OurPledge

The Genocide Olympics: Beijing Is Feeling the Heat

The newest AP article on the Genocide Olympics has this headline: “China’s FM: Linking Beijing Olympics to Darfur will fail.”

Clearly, the Chinese government is getting nervous.

Beijing’s marketers can’t wipe off the stain, though. When your Olympics artistic adviser Steven Spielberg has contacted you in concern; when activists have established the groundwork for a shaming torch relay from Darfur to China; when over 100 Members of Congress have sent you a strongly worded appeal warning you of an impending Genocide Olympics…if you’re the Chinese government, you’re definitely worrying about what 2008 will bring.

Take Action: Sign our Genocide Olympics petition

Learn More: Read Nat Hentoff’s May 15th Village Voice column “China Up Against the Wall”

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Recap: The April 2007 Global Days for Darfur

In the U.S., there were over 500 “Global Days for Darfur” rallies. There were events in all 50 states.

AADG members helped coordinate the April 29 rally and concert in San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza, which was primarily organized by the San Francisco Bay Area Darfur Coalition. New Mexico Governor and Presidential Candidate Bill Richardson spoke, Mohamed Suleiman and Eltayeb Ibrahim (both from Darfur) spoke, over 3,000 signatures were collected on our petitions to Congress and the Ambassador of China…All in all, a good event—we hope the participants will join others around the country in sustaining and stepping up their advocacy in the next few months!

More: Coverage in The San Francisco Chronicle.

And here are some photos, many more to come later:

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OurPledge.org Relaunches

In the past year we’ve gone through four major versions of our website.

OurPledge.org started as a registration page for the April 30, 2006 rally on the Golden Gate Bridge. It soon changed into a more general Darfur advocacy hub. All along the journey, AADG has tried to generate some useful resources, including e-petitions to the White House and Congress and constantly updated letter-writing templates.

Recently, we’ve been getting a number of website-related requests. A good number of you wanted some tweaking. You wanted daily, and not just weekly, Darfur news updates. You wanted a more robust description of AADG’s grassroots projects, complete with status updates. You wanted to commit to effective day-to-day action on behalf of Darfur, but wanted some context added to the recommendations of the e-petitions.