William Balfour was with another Woman during Jennifer Hudson's Relatives Murder

The mother of William Balfour the "person of interest" in the slayings three of Jennifer Hudson's family members insisted Monday night on CNN that her son was not involved in the crime.

"No means did my son do this," Michele Davis-Balfour said on CNN's "Nancy Grace."

She said that her son, William Balfour, 27, was with a girlfriend Friday when the bodies of Jason Hudson and Darnell Donerson, Hudson's brother and mother, were discovered shot to death in their South Side Chicago home.

"My son's alibi was [he was] with one of his girlfriends, OK?" Davis-Balfour said. When Grace asked which girlfriend he was with Friday, the mother said her son was with a woman named Diana on Friday night, and with a woman named Kate on Saturday morning.

Davis-Balfour said that her son is separated from Julia Hudson, Jennifer Hudson's sister. It was Julia Hudson who first discovered her mother's body, police said. Authorities were then notified, and they arrived at the home and found Jason Hudson's body.

At that time, a massive search began for Julian King, who is Julia Hudson's 7-year-old son and Balfour's stepson. That hunt ended Monday when the boy's body was found by police in an abandoned white Chevrolet Suburban SUV on the West Side of Chicago.

A Tuesday autopsy report revealed Julian had been shot multiple times, but the Cook County medical examiner's report did not say when the child died and where his wounds were.

William Balfour was detained for questioning in connection with the killings, a police representative said. Julian was not with Balfour when he was detained, officials said.

Balfour is now in state custody for a parole violation. He spent nearly seven years in prison for attempted murder, carjacking and possession of a stolen vehicle and was released in May of this year. Police have so far refused to discuss precisely how he violated parole.

Balfour was also arrested last June for drug possession, but officials said there was not enough evidence to constitute a parole violation. Chicago news station WLS is reporting that cocaine was found in Balfour's car.

Authorities also said that Balfour's parole violation was of a "technical" nature, which could range from a curfew violation to missing an appointment with a parole officer. WLS reported that Balfour missed an appointment with his parole agent Friday. The agent phoned Balfour, who told the agent that he was baby-sitting, the station said.

Balfour violated his parole by possessing a weapon and by failing to attend an anger management class and a substance abuse program, according to WLS.

On Monday, Davis-Balfour spoke about the nature of her son's relationship with Julia Hudson.

On Julia Hudson's MySpace page Monday afternoon, she wrote: "Now because I chose to do what was natural to me and love someone, it cost me my beautiful family, my wonderful beautiful loving supporting mother, Darnell, my true blue baby brother, Jason, I love u big baby ... and last but never not least, my only son, Julian."

Davis-Balfour disputed that her son and Julia Hudson had a rocky relationship. Grace asked if the two were "romantically" involved, and Balfour answered that they were. Julia Hudson and her son were together Thursday night after she invited Balfour to celebrate her birthday by having cake.

"People don't understand what's going on. My son loved her. She loved him," Davis-Balfour said. "...Regardless to whatever anyone says, my son still loved Julia."

Davis-Balfour expressed anger that her son's picture has been splashed on media reports since Friday, though reports have been careful to point out that police have not named him as a suspect in the killings.

"You all have put my son's face on worldwide news like he's -- like he's Attila the Hun," Davis-Balfour said. "You all are not saying that my son obtained his GED while he was in the correctional facility. You all are not saying that my son took up horticulture while he was there. William is a very smart and intelligent young man."

The mother also defended her son's criminal past, including his carjacking and attempted murder charges.

"No, he has never done bodily harm to no one. He has never been the type of kid that you could say was a violent type," she said.

"My son -- it was still in the man's car, right? The man saw my son starting his car. He ran outside, jumped on top of his own vehicle.

"This is why they said vehicle hijacking, because my son jumped -- the man jumped on top of the car while my son was stealing it, right? He stuck his hand inside the driver's side and started choking my son. So my son kept driving even more, took the owner of the vehicle on a high-speed ..." Davis-Balfour said.

Authorities said they are confident they will soon catch the killer.

"I suspect that we'll have some evidence that will link us to the killer," Chicago Police Superintendent Jody Weis said Tuesday.

Police are collecting evidence from the SUV and reviewing surveillance tapes from all over the city as the investigation continues, Weis told reporters.

"There's a lot of work to be done. We'll be sure we go through this thoroughly," Weis said. Asked about possible motives, Weis replied, "We don't know what the motive really was at this time. But, clearly, you have people who do know each other, so it wasn't a case of a stranger-type homicide."

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Why Congolese Attack UN Peacekeepers

Alex Perry

There can be no greater indictment of a peacekeeping mission than when it is attacked by the people it was sent to protect. But that is what's happening to the U.N.'s biggest peacekeeping mission, the 17,000 blue helmets in the Democratic Republic of Congo (D.R.C.) known by the French acronym MONUC. On Monday, one person died when hundreds of protesters attacked the mission in the eastern Congolese city of Goma, on the border with Rwanda. The protesters say the U.N. is not doing enough to protect them from an advancing rebel army. Several U.N. compounds in the city were attacked, said U.N. spokeswoman Sylvie van den Wildenberg, who adds that at one location, MONUC soldiers fired into the air to disperse the demonstrators. It was unclear whether the dead civilian was killed by a rock thrown by a protester or a bullet, she said.

