Nov 17 (Reuters) – California’s Supreme Court on Thursday said that the original sponsors of Proposition 8, a ballot initiative prohibiting same-sex marriage in California, can defend the initiative in court. The state court was responding to a request from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which had asked whether state law authorizes the sponsors […]

In September 2004, then-U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, became the first member of any U.S. administration to apply the label “genocide” to an ongoing conflict. Interviews I conducted for Fighting for Darfur: Public Action and the Struggle to Stop Genocide revealed that despite a thorough investigation into the atrocities in Sudan’s western region of […]

[With MARY BETH SHERIDAN] U.S. officials say satellite imagery provides no clear evidence of mass graves in an area of Sudan that has recently erupted in war, contradicting claims by a humanitarian group. The Satellite Sentinel Project, co-founded by actor George Clooney, said last week that it had detected what appeared to be three mass […]

With MARY BETH SHERIDAN – The map of Africa will be redrawn Saturday, as South Sudan becomes an independent nation through a peace process championed by successive U.S. presidents but still beset by lingering tensions from years of war. President George W. Bush put Sudan at the center of his foreign policy in Africa, helping […]

For 19 days, media cut off from direct access to the Nuba Mountains in Southern Kordofan, which lies in northern Sudan, have been struggling to verify information emerging about the situation there. On Wednesday, a long-time Sudan analyst who was in the Nuba Mountains when the bombing began on June 5, and who only just […]

The news coming out of Sudan grows bleaker by the hour. Prospects for peace look less likely now than at any point since the north-south civil war, Africa’s longest-running conflict, ended in 2005. The Sudanese government is presently bombing the northern border state of Southern Kordofan, and the United Nations estimates that more than 100,000 […]

[Published June 6, 2011] JUBA, South Sudan – Sudan has rejected a call by the U.N. Security Council to withdraw its forces from the contested town of Abyei, as internal pressure mounts on South Sudan to respond to the invasion last month. Sudanese Foreign Minister Ali Ahmed Karti, in a statement released over the weekend, […]

[Published June 1, 2011] WAU, South Sudan – Katerina Nyakat Monjok can see the sprawling compound of the U.N. Mission in Sudan from her home in Abyei. But Monjok, 37, says her proximity to the peacekeeping base did not provide any protection when the Sudanese government attacked her town on May 21. The attack, which […]