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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 March 30, 2012

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.

With English as his fifth language, Paul Lorem faces a demanding few years ahead as a freshman at Yale. But his present hurdles pale in comparison to the challenges Lorem has overcome to make it all the way to one of the most prestigious U.S. universities from his hometown in a remote area of South Sudan. New York Times columnist Nick Kristof describes Lorem’s journey—from a cattlekeeping community, to Kakuma refugee camp, and beyond.

“The United States has a long history of inadvertently (and sometimes not so inadvertently) training future coup plotters around the world.” Days after the overthrow of Mali’s government—itself initially the product of a military takeover—Foreign Policy’s Joshua Keating compiles a list of seven men who refined their coup-making skills in the United States.

In February, the Congolese army launched a new offensive in the East, primarily focused on routing the FDLR, a rebel group with links to the Rwandan genocidaires. Congo Siasa blogger Jason Stearns takes stock of the operations so far.

Following some rosier reports describing a wave of returns by Darfuris displaced by conflict, a team of reporters with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting describe ongoing insecurity that has in fact left tens of thousands of civilians newly displaced. A Darfuri living in Riyadh camp in West Darfur state laid out three conditions that must be met before people begin going home:

"First we want disarmament [of armed groups] and would like to see widespread arms stocks taken away,” the IDP said. “Secondly, we want the settlers who were brought onto our lands to be removed and the reconstruction of villages with schools and hospitals. Thirdly we want compensation for our relatives who have been killed.”

In an edition of the magazine that’s a throwback to the 1960s (to mark the return of the AMC series Mad Men), Newsweek’s Nick Summers looks at the tricks of today’s trade in influencing public opinion.  The piece focuses on the advertising industry (“Meet the New Don Drapers”) but offers up some important takeaways for advocacy as well and is generally an entertaining read.