Confessions From Mars Hill

Darfur and Google Earth

This is from a blog post at PC World.

Google Earth has added a Global Awareness layer to its maps program that lets you learn about the crisis in Darfur. By selecting the Global Awareness layer (in the lower left-hand corner of Google Earth) you can fly over enhanced satellite images of the war-torn region. Sprinkled over the map are icons that link to photographs, data, videos, and narratives of eyewitnesses to the genocide.

Pretty good use of a great program.  Now I can do something with it other than find my house and see Disney World.

Kofi Annan's Last Speech

I read this report in the Washington Post which gives some exerpts from Kofi Annan's last speech as outgoing Secretary General of the United Nations regarding Darfur.  Genocide has been constant since 2003 and there has been very little to nothing done by major governments to stop it.

Here are a couple of good quotes:
"Sixty years after the liberation of the Nazi death camps, and 30 years after the Cambodian killing fields, the promise of 'never again' is ringing hollow,"

"There is more than enough blame to go around," Annan said. "It can be shared among those who value abstract notions of sovereignty more than the lives of real families, those whose reflex of solidarity puts them on the side of governments and not of peoples, and those who fear that action to stop the slaughter would jeopardize their commercial interests."

SBC In The News

It is rare for me to read something in the news about Southern Baptists and be proud of it.  One of my google alerts on Darfur pulled up this story this morning and I was thrilled to see the name of Richard Land, a Southern Baptist big shot, quoted in the piece.