The US government is considering whether to upgrade the disaster in Sudan's Darfur province -- identified by the UN and aid agencies as the world's most serious humanitarian crisis -- to one of genocide. This apparent exercise in semantics seems self-indulgent when it is already known that some 1.3 million Darfur people have been driven from their homes by Sudan government-backed militias; that countless tens of thousands have died; and that further mass deaths from starvation and disease loom. [more]