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In the January 2013 issue of Sojourners, Bill McKibben writes about the bizarre weather year those of us in the United States experienced in 2012: In the U.S. alone, 2012 brought a March heat wave which led to fires in Colorado and New Mexico, and a "derecho" storm in June that followed the east coast heat wave, leaving five million people in the mid-Atlantic region without power. July 2012 was the hottest month ever recorded in the U.S.; the Midwest’s corn and soybean crops experienced a devastating drought. The grand finale for the year was the ferocious hurricane Sandy, which slammed the Caribbean, ripped through the Chesapeake Bay area, and tore up New Jersey and New York.

In early January a number of faith communities and allied organizations that work to support individuals and societies striving to meet basic human needs wrote to President Obama to congratulate him on his election to a second term, and to raise a number of concerns as his administration continues to develop policies and programs that address global hunger and rural poverty. The following edited version of that letter outlines the course of action needed to address the right to food and to protect our planet from further ecological destruction.

The following article by Syrian Fadi Hallisso, SJ was the basis for his December 13, 2012 presentation to a Pax Christi International workshop in Amman, Jordan.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is the site of the world’s longest-running and most expensive peacekeeping operations, including a UN peacekeeping presence for several years after its independence in 1960 and more recent UN missions starting in the late 1990s. Despite this, an estimated five million people have died in the years since the second regional war began in 1998, and millions more have been forced to flee their homes.