Freedom Riders has kept me unbelievably busy (and the paperback for Freedom’s Main Line is out soon!), as has a perhaps ill-advised (from a time-use vantage point) Maymester class that I am teaching right now. So I’ve let my Firefox tabs overload with stories that I thought I’d be able to cover in full. Instead I’ll lay them out here with brief comments as apt.
At Foreign Affairs Jonathan Stevenson looks at how American involvement in Libya challenges AFRICOM.
And Khartoum is back to bombing Darfur. We don’t have a lot of details, but is there a scenario where there is a good explanation for this?
I’m not sure how often Kizza Besigye, Uganda’s main opposition leader, has been detained in various guises, but now he is under de facto house arrest. Meanwhile, the opposition continues to clash with state police. Surely these two stories cannot be related.
Jason Stearns is always worth reading on the Democratic Republic of Congo. Here he is in Foreign Policy.
The Global Press Institute argues that global warming disproportionately harms women. And in Ghana (and surely many other places) maternal mortality rates remain frighteningly high.
So, if you are a nation state and you invite Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir to visit your country, expect to see a variation on this lede: “Judges at the International Criminal Court reported the African nation of Djibouti to the United Nations Security Council Thursday for failing to arrest Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir during an official visit.”
And to bracket this post I’ll close with one last blast of self indulgence:
My Miller Center lecture is now available for viewing (or listening to) here.
The Newshour with Jim Lehrer also featured Freedom Riders on Monday (you can access the video and transcript through that link), and the clip they featured the other day included one of my appearances in the film (I’m in the documentary a dozen or so times total.)