Presidential polls are approaching on November 28th in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but few observers expect them to be free or fair. The country’s Parliament has changed the Constitution to favor sitting President Joseph Kabila with one round or winner-take-all voting, in which opposition candidates would be expected to divide the opposition vote, leaving Kabila with the most votes and no run-off to face.

On Saturday September 3rd, 2011, we were honored to have with us via telephone two African American writers, activists, and radio hosts to speak with us about the controversy surrounding the new Martin Luther King Memorial Monument now in place between the Lincoln and Washington Monuments in Washington D.C..
Our guests are Kevin Alexander Gray and Dr. Jared Ball.

The New York Times congratulated movie actor George Clooney, an ardent campaigner for Southern Sudanese independence, on his victory, though many African people thought that the Sudanese people might have more rightly been at the center of the South’s Independence Day story.
Others emphasized the U.S. and allies’ interest in managing Sudan’s vast oil reserves. AfrobeatRadio’s Ann Garrison has more.

On July 22, 2011, thirty-two year-old Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik massacred 77 people in Norway. Hollywood released the new Captain America film the same week.
Meanwhile, ordinary people in the developed and underdeveloped countries suffer more and more as the captains of industry profit from massive global high-tech warfare and the manufacture of misery.

Shame on the Associated Press for this report, reproduced word for word by news outlets all over the world. This is the nearly identical report that the AP has been regurgitating about the Democratic Republic of the Congo for years. They probably pulled it out of a computer file and changed the date, and perhaps the location of the refugee camp:

Sometimes ‘little’ people can make history too. When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia last December, he started a blaze that created the Arab Spring. The same may happen with Roland Désiré Aba’a, who is on hunger strike against “the French occupation” of his country.

A couple of months ago, a WFP team in the Ogaden was returning to their base and made the mistake of taking a short cut off of the Ethiopian approved travel routes and came across an Ethiopian paramilitary unit carrying out their everyday practice of burning, looting, murder and mayhem in a village accused of being supporters of the ONLF.
To this day, the WFP has remained silent about the details of the incident and has not condemned the murder of their staff by the Ethiopian paramilitary death squads.

The newly independent nation of South Sudan celebrated its independence from Sudan last Saturday and Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir traveled to the new nation’s capitol, Juba, to congratulate the Southern Sudanese people, but fighting continues in the border states, and many fear that South Sudan’s Independence Day may have been the calm before the storm, because negotiations about sharing oil revenues and the demarcation of borders, broke down before the celebrations. KPFA’s Ann Garrison has more.

Ethiopian troops are in the oil rich, contested Sudanese Abyei region, in accordance with a new UN Security Council resolution invoking sovereign nations “responsibility to protect” vulnerable populations from genocide and mass atrocities, if their own governments aren’t protecting them. But, human rights investigators say that the Security Council is ignoring Ethiopia’s own genocide, in the Ogaden Basin, and, that the West is funding it.

Stopping genocide and mass atrocity prevention has superseded the War on Terror as a justification for U.S. military intervention in Africa, as outlined in Mass Atrocity Response Operations, a Military Planning Handbook (MARO), a Harvard/Pentagon publication.
Using the genocide in Uganda’s Acholiland, where intervention wasn’t geostrategic as an example, Ann Garrison talks about faux humanitarian militarism with Black Star News contributor Michael Kirkpatrick.