The Los Angeles Times

If Hollywood were to give out grades for how President Obama is doing on issues that matter most to liberal activists here, he would get -- at best -- an incomplete.

"The pace of change has begun to matter to Hollywood," said Joel Flatow,who heads the Recording Industry Assn. of America's West Coast office. And that pace, so far, may not be quick enough on the key issues of Darfur, the environment, stem cell research, gay rights, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Reporting from Johannesburg, South Africa - For most of her recent African tour, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sounded much like any visiting foreign official, male or female. Except in Congo.

When Clinton ignored security advice and flew to Goma, in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, her focus on the region's rape crisis resonated with some of the continent's most powerless people: women.

It wasn't just that she was the first top-level American official to go to the epicenter of one of the world's deadliest wars, nor even the U.S. aid money she promised. It was her reaction to victims' stories of rape -- and the hope that she might do something about it.

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Reporting from El Fasher, Sudan -- What if the conflict many call the "first genocide of the 21st century" weren't one at all? 

In the United States, many see the six-year war in Darfur as a bloody campaign by a Sudanese Arab-dominated government against rebellious "African" tribes in western Sudan. Two consecutive American presidents and several activist groups have defined it as genocide.

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 Human rights activist John Prendergast, a foreign policy advisor to the stars, met with President Obama and his new Sudan special envoy, Air Force Gen. J. Scott Gration, this week to discuss the deteriorating situation in Darfur.

Prendergast, who has advised celebs as varied as NBA star Tracy McGrady and actors Don Cheadle and Angelina Jolie, was welcomed to the White House along with Omer Ismail, a senior advisor to Prendergast's Enough project.

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A three-judge panel found that President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir "intentionally directed attacks against an important part of the civilian population of Darfur, Sudan, murdering, exterminating, raping, torturing and forcibly transferring large numbers of civilians and pillaging their property," ICC spokeswoman Laurence Blairon said.

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As if anyone in the Sudanese capital needed any reminders, an arrest warrant on genocide charges is expected to be issued against Bashir on Wednesday by the International Criminal Court, in a case that threatens to send the country down a path of uncertainty and instability. 

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Much of the world seems to have written Africa's problems off as insolvable, and nowadays, if you ask a lot of Americans to name an ongoing tragedy, they'd probably point first to the U.S. economy.