Refugees Sudan

A French soldier with the European peacekeeping force in Chad was missing and another was wounded after their vehicle accidentally strayed into neighboring Sudan, a French Defense Ministry official said. A recovery effort was met with hostile fire, said Commandant Dan Harvey, a spokesman for the EU peacekeeping force. It was not immediately clear who fired on the soldiers. It was the first known incident since European Union Forces began protecting refugees from Sudan's Darfur region.

Chad's prime minister blamed the influx of about 300,000 refugees from Sudan's neighboring Darfur region for his country's worsening tensions with Sudan, and he demanded that the international community remove the people. Prime Minister Nouradin Koumakoye warned that if the refugees are not transferred elsewhere, Chad's government would expel them on its own. Koumakoye repeated charges that Sudan is fomenting violence in Chad because Darfur refugees are sheltering there . Chadian rebels attacked the capital this month before being driven off, but Sudan denies any involvement.

Israel said it would no longer allow refugees from Sudan's Darfur region to stay after they sneak across the border from Egypt. The number of African migrants entering Israel, including those from Darfur, has soared to as many as 50 a day, apparently as word of job opportunities has spread, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Overnight, Israel returned 48 Africans to Egypt.

Thousands of refugees from Sudan risk being stranded on the border with Chad and exposed to attacks by militiamen unless they can be ferried to camps before the rainy season starts, aid workers say. "We need more vehicles, petrol and food. My opinion is that we underestimated the situation here, and the response has come too late," said Emile Belem, who heads the U.N. refugee agency office in Iriba. The U.N.

The United Nations took over command from a European Union protection force in eastern Chad on Sunday, and there were growing fears of more rebel violence and the possible arrival of tens of thousands more refugees from Sudan's Darfur region. The European Union formally handed over command to the U.N. mission in Chad and Central African Republic after a yearlong mandate expired. The hand-over, which sees about 5,000 U.N.

Dora Apsan Sorell, an 83-year-old survivor of Auschwitz, first learned of the crisis in Sudan from a television show, the same day her reparations check arrived here. To her, the desperate people on the TV screen could just as well have been her own family and friends 60 years ago. "I could just see in front of my eyes our people walking aimlessly, in dirty rags, hungry and bewildered, behind the barbed wires of the camps after being separated from their families," said Sorell, a retired doctor.

As Jewish families throughout the region gather this week to celebrate Passover, the holiday celebrating freedom from slavery, a passionate group of organizers at Jewish World Watch hope that 5-by-7-inch cards will lie beside the flat bread and bitter herbs at the traditional meal, or Seder. The cards ask probing questions about helping refugees in Sudan's Darfur region. Since 2003, more than 200,000 have died in Darfur; more than 2 million live in disease-ridden refugee campus.

The last group of Ethiopian Jews in Sudan was airlifted Friday by U.S. military transport planes to Israel from a refugee camp on the plains of eastern Sudan in an operation planned by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, The Times has learned. The Ethiopian Jews, known as Falashas, were moved in a top-secret and closely timed operation that began at dawn, when the first of about 10 turboprop C-130 transport aircraft landed at a gravel airstrip about eight miles north of Gedaref.

There used to be a nice water hole here. It was just right for the occasional elephant, dik-dik or nomad who needed a drink after wandering in the blast-furnace heat of the acacia plains. Since March, however, about 20,000 refugees from Sudan's civil war have drunk from the water hole. It is now a pit of jet-black mud. But the Toposa nomads who have come here in retreat from fighting and famine are still thirsty.

At a time when congressional travel is coming under new scrutiny, Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) has the distinction of taking more trips at taxpayer expense than anyone else in the California delegation. In the last 3 1/2 years, she visited the South Pole, snorkeled at Australia's Great Barrier Reef and joined world leaders at a security conference in Munich, Germany. She met with Darfur refugees in Sudan, attended a "legislators' dialogue" with European Parliament members in Slovenia, delivered a speech on transportation security in France and inspected anti-terrorism defenses in Genoa, Italy, and Mombasa, Kenya.