Hundreds of thousands of Congolese have fled renewed fighting in the eastern part of the country in the past few weeks. Government forces are pitted against rebel groups that have operated in the area since crossing the border from neighboring Rwanda at the end of the genocide there in 1994. In some ways — such as how the conflict has sucked in armies from across Africa and how it has often descended into a fight over the region's plentiful natural resources — the war in Congo is immeasurably more complicated than the one in Rwanda. But in other ways, it's a direct sequel. The rebels now advancing on Goma, for instance, are led by General Laurent Nkunda, an ethnic Tutsi fighting remnant Rwandan Hutu militias.

In all, according to humanitarian NGO the International Rescue Committee, the war in Congo — which escalated into a full-scale civil war in 1998 that lasted until 2003, and still erupts periodically, as now — has killed 5.4 million people, mostly through hunger and disease.

The moral imperative for an international response is clear. It's set out in the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), a doctrine adopted by the U.N. World Summit in 2005 — the largest gathering of world leaders in history — that made clear that a nation forfeits its right to sovereignty if it unleashes or is unable to prevent massive human-rights abuses on its soil. R2P was born from the collective shame over global inaction during atrocities in places such as Cambodia, Rwanda and Srebrenica. The most striking current example of R2P in effect is in Darfur, where the U.N. has agreed to deploy 26,000 peacekeepers to end genocide. It is a mission that, if fully staffed, would supercede that in the D.R.C. as the biggest in the world. "The concept is focused on mass atrocity crimes," says Gareth Evans, who heads global-conflict watchdog the International Crisis Group and who launched a book, Responsibility to Protect, in Washington on Tuesday. "The whole point is to develop an international reflex response that goes, 'Of course we have to do something. Let's figure out what.' "

With such high-minded intervention, why have the people of Goma turned on their would-be protectors? Ironically, that may have to do with how aggressively MONUC has pursued its task. MONUC was established in 1999 and has an annual budget of more than $1.1 billion. Its robust mission statement includes "forcibly implementing" a cease-fire and "using all means deemed necessary" to protect civilians and improve security. In that role, it has shown an eagerness to fight, even using helicopter gunships; it has taken sides with the government; and it has pursued and arrested war criminals wanted by the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Many U.N. insiders regard MONUC almost as a rogue operation, employing the kind of methods normally used by the U.S. in Iraq and inappropriate to U.N. peacekeepers.

Others regard MONUC's willingness to get off the fence and fight as its great strength. But inevitably, says Alex de Waal, program director at New York's Social Science Research Council and author of several books on Africa, "when you move to coercive peacekeeping, you're no longer neutral. You cannot expect to be treated above and beyond the conflict. You are part of it." Hence MONUC has been beset by accusations of bias from all sides, many with some merit. Now, diminished in authority, it finds itself dodging rocks from the very people on whose behalf it took up the responsibility to protect.

On the other end of the scale is the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Darfur. It has strictly observed the peacekeeping tenets on neutrality, limiting itself mostly to its bases and never opening fire unless directly fired upon. In other words, says de Waal, it has been ineffectual, "a liability. Ten thousand soldiers just sitting in their bases." Even that hasn't saved them, however. Last October in the camp of Haskanita, 10 African Union peacekeepers — seven Nigerian, two Batswana and a Senegalese — were killed by a group of Darfur rebels, again part of the community whom the peacekeepers had been sent to protect. A war-crimes indictment against the rebels who perpetrated and led that attack is expected any day.

Peacekeeping is tricky, no doubt. De Waal is among those who have questioned whether we might have set our sights too high, and whether, while peacekeeping might work in small countries like Sierra Leone or East Timor or Kosovo, there may not be the resources to make it work for vast nations like the D.R.C. or Sudan. Evans, a former Australian Foreign Minister, is among those who believe that just because something is difficult, "it doesn't mean you abandon it." Says Evans: "In Congo, the problem is insufficient resources. Maybe MONUC has to be reinforced and upgraded. In Darfur, you have a lackluster result, yes, but you had to have peacekeepers with a mandate that was accepted by the government. A full-bore invasion [would have had] catastrophic results." Evans is also keen to highlight "unheralded, unacclaimed" R2P successes like in Kenya this year and in Burundi in the early years of the decad — both cases in which strong diplomatic intervention prevented ethnic clashes from descending into wider ethnic wars.

