Peace and Conflict Update

South Sudan to Arm Civilians against LRA

Increasing attacks and abductions by the Lord’s Resistance Army in Southern Sudan have destabilized the region, creating more than 25,000 new IDPs and, ahead of a January 2011 referendum on the South’s independence, the violence has raised questions of tampering by the northern government. To protect its citizens form the growing threat, the government of South Sudan will spend 1.3 million USD to arm and train civilian groups so that communities can independently protect themselves from LRA attacks. Self defense forces organized by villages, known as ‘Arrow Boys’ have clashed with LRA fighters frequently in recent months as the amount of LRA in the region has increased. The Arrow Boys have, up until now, used arrows dipped in poison to defend themselves against the LRA.

The Obama Administration Unveils New Plan for International Aid

International aid and advocacy groups welcomed President Obama’s newest global development policy unveiled last week at the Millennium Development Goals summit in New York, saying it will make U.S. foreign aid more effective and instead of doing “a little bit of everything everywhere” the plan will focus on “achieving greater impact in fewer areas.” The most important shift in the policy, according to an aid analyst at Oxfam, is that” it will put aid beneficiaries in charge of their own development.” Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont stated that this new strategy will work to “build the capacity of developing countries to achieve lasting progress against poverty, conflict, environmental degradation and other major threats to global security.”

We have to keep our sense of urgency…

“Without a sense of urgency, desire loses its value.”

These are the words of entrepreneur, author and motivational speaker Jim Rohn. And these words could not be more appropriate than they are for the current situation. People all over the world have come together around a common purpose and are riding the energy that this cause has conducted. There are only 52 days left before President Obama’s comprehensive plan to stop the LRA is due. This means we must not lose our sense of urgency, but rather gain even greater momentum and harness the energy and desire we are all feeling in order to make sure a legitimate plan is drafted and set in stone. So stay urgent, stay involved, and come November we can all watch together as Obama’s plan is implemented.

-Braden

BBC News: South Sudanese to be armed against LRA

From BBC News:

“Self-defense groups in south Sudan are to be given guns to help fight off increasing attacks by Lord’s Resistance Army rebels.

Some $2m (£1.3m) will be spent arming the Arrow Boys vigilantes, Western Equatoria state governor Joseph Bakasoro told the BBC.

At present, they usually just use knives and traditional weapons.

LRA attacks have forced some 25,000 Sudanese from their homes this year, the UN says.

The rebel group, initially from Uganda, now operates in Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as Sudan.

“The home guard units will be trained and armed so that they can provide effective defense until the regular forces can intervene,” said Mr Bakasoro.

There are fears that violence could increase in Southern Sudan, ahead of January’s referendum on the region’s independence.

Read the rest of the article here.

Sign the pledge, and help translate words to reality

From Resolve:

Last year, the efforts of tens of thousands of people and hundreds of Members of Congress secured the passage of a bill that requires President Obama and his team to develop a comprehensive strategy to help see an end to LRA atrocities.

But as the President’s team develops their plan, a major question remains unanswered: will the President’s promise translate into a strategy that includes the major new investment of resources and leadership needed to actually achieve peace?

One thing we do know is that our silence would make the answer much more likely to be ‘no,’ and communities across central Africa will continue to face abductions and brutal attacks. But when our voices unify to call for justice, they have the power to rightly shake things up in DC.

When he signed the bill into law, the President promised to “renew our commitments and strengthen our capabilities to protect and assist civilians caught in the LRA’s wake, to receive those that surrender, and to support efforts to bring the LRA leadership to justice.”

The President’s strategy is now due in just 52 days, and its contents will impact the future for hundreds of thousands of people whose children, homes, and communities are being targeted by the LRA.

That’s why we launched From Promise to Peace. This campaign aims to raise the bar for the President, and to make sure his own words translate into the leadership needed to permanently end LRA atrocities and abductions. While 52 days is not long, there is much we can still do to accomplish this goal.

First, sign the pledge committing yourself to read the President’s strategy when it is released. They need to know that we aren’t going to stop until this crisis is ended.

Then, sign up for a local lobby meeting to convince your Member of Congress to do the same. Unless our representatives in Congress speak out, they reinforce the message that addressing the gross injustices being faced by families and children
across central Africa is not a worthy priority.

That message has helped perpetuate this crisis for more than two decades, and our voices can help change it.

First look: the new Sufjan Stevens album

Here is Sufjan’s soon-to-be released new album. Take a listen, drool all over yourself, and fall in love with it.

Check out this NPR article to listen to the songs and read about why Sufjan is as cool as he is.

-Braden

CNN: Don’t know much about religion?

From CNN:

Odds are that you know Mother Teresa was Catholic, but what religion is the Dalai Lama?

How about Maimonides?

And – no Googling – what’s the first book of the Bible? How about the first four books of the New Testament?

Americans who can answer all of those questions are relatively rare, a huge new study has found.

Take part of the quiz yourself.

In fact, although the United States is one of the most religious developed countries in the world, most Americans scored 50 percent or less on a quiz measuring knowledge of the Bible, world religions and what the Constitution says about religion in public life.

The survey is full of surprising findings.

For example, it’s not evangelicals or Catholics who did best – it’s atheists and agnostics.

It’s not Bible-belt Southerners who scored highest – they came at the bottom.

Those who believe the Bible is the literal word of God did slightly worse than average, while those who say it is not the word of God scored slightly better.

Barely half of all Catholics know that when they take communion, the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ, according to Catholic doctrine.

And only about one in three know that a public school teacher is allowed to teach a comparative religion class – although nine out of 10 know that teacher isn’t allowed by the Supreme Court to lead a class in prayer.

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life is behind the 32-question quiz, polling more than 3,400 Americans by telephone to gauge the depth of the country’s religious knowledge.

