News Worthy News

Today's been one of those days where the time is going by fast at work, but it's been nice and relaxed. It's been a good day (which probably was helped by the fact that my hubby left me the cutest note this morning). Good boy, hubs, definite brownie points. Hmm, brownies. I haven't had brownies in forever.

Beyond my rambling and nice day, I've found some interesting articles on the news front.

Let's start internationally with the new news in northern Uganda, where a 20-year war has taken tens of thousands lives and over 20,000 children have been kidnapped by the Lord's Resistence Army (LRA) to be their child soldiers and sex slaves. Finally (after a lot of lobbying by humanitarian relief organizations, including Uganda-CAN) the U.S. is backing LRA talks, according to US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer. She states that "We are working with the governments in the region to try to keep military pressure on Joseph Kony so that he is defeated. The priority has to be to get him out of the bush no matter how they do it." President Bush recently signed the U.S. budget supplemental bill, which will appropriate an additional $35 million for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance. This money will be used in northern Uganda and in the Democratic Republic of Congo for emergency health measures, and will have a significant impact on improving conditions in camps for displaced people. It's about time the U.S. started focusing on northern Uganda and DR Congo, human rights, specifically children's, have been violated for too long in both countries. It gets sickening after a while to remember Bush's speeches on how many human rights Saddam Hussein violated and then Bush has been virtually ignoring other human rights violations in other countries. The war in Uganda has been taking place for 20 years! It's time for the U.S. and the U.N. to wake up and take some action in these countries. For more on this issue check out this article and here as well. Some good websites for non-profits educating and supporting the end of this war include: Invisible Children, War Child, Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, and a report written by Graca Machel for Unicef on Child Soldiers.

Nationally, the news is once again on homosexuality. Okay, so we've accepted African Americans and women as human beings with rights, so you'd think we'd have learned by now, but no. Of course not, that'd be silly to learn from our history. According to an article on BBC, the U.S. Pentagon still lists being gay as a mental disorder, long after the mental health community has recognized that there is no scientific evidence to deduce that homosexuality is a mental disorder, and in fact studies point more to homosexuality being caused biologically. U.S. lawmakers are requesting the Pentagon to change this listing in accordance with the American Psychiatric Association's stance that "homosexuality per se implies no impairment in judgment, stability, reliability, or general social and vocational capabilities." Hello, people! How many civil rights revolutions must we go through before we accept people who are different? Do we not remember when white men used to think that black people and women were diseased or inherently bad? Do you think a woman came up with the Adam and Eve story? Yikes, people do forget easily.

Update: The people's response to the Pentagon: Homosexuality is a Mental Disorder story... or as The Onion puts it, Pentagon: Gay Equals Crazy. Good stuff.

Lastly, on a lighter note, football news! Check out this wrap up on Dave's Football Blog on the AFC North. I knew the Bengals were competitive with us, but I didn't know they'd take it this far...