love, she reflects on how it has changed, and how it changed her. [more inside]
posted by netbros on Dec 16, 2008 - 4 comments

Misc-Olympics-Filter. Google's 2008 Olympics page (gadget can be added to your Google homepage). Former Sudanese refugee chosen as US flag bearer for opening ceremonies. And a scandal after BeijingTickets.com (now shut-down) fails to deliver tickets that they sold: BeijingTicketScam.com
posted by allkindsoftime on Aug 8, 2008 - 32 comments

Al Jazeera cameraman and Guantanamo detainee Sami al-Haj was released after 6.5 years. Meanwhile, an interrogation video of current Guantanamo resident, now 21 year old Canadian Omar Khadr, has also been released. Previously.
posted by gman on Jul 15, 2008 - 61 comments

One day in 1999, Alex Sabac el Cher, a retired German textile salesman opened his door to a historian who had a painting to show him and a few questions. Preußisches Liebesglück ("Prussian love bliss"), a 1890 painting of two lovebirds, an African officer of the German imperial army and his young red-headed bride, was perhaps an allegory of (color-)blind love, but also an actual moment of happiness in the Sabac el Cher family history, that started in 1836 with the gift of a young Nubian boy nicknamed August "Good morning" to an exiled princely murderer and became interwoven with German history. Bonus: First 10 minutes (in French) of a documentary about the Sabac el Cher.
posted by elgilito on Mar 11, 2008 - 6 comments

A few months ago, a British Schoolteacher in Sudan allowed a class of hers to vote on a name for a teddy bear. The class of seven year olds decided - with a majority of 20:3 - to name the stuffed toy Mohammad. Last week, she was arrested for this 'crime' after several of the parents complained, and has been sentenced to 15 days in prison and will be deported. However, that isn't good enough for the thousands of people that marched on martyrs square today and demanded that she instead be killed for this crime. [more inside]
posted by Brockles on Nov 30, 2007 - 253 comments

Newsweek's "Packaging a Tragedy" After which, two Darfur experts, John Prendergast and Alex De Waal have a heated debate over the role of the Save Darfur Campaign, wondering whether its advocacy has helped or hurt the chances for peace in the region. De Waal has argued that the seduction of humanitarian intervention has impeded progress in Darfur, while Prendergast has urged more robust intervention. Both want the same thing, an end to the killing, but both get extremely heated in disagreeing about how.
posted by cal71 on Nov 9, 2007 - 17 comments

So, apparently some of those Sudanese orphans were neither Sudanese nor orphans. The organization Zoe's Ark may have fucked the fuck up.
posted by Sticherbeast on Nov 1, 2007 - 17 comments

From Hunter to Hunted "In his quest to free slaves around the world, Aaron Cohen thought he’d seen it all. Then he went to Myanmar."
posted by homunculus on Jul 1, 2007 - 25 comments

Unexpectedly, thousands of mammals were spotted during their migration in the Southern Sudan surprising scientists who had given up thinking that wildlife might still exist [video link] in this war torn region of the world.
posted by infini on Jun 13, 2007 - 11 comments

"I couldn't face the prospect of my child growing up and asking me, years later, what I had done, and having to say: 'Nothing.'" Last spring Leslie Thomas, a Chicago-based architect, read a story detailing the fallout of hostilities between the Sudanese government and the rebels -- more than 200,000 dead, 2.5 million made homeless -- and decided to put together DARFUR/DARFUR: a traveling exhibit of digitally-projected changing images. The goal: to raise $1m with at least 24 venues in 24 months. The photographs have been taken in Darfur by photojournalists Lynsey Addario, Mark Brecke, Helene Caux, VII's Ron Haviv, Magnum Photos's Paolo Pellegrin, Ryan Spencer Reed, Michal Safdie, and former U.S. Marine Brian Steidle. On a sidenote, Pellegrin has just been awarded the W. Eugene Smith Grant.
posted by matteo on Nov 2, 2006 - 13 comments

When you have a blog , and you're the Special Representative of the UN in Darfur, be careful about what you write. Jan Pronk's blog gives you a good idea in what a high level UN diplomat actually does, and how difficult it is to get anything done in a country torn by war. Oh, and check these photos out, if you just want the non-political goodness.
posted by Harry on Oct 25, 2006 - 11 comments

Let's Play Genocide MTV's Darfur Digital Activist online game contest has posted the four finalist teams' prototypes for voting. In Fetching Water, "you are a Darfurian trying to to make it the well to get water without becoming a victim of the Janjaweed." When do social impact games cross the line from raising awareness into trivializing?
posted by Cassford on Feb 3, 2006 - 15 comments

The International Criminal Court will soon formally investigate war crimes in Darfur, Sudan. In two years the ethnic Arab militia janjaweed—many who received military training from Gaddafi hoping to set up an "Islamic Legion" of mercenaries—have slaughtered up to 180,000 non-Arabs and raped untold thousands. Nicholas Kristof's piece in the NYT reports on the rape crisis, and features a Flash piece with interviews. Zogby/ICG studies show 80% of Americans support a tougher international response to the situation in Darfur, yet it also revealed a strange datapoint: "African-Americans are among the U.S. sub-groups least aware of the situation in Darfur and least likely to feel that the international community has a responsibility to intervene." A few weeks ago, writer Jeremy Levitt (Chicago Sun-Times) addressed this.
posted by dhoyt on Jun 5, 2005 - 11 comments

