The Shining Path's Upper Huallaga Valley leader Comrade Artemio in a video grab I made from Youtube.

New York- I haven’t been posting nearly often enough in the hectic preparation for this year’s  Jamestown Foundation annual terrorism conference at the National Press Club this Thursday, December 9th. This past week we released our eleventh issue of Militant Leadership Monitor with biographies of South Sudanese leader Salva Kiir by Andrew McGregor (an especially timely report before the January 9th independence referendum), the Shining Path’s Comrade Artemio by me, Lashkar-e-Taiba’s Azam Cheema by Animesh Roul, and Saudi AQAP explosives fabricator Ibrahim Asiri by Murad Batal al-Shishani.

Additionally, if anyone would be interested in helping me financially in traveling to South Sudan for the independence referendum in January, please contact me.-Derek

New York- While I am in total go mode getting ready to launch my new publication, Militant Leadership Monitor, from the Jamestown Foundation, I want to quickly plug a couple of friend’s projects. Jen Marlowe is still hard at work traipsing around South Sudan, first on the Huffington Post, and now on PBS’s World Focus site with a story titled “In South Sudan, schools still function under trees“ about the difficulties of building a basic school facility (I suppose as ostensibly simple task in other places) in Warrap State, a previously non-existent political entity that was created under the Comprehensive Peace Agreement where the GoSS is to build it’s first oil refinery.

Belén Fernandez is back reporting on the ongoing political crisis in Tegucigalpa where she has been working for Counterpunch and is getting ready to release her book Coffee with Hezbollah, slated for wider release in March, about her and her friend Amelia’s post-war 2006 trip to South Lebanon. I’ll be reviewing it here on TWD when it comes out.

New York- My friend Jen Marlowe heads a grass roots development project in South Sudan called Rebuilding Hope that seeks to bring education, health care, and wells for clean, safe drinking water to remote villages in the region.  Jen also had a post on the Huffington Post last week entitled “South Sudan: Progress and Pessimism” which details both change brought by the relative calm of the North-South Comprehensive Peace Agreement which has just passed the five year mark, and fear on the horizon in regard to the upcoming elections in April and the 2011 referendum that could lead to southern secession and further instability.

Jen’s film Rebuilding Hope: Sudan’s Lost Boys Return Home can be bought from Cinema Libre Studios for $19.95 plus $5 shipping. Order your copy.

“Rebuilding Hope is a riveting and moving portrait…Jen Marlowe provides an essential, human window into the fragility of Sudan’s southern peace.” Leslie Lefkow, Senior Researcher, Human Rights Watch