Archive for April 23, 2012

Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s president, has pledged not to negotiate with South Sudan amid reports of fresh air attacks on his country’s southern neighbour.

The renewed tensions come as South Sudan’s 10-day occupation of the oil town of Heglig has left parts of the town blood-soaked and in ruins.

“We will not negotiate with the South’s government, because they don’t understand anything but the language of the gun and ammunition,” Bashir told Sudanese troops at a barracks near an oilfield along the two neighbours’ contested border on Monday.

“Our talks with them were with guns and bullets.”

General Kamal Abdul Maarouf, a Sudanese army commander who led the battles in Heglig, said the army had killed 1,200 South Sudanese troops in fighting in the area, an account South Sudan denied.

An AFP news agency correspondent who accompanied Maarouf said he saw piles of corpses bearing South Sudanese military uniforms scattered beneath trees in the border region.

South Sudan’s army said 19 of its soldiers were killed and that 240 Sudanese troops lost their lives.

‘So many bodies’

Early in the occupation, one South Sudanese soldier in Bentiu, capital of the South’s Unity state, said “there are so many bodies at the front line, so many dead”, that it is impossible to bury them or bring them back.

Despite the end of the occupation, Major General Mac Paul, the deputy director of military intelligence for South Sudan, said on Monday that two MiG 29 fighter planes dropped three bombs, two of which landed near a bridge that connected Bentiu and Rubkona.

“This is a serious escalation and violation of the territory of South Sudan. It’s a clear provocation,” he said.

via Sudan’s president rules out talks with South – Africa – Al Jazeera English.

(CNN) — Sanford, Florida, Police Chief Bill Lee is expected to resign Monday, 57 days after his department declined to arrest neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, according to a city official familiar with the matter.

Lee announced that he was temporarily stepping aside on March 22, a day after Sanford’s city commission expressed a lack of confidence in his handling of the incident.

At the time, Sanford police were under intense pressure to arrest Zimmerman, 28, for shooting the unarmed teen-ager. Zimmerman was later charged with second-degree murder after a special prosecutor investigated the case.

via Police chief in Trayvon Martin case to resign – CNN.com.

WASHINGTON — The college class of 2012 is in for a rude welcome to the world of work.

A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don’t fully use their skills and knowledge.

Young adults with bachelor’s degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that’s confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.

An analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven prospects for holders of bachelor’s degrees.

Opportunities for college graduates vary widely.

While there’s strong demand in science, education and health fields, arts and humanities flounder. Median wages for those with bachelor’s degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.

Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor’s degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.

“I don’t even know what I’m looking for,” says Michael Bledsoe, who described months of fruitless job searches as he served customers at a Seattle coffeehouse. The 23-year-old graduated in 2010 with a creative writing degree.

Initially hopeful that his college education would create opportunities, Bledsoe languished for three months before finally taking a job as a barista, a position he has held for the last two years. In the beginning he sent three or four resumes day. But, Bledsoe said, employers questioned his lack of experience or the practical worth of his major. Now he sends a resume once every two weeks or so.

Bledsoe, currently making just above minimum wage, says he got financial help from his parents to help pay off student loans. He is now mulling whether to go to graduate school, seeing few other options to advance his career. “There is not much out there, it seems,” he said.

His situation highlights a widening but little-discussed labor problem. Perhaps more than ever, the choices that young adults make earlier in life — level of schooling, academic field and training, where to attend college, how to pay for it — are having long-lasting financial impact.

via 1 of 2 grads jobless or underemployed – Business – Stocks & economy – msnbc.com.