The International Crisis Group's monthly CrisisWatch service is a useful antidote to woeful media coverage of international affairs. This month's issue highlights several deteriorating situations and issues conflict risk warnings for three areas: Ethiopia/Eritrea, Sudan and Venezuela; but Sudan seems to be the most worrying situation:

"There is a looming humanitarian disaster, following months of ethnic cleansing, in Sudan's western region of Darfur -- notwithstanding the long-awaited signature of peace protocols by Khartoum and rebels in the south of the country: at least 1.2 million people have been displaced by government-supported militias, and hundreds of thousands of lives are at immediate risk in Darfur if determined international action is not taken at once."

ICG's work is not always appreciated by the subjects of their inquiry - after several threats Indonesia has finally gone ahead and expelled ICG analyst Sidney Jones from the country in response to criticisms of the Indonesian intelligence service's failure to deal with Islamic extremist groups operating on their territory.

ICG now have an RSS feed for their reports and analysis (here) - well done to whoever is running the site these days. I am proud to have developed ICG's original online presence in 1997, and I oversaw its development for about 5 years. It is starting to reach maturity and I am pleased that the current developers have retained the best bits of the system and tidied up the geological layers of CMS code that inevitably accumulate over such a period of time when you don't have the budget to rebuild from scratch.

ICG's archive of high quality analysis on conflict situations is worth a search, and they support languages including Arabic, Dari, Indonesian, Albanian and Nepali as well as English, French and Russian.