But then there's Somalia. Somalia is the world's biggest humanitarian crisis, in which 3.5 million people — more than one-third of the population — are now on the brink of starvation after 17 years of civil war. If we have a responsibility to protect anywhere, surely Somalia would be top of the list. But Somalia has attracted no offers of help from the West, and only a few thousand African Union troops. It is not as if the world has no interest in what happens in Somalia; anarchy has fostered not only a starvation catastrophe and international piracy, but also Africa's most dangerous Islamists, who have bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. And that's the problem: the dangers of Somalia override any noble notion about saving others. Evans says the "main point" of his book is to "clear away the debris and skepticism about the scope and limits of R2P." Here's hoping his writing is exceptional.

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Pakistan's 6.4 Earthquake Kills at Least 200 People

A powerful earthquake has killed at least 200 people and destroyed hundreds of homes in south-west Pakistan, officials said today.

The death toll from the quake was expected to rise as reports arrived from remote areas of the affected Baluchistan province, which borders Afghanistan.

It struck two hours before dawn and had a preliminary magnitude of 6.4, the US Geological Survey reported.

It was 10 miles (15km) below the surface, and the Meteorological Department said there were two tremors, the second bigger than the first.

The worst-hit area appeared to be Ziarat, where hundreds of houses in five villages, mostly made of mud and timber, were destroyed.

The local mayor, Dilawar Khan Kakar, said hundreds of people had been injured and 15,000 left homeless. Some homes were buried in a landslide triggered by the quake.

Rescuers have pulled 160 bodies from the rubble in the Zaiarat valley area, one of Baluchistan's most popular tourist spots, he told Reuters.

"There is great destruction. Not a single house is intact," he said in an interview with Express News television.

"I would like to appeal to the whole world for help. We need food, we need medicine. People need warm clothes, blankets, because it is cold here."

Emergency workers were trying to reach places high in the mountains above the valley, where many people are believed to be trapped under debris.

Sohail-ur-Rehman, another senior official, said authorities were attempting to bury the dead as quickly as possible to prevent outbreaks of disease.

"Graves are being dug with excavators ... we can't keep dead bodies in the open," he told Reuters.

Farooq Ahmed Khan, the head of a national disaster management team, told Reuters that around 300 rescue workers had reached Ziarat, which has a population of 50,000, and tents, blankets and clothing were being flown in.

An Associated Press reporter said he had seen the bodies of 17 people who had been killed in one collapsed house and 12 who had died in another.

Survivors sat in the open, with little more than the clothes in which they had been sleeping.

In nearby Kawas, dozens of dead and injured were brought to a hospital. Mohammed Irfan, a doctor, said the hospital was unable to cope.

With roads blocked by landslides, officials said the army was airlifting troops and medical teams to villages in the quake zone. A field hospital and thousands of tents and blankets were also being brought to the area.

Najam Maghlani, a resident of Quetta, the provincial capital, told the BBC the quake had been "the worst 40 seconds of my life".

"It was a very strong earthquake," he said. "After the first jolt, which was not very strong, there was another big one.

"When I came out, I saw very strange things. It was like there was lightning all around the city. There was no electricity, but still there was light in the sky.

"The trees were jolting and shaking. It was just like a thunderstorm."

Large parts of south Asia are seismically active because a tectonic plate known as the Indian plate is pushing north into the Eurasian plate.

Today's quake was the deadliest since a 7.6-magnitude quake devastated Kashmir and northern Pakistan in October 2005, killing around 80,000 people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless.

Officials said the area affected today, 400 miles from the capital, Islamabad, was much less densely populated.

In 1935, about 30,000 people were killed and Quetta was largely destroyed by a severe earthquake.

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15 Percent of Veterans Suffer Sexual Trauma

New research from the Veterans Administration finds that roughly 15 percent of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans seeking treatment from the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department have suffered sexual trauma ranging from harassment to rape.

These veterans were 1.5 times more likely than other veterans to need mental health services, the VA researchers wrote in their report.

"We are, in fact, detecting men and women who seem to have a significant need for mental health services," said Rachel Kimerling of the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System, in an interview with Reuters.

Most affected veterans were women, with more than one in seven of those seeking health services also reporting sexual trauma. Slightly less than 1 percent of male veterans seeking medical care reported military sexual trauma.

The research was presented at a meeting of the American Public Health Association in San Diego.

The term "military sexual trauma" includes everything from outright rape to coerced sex or threatening and unwelcome sexual advances, Kimerling said, adding that for her purposes it was not necessary to determine what kind of sexual trauma occurred. The study did examine when such events occurred, and did not include active-duty military since VA services are only available to discharged veterans.

"If you think about military service where you are living and working so closely with the same people, that even if it is not sexual assault ... it is possible that severe sexual harassment is just as traumatic," she said.

A VA spokeswoman said about 40 percent of all discharged veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan have sought some form of medical care from the VA.

The agency has a universal screening program for military sexual trauma.

"There are dedicated health care services for military sexual trauma at every VA facility across the nation," she said, adding that many veterans may be unaware that they can be helped.

Kimerling said sexual trauma could sometimes lead to anxiety, depression, substance abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder.

"We know there are effective, evidence-based treatments for them that are used in VA," she said.

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