Before we discuss the President of Congo's call for peace before justice, consider this. Eastern Congo is a mess. The military situation is so complex that spreadsheets are necessary to keep militias, commanders and alliances in perspective. The names are unpronounceable, unreadable, often misspelled, and it is no wonder writers...

Bhutto: The Film was one of sixteen documentaries selected for judging at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Entertaining, compelling and heartbreaking, Bhutto did not "win" at Sundance, but in this case winning is certainly...

A bunker-busting academic data bomb has just been dropped on the long suffering Congolese people after the release of a report by the Human Security Report Project at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver Canada. The mainstream press fanned the resulting firestorm of academic debate on methodology by misquoting...

Sanibel Island's Gulf waters have rebounded from a chilly 47 degrees recorded during last week's unprecedented cold snap that decimated fish populations and threatened to do the same to endangered species of sea turtles in Florida. The Sanibel-Captiva Marine Laboratory River, Estuary and Coastal Observing Network (RECON)...

From the Florida Keys to Sarasota, it's been a terrible time for Florida's wildlife. The extreme cold that has most of the nation in the deep freeze has filtered down into the Sunshine State where unusually cold water temperatures are injuring and killing thousands of animals statewide, including at least...

Update

Wednesday, January 6, 8:00pm CST--There has been much misinformation in international news reports about the location of the Tongo forest and risks faced by the chimpanzee population in Virunga due to the lava flow from the eruption of the Nyamulagira volcano.

Primate expert Jo Myers Thompson created this...

Has it occurred to you that social networking is really not very social at all? We Twitter, cultivate relationships with hundreds of "friends" we have never met on Facebook, blog until we are emotionally blue, lovingly attend to our websites and never...

Eastern Congo awoke in the early hours between Friday and Saturday there to the eruption of Mount Nyamulagira, located 16 miles from the provincial capitol of Goma. Lava is flowing into the World Heritage Virunga Park, burning the forest, and threatening endangered chimpanzees at the Tongo Chimpanzee Sanctuary. Fortunately the...

The notoriously failed Kimia II operation in eastern Congo has ended today, December 31. Soundly and forcefully criticized by Human Rights groups for the devastation it wrought on civilian populations, it will be replaced sometime in January with a new mission, dubbed Operation Amani Leo, sources say.

Let's face it. "Do-gooders," whether they are journalists, novelists, scientists, human rights workers, doctors, lawyers or Mwami tribal chiefs, will be unable to save the Democratic Republic of Congo. There are a lot of good people who care about Congo, individuals who have absolutely no power whatsoever to change anything....

Breaking news...

Merry Christmas. No Peace on Earth for DRC.

In a year-end report published today and based upon 23 fact-finding missions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Human Rights Watch (HRW) has demanded that the United Nations Security Council "act...

And so it came to pass that the Angel, Hope, received three children to light, to guard, to love and guide for almost eighty years. You see, there are many more people on Earth than there are angels to watch over them, so sometimes the angels are asked to protect...

From New York to Singapore, hundreds of major news organizations, including the New York Times, the BBC, the Associated Press, Reuters, and the Voice of America utilized the worst possible news cycle to announce that they were in receipt of a "leaked" United Nations Report detailing:

• Arms...

Sixteen years after hostilities ramped up in 1996, Congo remains awash in atrocities, the bloody fingers of blame point in all directions, and at the International Criminal Court (ICC) pleas of "not guilty" once again are ringing through the halls of justice. The focus now is on the Ituri region...

In a very sad day for Rwanda, The International Crimes Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) announced it has overturned a 20-year sentence and acquitted Protais Zigiranyirazo, accused genocidaire and suspected murderer of American primatologist Dian Fossey. Citing "serious errors" during the 2008 trial, ICTR Chamber Judge Theodore Meron ordered the...

Ashley Judd's op-ed in USATODAY drove me to the Tao Te Ching before my head exploded. In another example of celebrity naiveté falling prey to the obfuscations of non-governmental organizations in Congo, Judd wrote: "In Congo, 600,000 babies a year are born only to suffer and die." She added,...

I am terrible at writing headlines, but in these times of Google searches and social networking, article tags and Twitter hashtags, headlines are important. "Hope springs eternal" won't cut it when referring to what happened in Maine last week regarding gay rights. The linkage of "audacity" and "hope" is a...

In a damning and stunning statement today, Human Rights Watch (HRW) charged that the United Nations peacekeeping force (MONUC) in the Democratic Republic of Congo "knowingly supports abusive military operations" by the regular Congolese Army (FARDC). "Congolese armed forces have brutally killed hundreds of civilians and committed widespread rape...

If you can't trust the recommendations of your local independent bookstore, what can you trust? Anyone who has faced the dizzying racks of new releases in the chain bookstores, millions of books on Amazon.com, and the daunting The New York Times bestseller list knows what I am talking about. It...

The Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Philip Alston, described some of the heinous crimes committed against Congolese citizens after an investigation in eastern DRC. His statements support Human Rights Watch and other accounts that have surfaced in recent months relating atrocities committed by the...