British lawmakers said yesterday that the death toll in Darfur has been underestimated and is likely to be around 300,000, calling attacks against civilians in the western region of Sudan "no less serious" than genocide.
A report by the House of Commons' International Development Committee said a WHO estimate that 70,000 people had died from indirect effects of disease and hunger in the Darfur region was "a gross underestimate." The British report, published yesterday, says the total figure is likely to be "somewhere around 300,000." The International Development Committee said the WHO figure only counted those who died in camps for displaced people between March and mid-October 2004 and did not include people who died before reaching camps, or in inaccessible areas of Darfur.
The committee's report said the crimes committed in Darfur were "no less serious and heinous than genocide." It accused the international community of a "scandalously ineffective response" to the situation in Darfur, and said governments across the world were guilty of failing to deal with the crisis.
The report said early warnings about the emerging crisis were ignored, humanitarian agencies were slow to respond and the UN suffered from an "avoidable leadership vacuum" in Sudan at a critical time.
It also criticized the UN Security Council as driven by member states' interests in oil and exporting arms.
Baldry said the world's failure to protect the people of Darfur from the atrocities committed against them was a scandal.
"Crises such as Darfur require the world to respond collectively and effectively. Passing the buck will not do," Baldry said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
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