Sudan

For days now the United Nations has nervously monitored the planeloads of Sudanese troops arriving in North Darfur.

Now the purpose of the build-up has become clear: the African Union is being asked to leave, and the days of international peacekeeping are to end.

Khartoum is to settle the three-year-old rebellion on military terms.

There now seems no way that a United Nations force can be deployed in Darfur, since the idea of peacekeepers fighting their way into this vast, remote region is hardly plausible.

That will leave the huge camps housing two million displaced people extremely exposed....

The Bush administration and big business interests have been accused of undermining efforts to exert financial pressure on the Sudanese government to stop the killing in Darfur.

A bill that passed the US Congress endorsing state legislation to force publicly owned entities to sell off holdings in companies that do substantial business with Sudan, or sell Khartoum weapons, has now been blocked in the Senate, with campaigners blaming the White House. They say the long-delayed draft put forward last week by the Foreign Relations Committee had removed a clause known as Section 11 that would have thrown its weight behind a celebrity-backed campaign requiring publicly owned entities to dump stock.

Early surveys by the World Health Organization (WHO) found a two-month death rate of 10,000 a month, and later estimates simply extended the death toll based on that rate, up to 180,000 after 18 months. SciAm