Congressional Copy Editors Needed To Prevent Future Diplomatic Incidents A minor typo in an unofficial transcript at a Congressional hearing a couple of weeks ago caused Sudan to think the U.S. had conducted a secret nuclear weapons test there in 1962. As one might expect, they didn't take the news well.
It snowballed: within a day, the Chinese news service was reporting that the Sudanese government held the U.S. responsible for "cancer spread in Sudan" caused by "U.S. nuclear experiments in the African country in 1962-1970."
posted by zarq on Mar 16, 2005 - 17 comments

The Sudan crisis isn't going away. Darfur is a dead link. This Christmas, I urge you, leave your favorite animal charity in the care of the Western world's army of old ladies, and instead use your money for the immediate saving of those most desperate of human lives.
posted by Pretty_Generic on Dec 13, 2004 - 34 comments

Lost Boys of Sudan is an amazing documentary about refugees from Sudan's Darfur conflict finding haven in the US. It's premiering on PBS tomorrow. Their website has local PBS listings as well as locations and times of upcoming screenings in the US. From sleeping on the ground in a UN refugee camp to working at WalMart in Dallas, the men in the film undertake an enormously difficult, but ultimately life-saving journey.
posted by scarabic on Sep 27, 2004 - 8 comments

Powell declares a genocide in Darfour , marking a turnaround in America's appraisal of the situation in Sudan. Will something finally be done? And is Powell off the ranch on this, or this actually the policy of the Bush administration? Previously discussed in a number of threads.
posted by hank_14 on Sep 9, 2004 - 23 comments

Dying in Darfur. Can the ethnic cleansing in Sudan be stopped?
posted by homunculus on Aug 24, 2004 - 80 comments

The situation in Sudan is grim. About a million people have been displaced and the threat of mass starvation is real. The Sudanese government said today that it would grant permits to aid workers to enter Darfur. One group is the International Committee of Red Cross. You can find donation information on their website.
posted by john on May 24, 2004 - 11 comments

The world's greatest humanitarian crisis is happening in the Darfur region of Sudan. The US special envoy, John Danforth, asks, "Is the US engagement in Sudan worthwhile? There are so many issues in the world that need out attention."

Maybe he should ask some of the refugees.
posted by john on Mar 22, 2004 - 13 comments

IEEE bans residents of Cuba, Iran, Libya and Sudan from publishing "The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) recently imposed a ban on the residents of Cuba, Iran, Libya and Sudan from publishing and contributing to any IEEE publication or standard." I think this is something that deserves much wider coverage then it has been getting.
posted by Calebos on Oct 28, 2003 - 25 comments

The Nuba of Sudan : - politics, culture, photographs and wrestlers.
Related :- Survival International; the photographs of George Rodger, who travelled among the Nuba after World War II; the Nuba People; the Dinka and the Nuer, neighbours of the Nuba.
posted by plep on Jun 8, 2003 - 1 comment

The Lost Boys of the Sudan are a group of nearly 17,000 orphans whose parents were murdered and whose homes were destroyed by a government miltary turned against them. They marched on foot, without food or water, under attack from hungry predators & occasional strafing miltary fire for several years until settling in a squalid refugee camp in Kenya; nearly a decade later, the U.S. began a humanitarian policy of importing them, a few at a time, and resettling the lucky few in cities such as Chicago, Atlanta, and even Fargo, N.D. (NYTimes, reg req'd)
posted by jonson on Jan 3, 2003 - 14 comments

Export Restrictions on a website? I had to agree to this before downloading stuff from Oracle:
I am not a citizen, national or resident of, and am not under the control of, the government of: Cuba, Iran, Sudan, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Syria, nor any other country to which the United States has prohibited export.
posted by arnab on Sep 10, 2002 - 10 comments

"It's up to us, and I think we can do it," she said. "It's up to us to bankrupt the terrorists and those who finance them so they will never again have the resources to commit such atrocities against the American people as we experienced on September 11."
posted by jcterminal on Aug 15, 2002 - 45 comments

Escaped Sudanese slave, Francis Bok is becoming a celebrity[WSJ sub]. He has testified before Congress. Redemption (buying) slaves is one way to set some free. But is that a scam which will encourage the slave trade? What can we do to free them all?
posted by Geo on May 23, 2002 - 5 comments

Perry Farrell helps free sudanese slaves. Yes, the same Perry Farrell from Jane's Addiction. apparently he risked getting shot down by militia forces to rescue 2,300 women and children from slavery. wow.
posted by mcsweetie on Dec 24, 2001 - 27 comments

A survey of the political climate surrounding President Clinton's strike against bin Laden. Warning: ancient history (1998). Was he really "wagging the dog", or did he have a valid objective after all?
posted by Jack Torrance on Sep 23, 2001 - 6 comments

China puts '700,000 troops' on Sudan alert. "The Chinese have been brought in by aircraft and ship ... We've all seen the Chinese being brought in and can only pray about what's going to happen next." I am quite suprised I haven't heard more about this in the western media.
posted by cmacleod on Aug 28, 2000 - 4 comments