Free Republic

Police shot and killed a black man a few hours ago....protestors are now gathering at the local PD station The officers lined up outside have retreated inside...

Recorded machete attacks in the UK have shot up by nearly five times in just three years, with the majority in the capital, London. The huge number of crimes committed with the deadly, sword-like weapons means there is an average of 15 a day in the UK, or one every 90 minutes. Figures uncovered using freedom of information requests by the Daily Mail show that police dealt with 928 crimes involving machetes in the last two months of 2017. London saw the bulk, with 425 of the attacks. There were 99 in Greater Manchester, 77 in the West Midlands, and...

Léon Mugesera hospitalized after losing appeal of deportation order. The United Nations Committee against Torture has asked Canada to delay the deportation of alleged Rwandan war criminal Léon Mugesera. Defence lawyers for the former Rwandan Hutu politician have successfully lobbied the UN commission to investigate their claims Mugesera faces torture or death if he is sent back to his native country. It's not clear whether Canada considers the UN commission's request to be legally binding. The UN's intervention comes at the 11th hour of Mugesera's anticipated Thursday deportation. Justice Michel Shore denied Mugesera's appeal for a delay on his deportation...

Few combinations are more poisonous than race and politics. That combination has torn whole nations apart and led to the slaughters of millions in countries around the world. You might think we would have learned a lesson from that and stay away from injecting race into political issues. Yet playing the race card has become an increasingly common response to growing public anger at the policies of the Obama administration and the way those policies have been imposed. When the triumphant Democrats made their widely televised walk up Capitol Hill after passing the health care bill, led by a smirking...

<p>Maybe it's because I spent time last summer in Burundi, the poorer twin-sister country of Rwanda, which shares a similar history, tribal make-up, geography, culture, and terrifying undercurrent of genocide. Maybe it's because while there, I met some Anglican priests serving in Rwanda, who told personal stories of the tragedies there and their efforts to bring healing and reconciliation in the aftermath. Maybe it's because (I know some readers will be tempted to write me off after reading this sentence) I was so frustrated by last year's promotional hype surrounding Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, and I was so frustrated by the movie itself, although I know many good people found it moving and spiritually edifying. Maybe it's because I have deep concerns about the alignment of major sectors of Christianity with "red-state Republicanism," and I worry that a kind of modernist, nationalist neo-fundamentalism is trying to claim all Christian territory as its sovereign domain.</p>

Violence and Suffering in Sudan's Darfur Region The Crisis in Darfur A preventable humanitarian crisis, affecting more than two million people, is raging in the Darfur region of western Sudan. Not since the Rwanda genocide of 1994 has the world seen such a calculated campaign of slaughter, rape, starvation and displacement. Government-backed militias, known collectively as the Janjaweed, are systematically eliminating entire communities of African tribal farmers. Villages are being razed, women and girls raped and branded, men and boys murdered, and food and water supplies targeted and destroyed. Victims report that government air strikes frequently precede militia raids.

MAR DEL PLATA, Argentina (AFP) - US President George W. Bush will bestow the highest US civilian honor on boxing legend Muhammad Ali, "Hotel Rwanda" hero Paul Rusesabagina and 11 others, the White House said. Singer Aretha Franklin, US Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan, and golfer Jack Nicklaus will also receive presidential medals of freedom in a November 9 ceremony at the White House, said Bush spokesman Scott McClellan. Last year, Bush raised eyebrows by giving the medal to former CIA director George Tenet, retired general Tommy Franks and the former civilian overseer for Iraq, Paul Bremer, sidestepping their ties...

Tagline of the movie: When a country descended into madness And the world closed its eyes He opened his arms And created a place Where hope could survive

Blood flowed in the streets. Machine guns and machetes replaced courtesies and conversations among neighbors and colleagues from different ethnic groups. As Rwanda fell into the grip of genocide 10 years ago, what distinguished Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager in Kigali, the capital, from many of his countrymen was an unspoken passion to serve others and a knack for decorum. "I was not brave, but maybe I was someone who refused to follow the mob," Rusesabagina said in an interview in Washington before the screening last week of "Hotel Rwanda," a film based on heroic exploits by which Rusesabagina ultimately...

PARIS - A French military tribunal opened an investigation Friday into allegations that French peacekeepers facilitated attacks on ethnic minority Tutsis during the 1994 genocide of more than half a million Rwandans, judicial officials said. A judge from the tribunal visited Rwanda last month to interview six survivors who had filed a lawsuit in February accusing troops of "complicity in genocide" and "crimes against humanity." The judge, Brigitte Raynaud, will head up the investigation, said the judicial officials, speaking on customary condition of anonymity. One of the central claims of the suit is that French soldiers allowed members of the...

DAR ES SALAAM (Reuters) - The suspected architect of Rwanda's 1994 genocide begins a fourth week of testimony on Monday defying accusers in the biggest trial to date over the central African nation's 100 days of slaughter. Prosecutors at the UN's Tanzania-based International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) say former army colonel Theoneste Bagosora, now 64, was in charge as troops and machete-wielding militiamen butchered some 800,000 people. But in lengthy comments from the stand, Bagosora has accused rebel-turned-president Paul Kagame of triggering the bloodshed, blamed the chief of UN peacekeepers for the murder of Rwanda's prime minister and even...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- The Moroccan mission to the United Nations has announced it arrested six U.N. peacekeeping soldiers in Congo accused of sexually abusing local girls and discharged the contingent's commander. Fred Eckhard, the U.N. secretary-general's spokesman, on Monday said the announcement over the weekend showed "the Morrocan authorities attach as much importance to eradicating sexual abuse within U.N. peacekeeping missions as does the U.N." "The mission hopes that the vigorous and public reaction of Morocco will serve as an example and that other troop contributing countries will follow," he added. There have been more than 150 allegations of...

United Nations observers have sighted about 100 Rwandan troops inside the Democratic Republic of Congo. Thousands of civilians have reportedly begun to flee the area. The Congolese say more than 6,000 Rwandans have crossed the border and are attacking and burning villages. From the eastern town of Beni, Congolese regional cooperation minister Mbusa Nyamwisi said villages were being targeted nearby. "We are being attacked by the Rwandan troops," he said. The apparent incursion comes after threats last week by Rwanda's president Paul Kagame to send troops across the border to engage Hutu rebels inside Congolese territory. President Kagame said any...

US president Bill Clinton's administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction, classified documents made available for the first time reveal.Senior officials privately used the word genocide within 16 days of the start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the president had already decided not to intervene.Intelligence reports obtained using the US Freedom of Information Act show the cabinet and almost certainly the president knew of a planned "final solution to eliminate all Tutsis" before the slaughter reached its peak.It took Hutu death squads...

<p>Exactly 10 years ago the world stood by as a genocidal rampage by ethnic Hutus against ethnic Tutsis in Rwanda claimed as many as 800,000 lives. Now something similar may be unfolding in western Sudan, a region even more remote from the world's gaze. Will humanity bestir itself to act, or will history repeat itself?</p>