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5 Stories You Might Have Missed This Week

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5 Stories You Might Have Missed This Week

Posted by Laura Heaton on November 4, 2011

5 Stories You Might Have Missed This Week

Here at Enough, we often swap emails with interesting articles and feature stories that we come across in our favorite publications and on our favorite websites. We wanted to share some of these stories with you as part of our effort to keep you up to date on what you need to know in the world of anti-genocide and crimes against humanity work.

In rare photos taken in the rebel stronghold of Kurmuk in Sudan’s Blue Nile state, an area overtaken by government forces and aligned militias yesterday, photojournalist Pete Muller documented life in the third conflict zone to erupt in the country since May. The photos and narrative provided by Jeffrey Gettleman, James Estrin, and David Furst appear on The New York Times Lens blog.

Reporting from another flaring hotstop in East Africa, Gettleman filed this rare first-person account of his numerous trips to Somalia and surrounding areas covering the famine. Part overview, part guide to humanitarian giving, with searing anecdotes to illustrate the severity of the situation, “Somalia’s Agony Tests Limits of Aid” is arguably the most compelling and accessible recent reporting on the crisis.

In a touching and personal feature for WNYC’s Radiolab, popular science writer and blogger Carl Zimmer reflects on time spent in South Sudan during the civil war while doing research on some of the region’s deadly (and for a Western listener, bizarrely terrifying) diseases.

As the media riffed on the theme of the “birth of the world’s 7 billionth person” early this week, the Time blog Global Spin pinpointed five crisis spots to watch. Mounting risk of conflict won’t simply come from the increasing scarcity of resources though, writer Joe Jackson points out. “Wars rarely just have one cause,” writes Jackson, quoting Alex Evans of NYU. “Instead, it's best to think of resource scarcity as a threat multiplier.” Top of the list? The Horn of Africa.

U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice sought to refute the characterization of U.S. foreign policy as “leading from behind” through the example of the U.S. role in the lead-up to NATO’s actions in Libya. Ambassador Rice’s blunt opinion of the slogan – “just a whacked out phrase”—came out in an interview with Foreign Policy’s Turtle Bay blogger Colum Lynch.