Read CNN Belief Blog contributor and Pew adviser Stephen Prothero’s take on the survey

“When it comes to religion, there are a lot of things that Americans are unfamiliar with. That’s the main takeaway,” says Greg Smith, a senior researcher at the think tank and one of the main authors of the survey.

Smith has a theory about why atheists did so well on the quiz – they have thought more about religion than most people.

“Very few people say that they were raised as atheists and agnostics,” he explains.

About three out of four were raised as Christians, he says.

“They were raised in a faith and have made a decision to identify themselves with groups that tend to be fairly unpopular,” atheists and agnostics, he says.

“That decision presupposes having given some thought to these things,” which is strongly linked with religious knowledge, he says.

The single strongest factor predicting how well a person does on the religious knowledge quiz is education – the more years of schooling a person has, the more they are likely to know about religion, regardless of how religious they consider themselves to be, Pew found.

“The No. 1 predictor without question is simply educational attainment,” Smith said.

The think tank also asked a handful of general knowledge questions – such as who wrote “Moby-Dick” and who’s the vice president of the United States – and found a link between religious knowledge and general knowledge.

Very few people scored high on religion questions and badly on general knowledge, or vice versa.

People who were members of religious youth groups also did well, he said.

“Religious education is an important factor that helps to explain knowledge – people who participated in youth groups get an average of two extra questions right,” he said.

Jews and Mormons were close behind atheists and agnostics as the group who did best overall on the religion questions, and white evangelical Protestants also tended to get more than half right.

White Catholics averaged exactly half right, followed by mainline Protestants and people who said they were “nothing in particular,” both of whom got just under half right.

Black Protestants got just over a third of the questions right, and Hispanic Catholics just under a third, the Pew Forum found.

The survey was inspired partly by CNN Belief Blog contributor Stephen Prothero’s 2007 book, “Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know – And Doesn’t.”

Because the Pew Forum couldn’t find any indication that such a survey has ever been done before, it can’t say if Americans today know more or less about religion now than they did in the past.

And the organization doesn’t claim too much for its 32 questions.

They “are intended to be representative of a body of important knowledge about religion; they are not meant to be a list of the most essential facts,” the Pew Forum says.

Only eight of the 3,412 survey respondents got all 32 questions right. Six got them all wrong.

The New Yorker: The revolution will not be tweeted

Small Change

Why the revolution will not be tweeted.

from Malcolm Gladwell:

At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away.

“I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress.

“We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied.

The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one of the students said.

By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted.

By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. “I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.

The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns. When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest against their country’s Communist government, the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had been brought together. A few months after that, when student protests rocked Tehran, the State Department took the unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance of its Web site, because the Administration didn’t want such a critical organizing tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations. “Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy,” Mark Pfeifle, a former national-security adviser, later wrote, calling for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools. Facebook warriors go online to push for change. “You are the best hope for us all,” James K. Glassman, a former senior State Department official, told a crowd of cyber activists at a recent conference sponsored by Facebook, A. T. & T., Howcast, MTV, and Google. Sites like Facebook, Glassman said, “give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over terrorists. Some time ago, I said that Al Qaeda was ‘eating our lunch on the Internet.’ That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation.”

(more…)

President Obama: U.S. must be big hearted and hard headed

“The United States is changing the way we do business.” These are the words Obama echoed through the main chamber of the United Nations on Tuesday.

The President addressed issues of the most extreme poverty and hunger, making sure that all the world’s children at least learn to read and write, and fighting mankind’s most devastating diseases.

A deadline to achieve these goals has been set for 2015, thought most U.N. representatives find this very unlikely.

The president wants the world to start focusing on long-term plans for lifting countries out of poverty. Development over dependency.

“No one nation can do everything and still do it well,” Obama said.  “To meet our goals, we must be more selective and focus our efforts where we have the best partners and where we can have the greatest impact.”

Check out this NPR article on Obama reminding the world of his global goals.

Two killed, 17 wounded in clashes in Mogadishu

Mogadishu, Somalia (CNN) — At least two people were killed and 17 others wounded as clashes between government forces and Islamic militants rocked parts of Mogadishu, Somalia, on Saturday, a local ambulance group said.

The clashes erupted around the city’s notorious Bakara market — a stronghold for militants fighting to overthrow the U.N.-backed transitional Somali government, said Ali Musa, director of an ambulance group in Mogadishu.

“Mogadishu is a city at an endless war. People can get caught in violence at any time of the day ” said Musa, whose ambulance group plays a vital role in helping victims of the country’s continued war.

Meanwhile, a commander of Somali government forces said his forces pushed Al-Shabaab militants from new areas in Mogadishu.

Read the rest of the article here.

A freak Segway accident

I’ll admit it, when I see groups of people taking the Segway tours that seem to be getting so popular, I sort of really want to join. But I have heard a handful of people say “no way, they look much too dangerous.” I would usually argue that but I don’t think I have a strong argument anymore considering the owner of Segway accidentally rode his out-of-control Segway off a cliff and fell to his death. -Braden

From Daily Mail:

Former miner Jimi Heselden, 62, plunged into the River Wharfe while riding around his West Yorkshire estate in Boston Spa on a rugged country version of the Segway.

He bought the firm last December and was using one of the machines – which use gyroscopes to remain upright and are controlled by the direction in which the rider leans – to inspect the grounds of his property.

A spokesman for West Yorkshire Police said today: ‘Police were called at 11.40am yesterday to reports of a man in the River Wharfe, apparently having fallen from the cliffs above.

‘A Segway-style vehicle was recovered. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

His death comes just a week after he became one of the UK’s most generous philanthropists, having given away £10million to a charity foundation he set up in 2008.  He had previously given £13million to the same organisation.