This is appalling. Maybe if Iraq weren't draining all our money, we could be helping out more here.

At least 70,000 people have died since March as a result of poor conditions in refugee camps in Sudan's Darfur, the United Nations health agency said Friday. The World Health Organization warned that the death toll will climb unless other countries provide more aid.

The revised death toll cited by the UN does not include those killed in ongoing violence being carried out by Arab militias against Darfur's black residents and from rebellion by tribal groups.

This is genocide. Ethnic cleansing. Read the latest Human Rights Watch report and take action.

The municipal elections in Saudi Arabia will take place in February, 2005. The BBC reports women will not be allowed to vote:

The Saudi interior minister has said women will not be allowed to vote in the country's municipal elections starting in February 2005. In response to a question about women's getting the vote, Prince Nayef bin Sultan said simply: "I don't think that women's participation is possible."

The excuse is "administrative problems."

The official told AP that there were not enough women electoral staff to run women-only voter registration centres, while only a fraction of women in Saudi Arabia had photo identity cards.

Karzai's Opponents are claiming fraud in today's Afghan elections.

Afghans packed polling stations on Saturday for a historic presidential election that was blemished when all 15 candidates opposing U.S.-backed interim President Hamid Karzai withdrew, charging the government and the U.N. with fraud and incompetence.

In the end, faulty ink - not Taliban bombs and bullets - threatened three years of painstaking progress toward democracy. The opposition candidates claimed the ink used to mark people's thumbs rubbed off too easily, allowing for mass deception.

Electoral officials rejected opposition demands that voting be stopped at midday, saying it would rob millions of people of their first chance to directly decide their leader, and the joint U.N.-Afghan panel overseeing the election would rule later on the vote's legitimacy.

Things got violent after the voting:

Human Rights Watch has a report on the risks to women who vote in Saturday's Afghan elections. Reports that 41% of registered voters are women are likely exaggerated because of multiple counting of the same registrations. More imortantly, those women who do vote will do so at tremendous physical risk to their safety.

Widespread intimidation of women and general insecurity threaten women’s right to vote freely in the October 9, 2004, presidential elections, stand for political office, and fully participate in public life. Parliamentary and local elections planned for next year will present even greater challenges for women.

When a U.S.-led coalition invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, one of the justifications for the war was that it would liberate women from the misogynistic rule of the Taliban. There have been notable improvements for women and girls. More than one million girls are enrolled in school and the new Constitution contains guarantees for women’s equal rights.

However, warlords and the Taliban are undermining Afghan women’s participation in the political process through ongoing threats and attacks. Throughout the country, militarized political factions are using force, threats, and corruption to stifle more legitimate political activity and dominate the election process.

We'll be listening to Bush in the debate closely as he credits his Administration's achievements for Afghans, particularly women. I hope the mainstream media and bloggers will be fact-checking him.

Nat Hentoff's new column in the Village Voice addresses indifference to the genocide of Black Afraicans in Darfur in Sudan.

...the World Health Organization, which is striving mightily—with other humanitarian organizations—to save lives in Darfur, says it will run out of money by the end of this month if more funds don't come in from concerned countries. The United States has been the largest donor.

However strongly a future U.N. Security Council resolution may be worded and accepted by Khartoum, Sudan's National Islamic Front government chronically breaks its agreements. The murdering and raping of black Africans in Darfur will continue unless there is massive world pressure that may well have to go beyond the United Nations and indeed create a coalition of nations that will use force to end what the International Crisis Group's John Prendergast accurately calls the "most unspeakable crime in the world."

Hentoff compares Kerry's response to the lack of response from Bush.

Vladimir Putin is making changes in Russia's political system in response to last week's massacre. Critics charge he is moving the country towards a dictatorship.

Putin called for measures limiting the role of smaller opposition political parties, barring independent politicians from running for the national legislature, and effectively giving the president the power to appoint regional governors who are now elected. The changes are likely to be approved before the end of the year by Kremlin loyalists who control Russia's Parliament.

Opposition leaders and some political analysts responded that the changes would do little or nothing to stop terrorism, and they accused Putin of using the Beslan school raid that killed more than 330 people, half of them children, as a pretext for gaining full control over Russia's political institutions.

There was an explosion in North Korea resulting in a mushroom cloud. Agonist has the details--there is concern among some that it might have been a test of a nuclear weapon. A conservative newspaper, The Sankei Shimbun, reports there is speculation that North Korea has built an underground facility in Mount Baekdu near the Korea-China border.

