militiamen killed 16 people and kidnapped at least 34 girls last week in the congo

a un report has concluded that no ?genocide? was committed in sudan?s darfur region, where tens of thousands of civilians have died in the past two years, and an estimated 1.8 million have been displaced, not to mention more than 70,000 dead from hunger and disease. but, there?s no ?genocide? so it?s ok

meanwhile, in rioting in khartoum, sudan, there were, depending on the information source, 25 killed, 196 injured, 23 killed, 100 injured or 14 killed, 16 injured (those low numbers coming from the governor, as one might expect)

a 10 year old palestinian girl was shot and killed monday inside a united nations school in a southern gaza strip refugee camp, hit in the head by israeli tank fire, apparently

one of the suicide bombers on iraqi election day was a child with down?s syndrome, reportedly

the nepalese king has disbanded his government and tropps have surrounded the home of the prime minister, but it's not a "coup" surely

rebels fired homemade rockets on a military post in colombia tuesday, killing at least 14 soldiers and wounding about 25

and, michael jackson's molestation trial makes headlines, or you could skip past that and read about eva longoria's love life or, oh my god, orlando bloom and kate bosworth splitting... if you cared that they were together in the first place, that is

and, in other news, did you know that, according to mariam fam of the ap, sunday's election in iraq "occurred without catastrophic rebel attacks"? i guess 44 dead doesn't count as catastrophic, unless of course you happen to be a family member of one of those 44, but some of them will probably become disgruntled and hold us, or the authority in iraq, responsible for the violence, and they will soon be counted with the insurgents and then they won't matter at all, until they are dead and we chalk them up on our scoreboard--we're still winning, by the way, regardless of our lack of success; you go by strict numbers and there's been 1400+ dead us soldiers, a few thousand, i believe at last count, injured, and what's the latest count on iraqi dead? oh wait, there isn't one, at least no good one, cause the highest estimates put the dead at tens of thousands and we wouldn't dare admit to any accuracy there, so we throw out much lower estimates... and i don't even care to go find what our current estimates are cause we all have got to know they won't be accurate and will likely not even be trying to be

as much as i want to be inside the culture we have, to fix it from inside, or at least do my small part in fixing it--and who knows if i've even made a dent yet?--the idea of running away to some rural place far far from all of this shit is increasingly appealing from day to day. if only there were some appropriate place outside the system that wasn't antarctica...

i'll end today's rant with this note from iraq: monday, at the camp bucca prison facility, during a search for contraband, detainees (read: iraqis we've caged because we are gods and it's our right) got violent, throwing rocks and using weapons fashioned out of objects from their cells. as would be expected and damn well required from the good soldiers of the united states, we opened fire. i mean, how dare the caged animals try to get out. how dare they think they have some inalienable right to freedom.

only four were killed. but, is that good news? or is it more likely that most americans think that isn't enough?