Child soldiers used in more than 25 countries, including UK and Israel.
“In this age of global media, today’s verdict will reach warlords and commanders across the world and serve as a strong deterrent,” the U.N.’s special representative for children and armed conflict, Radhika Coomaraswamy, said in a statement. The ICC indicted Kony seven years ago for crimes including using child soldiers, but has not been able to catch him.
If you watched last month’s National Geographic Bee on TV, you know it’s not just spelling bees. English professor Amardeep Singh says the reason Indian American kids are dominating the “bee” scene is likely a combination of their enthusiasm and passion with their parents’ putting pressure on them to succeed. The Wall Street Journal India reports:
It’s stunning… The fact that Indians would ever win is noteworthy. The fact that they would win more than once is impressive,” Pawan Dhingra, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s Asian Pacific American Program, said in an interview on National Public Radio. “But the fact that they would win at such a dominating level becomes almost a statistical impossibility. It’s phenomenal, really. There is more than randomness going on.
Right now Sudanese citizens in the Nuba Mountains are starving to death because they’re caught in the crossfire of their government’s year-long killing campaign. New York Times reporter Nicholas D. Kristof, who’s been writing about the situation, recently snuck into the country “on a dirt track controlled by rebels” to provide a first-person update about the crisis. He writes:
PERHAPS hundreds of thousands of people here have no food and are reduced to eating leaves and insects, as Sudan’s government starves and bombs its own people in the Nuba Mountains. Children are beginning to die…This week will mark a year since Sudan began its brutal counterinsurgency campaign in the Nuba Mountains, intended to crush a rebel force that is popular here and controls much of the region. Sudan has expelled aid workers, blocked food shipments and humanitarian aid, and dropped bombs haphazardly — and almost daily — on its own citizens…
World leaders are mostly turning a blind eye. There isn’t even serious talk about damaging the military airstrips that Sudan’s warplanes take off from before dropping bombs on civilians, or about forcing a humanitarian corridor, or about arranging airdrops of food. As a result, the only certainty is that many Nuba will starve to death in the coming months.
President Obama, you harshly criticized President Bush for failing to stand up to Sudan’s slaughter in Darfur. So now what are you going to do as Sudan kills again — on your watch?”
(Source: Starving Its Own Children - NYTimes.com)
Want to help? Learn more here: http://www.nubasurvival.com/.
Man uses Google Earth to find his long-lost family; movie in the works.
“An Indian man separated from his family for 25 years has defied the odds by tracking them down — using little more than a vague recollection of his childhood and some help from Google Earth’s mapping technology.
Brierley used Google Earth and some fragmented childhood memories to hunt in towns around the train station. ‘I kept in my head the images of the town I grew up in, the streets I used to wander and the faces of my family,’ he tells Tasmania’s The Mercury. Brierley spent hours on Google Earth zooming around for clues, obsessively looking for something, anything that he recognized. Finally, he identified his hometown: Ganesh Talai.
And he found his family?
He sure did. Brierley joined a Facebook group for Ganesh Talai, says Chris Roberts at NBC Los Angeles, and began piecing together more clues from emails he sent to group members. Soon, he booked a plane ticket to India, roaming the streets of his childhood town until he located his family. ‘To this day, I still can’t believe I managed to find my family, considering India’s population size and how young I was when I lost them.’”
