China Bars Darfur Activist

Try as hard as they might, the Chinese are sure coming off looking incredibly thin-skinned about any semblance of criticism as the Olympics open.

Instead of promoting openness and tolerance, all they're doing is reinforcing the fact they're a Communist police state that has no interest in freedom of speech.

NBC can play along and pretend what a great place China is, but you just cannot silence every reporter and athlete, who I'm sure will have plenty to say when they get back from the games.

Olympic gold medalist and outspoken Darfur activist Joey Cheek has had his visa revoked by the Chinese embassy, hours before the speedskating champion was set to fly to China. And he wasn't even planning on wearing a mask when he got there.

Chinese officials don't need a reason to revoke anyone's visa but, in their eyes, they had plenty of reasons to snatch Cheek's. He is the founder of Team Darfur, a group of 70 athletes whose goal it is to raise global awareness of the human-rights violations taking part in the Darfur region of Sudan. China's military, economic and diplomatic ties to Sudan have been well-publicized in the lead-up to the Games.

Read the rest.

Carter Bigtimes Locals in Darfur Shouting Match

Don't you know who I am?

The meddling nitwit known as Jimmy Carter, worst U.S. president ever, is ingratiating himself with the folks in Darfur.

Former President Carter in Showdown With Officials in Darfur

KABKABIYA, Sudan — Former President Carter got in a shouting match Wednesday with Sudanese security services who blocked him from a town in Darfur where he was trying to meet with refugees from the ongoing conflict.

The 83-year-old Carter walked into this highly volatile pro-Sudanese government town to meet refugees too frightened to attend a scheduled meeting at a nearby compound. He was able to make it to a school where he met with one tribal representative and was preparing to go further into the town when Sudanese security officers stopped him.

"You can't go. It's not on the program!" the local security chief, who only gave his first name as Omar, yelled at Carter, who is in Darfur as part of a delegation of respected international figures known as "The Elders."

"We're going to anyway!" an angry Carter retorted as a crowd began to gather. "You don't have the power to stop me."

U.N. officials told Carter's entourage the Sudanese state police could bar his way. Carter's traveling companions, billionaire businessman Richard Branson and Graca Machel, the wife of former South African President Nelson Mandela, tried to ease his frustration and his Secret Service detail urged him to get into a car and leave.

"I'll tell President Bashir about this," Carter said, referring to Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.

What is this, third grade? "Ooh, I'm telling!"

The visit by "The Elders," which is headed by Nobel Peace laureates Carter and Desmond Tutu, is largely a symbolic move by a host of respected figures to push all sides to make peace. Tutu visited a refugee camp in south Darfur, but the U.N. Mission in Sudan deemed it too dangerous for Carter to make a similar visit.

Send in the Clowns

If the poor folks in Darfur think they have it bad, well, things aren't going to get much better.

U.N. approves up to 26,000 troops, police for Darfur

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The U.N. Security Council authorized on Tuesday up to 26,000 troops and police for Darfur and approved the use of force to protect civilians in Sudan's arid western region.

Expected to cost more than $2 billion in the first year, the combined "hybrid" U.N.-African Union operation aims to quell violence in Darfur, where more than 2.1 million people have been driven into camps and an estimated 200,000 have died over the past four years.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who conducted months of talks with Khartoum, described the resolution as "historic and unprecedented" and said the mission would "make a clear and positive difference."

Sure.

Hide the women and young girls.

Blaming the Jews for Darfur

You had to figure eventually some intellectual titan would blame the Jews for Darfur. I'm just surprised it took this long.

Sudan: Jews behind Darfur conflict

Sudan's defense minister, Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein, has accused "24 Jewish organizations" of "fueling the conflict in Darfur" last week in an interview with a Saudi newspaper.

Hussein was interviewed during an official state-visit to the Saudi kingdom last week.

A journalist from Saudi Arabia's Okaz newspaper asked Hussein: "Some people are talking about the penetration of Jewish organizations in Darfur and that there is no conflict there?"

"The Darfur issue is being fuelled by 24 Jewish organizations, who are making the largest amount of noise over the issue, and using the Holocaust in their campaigning," the Sudanese defense minister replied.

Hussein added that the Darfur conflict was driven by "friction between farmers and herders and shepherds. Among the biggest problems is that of water, which is used to exploit the differences and fuel the conflict."

"Are these Jewish groups supporting (the rebels) financially?," the interviewer from Okaz asked Hussein.

"Yes, they provide political and material support through their control over the media and across American and British circles," Hussein said, adding that Jewish groups were using "all means to fuel these conflicts."

He added that Western reports of 200,000 people dying in Sudan were false, and said: "We talk about 9,000 dead as a result of either government or rebel actions."

George Clooney was unavailable for comment.

UN Head Links Climate Change to Darfur

Call him Ban Ki-moonbat.

WASHINGTON - Climate change is partly to blame for the conflict in Sudan's Darfur region, where droughts have provoked fighting over water sources, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in an editorial published Saturday.

"Almost invariably, we discuss Darfur in a convenient military and political shorthand — an ethnic conflict pitting Arab militias against black rebels and farmers," Ban wrote in The Washington Post. "Look to its roots, though, and you discover a more complex dynamic."

Rainfall in Sudan began declining two decades ago, a phenomenon due "to some degree, from man-made global warming," said Ban, who has made both Darfur and climate change priorities.

Is there anything these people won't link to this mythical climate change, or global warming, or whatever they're calling it today?

UPDATE: The hysteria continues.

People displaced by global warming -- the Christian Aid agency has predicted there will be one billion by 2050 -- could dwarf the nearly 10 million refugees and almost 25 million internally displaced people already fleeing wars and oppression.

"All around the world, predictable patterns are going to result in very long-term and very immediate changes in the ability of people to earn their livelihoods," said Michele Klein Solomon of the International Organisation of Migration (IOM).

Good grief.