University students killed in terrorist attack

In Algeria, a terrorist attack killed a busload of university students in mid-December, The Economist reported. A group calling themselves “al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb” claimed responsibility for the attack, which also destroyed the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Refugees office.

This and other attacks fit the picture painted by journalist Peter Bergen, whose study reveals a startling seven-fold increase in the number of jihadist attacks worldwide since the Iraq invasion and occupation.

The 2006 National Intelligence Estimate states that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has become a “cause célèbre” for jihadists and “is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives.”

Depleted uranium the “stuff of nightmares”

At a recent U.N. General Assembly meeting, 139 countries voted in favor of a new resolution to take nuclear weapons off “hair trigger” alert, when they would be able to launch within minutes.

The United States, France and the United Kingdom were the only delegations to vote against the measure.

The vote accompanied dozens of others related to nuclear disarmament issues, nearly all of which the U.S. delegation opposed or voted against, often times alone, according to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).

One hundred thirty-six countries also voted to adopt a resolution prohibiting the use of Depleted Uranium (DU). A byproduct of nuclear plants, several nations use DU extensively for its unique armor-piercing properties.

Israel, the Netherlands, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic all voted against the measure.

When asked about their vote, U.S. delegates claimed there were no environmental or health risks from DU, according to ICAN.

Maj. Douglas L. Rokke, former DU project director for the U.S. Army, disagreed.

“[Depleted Uranium] is the stuff of nightmares,” he said to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “This whole thing is a crime against God and humanity.”

Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, a British-trained oncologist working in Iraq, also described to the P-I scenes of children born “without brains, with internal organs outside their bodies, without sexual organs, without spines” during the 1991 Gulf War.

Estimates of how much DU is being used in Iraq and Afghanistan is in the thousands of tons. DU stays radioactive for 4.5 billion years.

Conflict in Congo ignored, deadliest fighting since WWII

Violent conflict and humanitarian crises in Chechnya, Sri Lanka, the Congo and the Central African Republic are rarely, if ever, mentioned in U.S. media, according to Medecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in its December report on the top 10 underreported stories of 2007.

In one of the worst crises, Ethiopian troops backed by U.S. and E.U. forces are fighting several armed groups in Somalia, leading to an unknown number of civilian deaths. An estimated 200,000 are living in “extremely harsh conditions with little access to food, water and shelter.”

The Sudanese government is meanwhile actively obstructing efforts to deploy a United Nations/African Union peacekeeping mission to quell the civil war violence in the Darfur region.

Hundreds of thousands of people have died from the very complicated four-year conflict.

Even so, the Darfur conflict has been depoliticized and simplified, said Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani. By comparison, 4 million people have died since 1998 as a result of the fighting in Congo, the most deadly conflict since World War II.

[Reach columnist Aditya Ganapathiraju at news@thedaily.washington.edu.]