The conservative paper speculated that the underground facility may house missile or nuclear-related installations or emergency military command

If you're in the New York area Sunday, head over to the U.N. for a rally to stop racist genocide and slavery in the Sudan.

Black people across Sudan are under threat of annihilation. The mass murder of Blacks in Darfur is the first genocide of the 21st century: 50,000 have been slaughtered, 2 million forced into the desert as refugees, and thousands raped and enslaved. In the South, the Shiluk Kingdom faces extermination. Across Sudan, millions of Blacks forced from their homes - Muslims, Christians, and animists - now live in refugee camps.

This is genocide. One million may die by December at the hands of the radical Islamist regime in Khartoum, led by General Omar Bashir, who took power in a 1989 military coup. For too long, world leaders have stood by and failed to stop the atrocities in Sudan's killing fields. Prominent members of the UN Security Council have oil and military contracts in Sudan.

Can you imagine if every U.S.Independence Day we released all the rehabilitated prisoners--- if our Government put humane considerations above the economic benefits of the prison machinery? On Independence Day in Vietnam,

Vietnam has released nearly 9,000 prisoners, including 10 inmates whose cases it says had drawn international attention, as part of traditional pardons granted ahead of independence celebrations on September 2.

Foreign ministry officials told a news conference the release of the 8,611 prisoners reflected their ``good rehabilitation records'' and the ``humane tradition'' of Vietnam. Fifty-one foreigners were among those released.

Congress passed a resolution today declaring that genocide is occurring in Sudan.

In a rare show of bipartisan agreement, the House of Representatives passed the measure in a unanimous vote, and the Senate then approved it by a voice vote, in their last acts before Congress adjourned for a six-week summer recess. "While the world debates, people die in Darfur," said Sen. Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican. "We actually could save some lives instead of lamenting afterward that we should have done something."

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, a South Dakota Democrat, called the resolution "an important statement to make. The administration needs to hear it, the international community needs to hear it, and certainly the Sudanese government, which tolerates if not assists genocide, needs to hear it." The resolution says "the atrocities unfolding in Darfur, Sudan, are genocide."

Sudan is not happy with the pressure being brought to bear on it from the U.S. and Great Britain. Tony Blair has not ruled out sending military support to the area. The Sudanese President announced that:

"(This) pressure closely resembles the increased pressure that was put on Iraq (before the war)."

The conflict between the Arab nomads and African farmers has been going on for 15 months. The U.N. estimates that the conflict has killed 30,000 and displaced over 1 million. The Arab Janjaweed militias who have been attacking black Africans and raping African women may be getting help from the Sudanese Government. For the latest developments, check in with Passion of the Present.

Update: The Washington Post has this editorial today.

The Christian Science Monitor asks whether we have a duty to intervene in Sudan. What's going on there? Here's the latest: Human Rights Watch has released a new report with documents showing that the Sudanese Government has been assisting the Jangaweed.

The documents, which Human Rights Watch said it had obtained from the civilian administration in Darfur and are dated February and March this year, call for "provisions and ammunition" to be delivered to known Janjaweed militia leaders, camps and "loyalist tribes."

One document orders all security units in the area to tolerate the activities of Musa Hilal, the alleged Janjaweed leader in north Darfur. Peter Takirambudde, executive director of Human Rights Watch's Africa division, said: "These documents show that militia activity has not just been condoned, it's been specifically supported by Sudan government officials."

Over at Human Rights Watch's website, Mr. Takirambudde says:

"Sudan has launched a major public-relations campaign aimed at buying more time for diplomatic initiatives to work. But at this point and with our new evidence, Khartoum has zero credibility. To date, the government of Sudan has only used more time to consolidate the ethnic cleansing in Darfur"....“It’s absurd to distinguish between the Sudanese government forces and the militias—they are one.”

In a stunning defeat for the U.S., it has withdrawn its resolution seeking immunity for American peacekeepers from prosecution for war crimes.

Facing strong opposition, the United States announced Wednesday it was dropping a resolution seeking a new exemption for American peacekeepers from international prosecution for war crimes. U.S. deputy ambassador James Cunningham made the announcement after a U.S. compromise that would limit the exemption to one final year failed to get support from key Security Council opponents.

One reason for the rejection:

Several council members refusing the compromise cited the abuse of Iraqi detainees by U.S. soldiers and Secretary-General Kofi Annan's opposition to renewing the exemption for a third year.

President Bush's position: