Ok, some of you may already have seen this , but if not, then here's another version, off CNN / Reuters - more after the article:

JUBA, Sudan (Reuters) -- Unknown gunmen killed at least 38 civilians in a string of attacks in southern Sudan, regional government officials said on Thursday.

The south is hosting stop-start peace talks between neighboring Uganda's government and Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels who have long been accused of committing atrocities against villagers in lawless parts of the remote region.

Uganda's military said it suspected the LRA was behind Wednesday's killings, but the rebels denied it.

Southern Sudan's Interior Minister Paul Mayom Akec told a news conference armed men killed 38 people, including women and children, and burned cars in several attacks on roads between the southern capital Juba and the eastern banks of the Nile.

"It is not my immediate desire to talk about the identity of the attackers ... no matter whoever they can be, in order for us not to jeopardize the ongoing peace talks," Akec said.

South Sudanese Major-General Wilson Deng Kuoirot, who heads the talks' independent monitoring team, said 41 people had been killed in ambushes witnesses told him were carried out by young, dreadlocked men and women in "shabby-looking" fatigues.

"Our forces are doing everything possible to find out who is behind these killings," he told Reuters. The victims were mostly shot in the head and left in their charred vehicles, he said.

A Ugandan military spokesman in Kampala, Major Felix Kulayigye, said he suspected the LRA launched the attacks.

"We have known all along the people we are dealing with here are simply thugs. Now the world can see," he said by telephone.

Negotiations have stalled in recent days as both Uganda's military and the LRA accused each other of breaking a landmark truce signed in August that aimed to end 20 years of war.

An LRA spokesman in Juba, Godfrey Ayoo, denied they were behind the attacks: "We are not the ones who did it," he said.

U.N. confirms ambushes
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni was due in Juba this weekend to meet mediators, whose efforts had been hailed as the best chance of ending one of Africa's longest conflicts.

Two decades of fighting have killed tens of thousands and uprooted nearly 2 million more in northern Uganda.

The LRA, which was once supported by the Khartoum government as a proxy force against its own rebels, set up bases in the south in the mid-1990s, from where they staged raids into northern Uganda and terrorized local Sudanese communities.

The Juba talks -- the latest in many attempts to end the LRA insurgency -- were plagued from the start by profound mistrust on both sides, which spiked earlier this week with the military and rebels both accusing the other of attacks.

A U.N. spokeswoman in Khartoum confirmed ambushes on two roads around Juba on Wednesday, but had no immediate information about casualties. A U.N. bulletin said all road movement was suspended around Juba for the next 48 hours.

Alright, so here's the deal. The representatives of the LRA and the Ugandan Govt. have been meeting for peace talks in Juba, for the few months. The Govt. of SOuth Sudan has been heading up the mediation team. They've been meeting about 100m from where I go for pizza some nights. The ostensible aim of the talks is to bring the LRA, who have been "fighting their war" (read committing atrocities, killing innocents, and "conscripting" child soldier) for the past 20-odd years. The talks were going well, but slowly, up until about 2 weeks ago. The mediators had managed to get the LRA to start coming out of the bush and meeting at two rally point - one near the border to the Democratic Republic of Congo, one near the Ugandan border, both places inside South Sudan. Then it all went pear shaped. The LRA decided to move a couple of miles away from the rally points, claiming the water sources were better elsewhere. Then they decided the UPDF (Ugandan army) were slowly surrounding them and just waiting to attack (not impossible, but neither has there been any evidence), and disappeared off into the bush again. Talks are slow, to say the least.

Now, just during the last week, come the above mentioned attacks. I haven't been able to confirm the numbers of dead, but people seem to agree they are on the high side. Tensions have been high here for the last few days, as some of the attacks took place within kilometers of Juba. The LRA have been denying involvement, and accusations have been flung around by pretty much everyone. Couple that with Museveni (president of Uganda) bringing 4 helicopter gunships in for "close protection", and shutting down the airport and most of the city, on Saturday, and you have an awful lot of tension in the air. Keep in mind that the late John Garang died when Museveni's helicopter inexplicably crashed, delivering Garang to Juba from meetings in Uganda. This sparked riots in both Khartoum and Juba, as well as the outlying areas of South Sudan (read: the rest of the d**n region...), killing a number of people. This hasn't been forgotten by anyone, and there are those (Museveni) who are very interested in finding a better reason for the crash than: "Uhm... we don't really know, but maybe the pilots were too afraid of Pres. M. to refuse the flight despite knowing the weather was bad..." Anyway, I digress from the matter at hand, the attacks: Yesterday, 16 members of something called the JIU - Joint Integrated Unit (an attempt to further the peace agreement between North and South by creating military units comprised of both SPLA(south) and SAF(north) troops) were arrested for impersonating LRA and staging the ambushes/attacks. Now, there could be many reasons for this, none of which are good. The good news for the LRA is that so far they seem to be off the hook for this particular round of deaths. That just leave them with 10' of thousands of deaths, and 100's of thousands of internally displaced Ugandans living in camp all over Northern Uganda...

The upshot of this all is : Don't worry. Juba town is safe and stable. There haven't been any attacks in the city, and there won't be. I am taking good care of myself, and will be on the first plane out of here, if stuff starts to get hectic. For right now, the plan is that I'll be here until the beginning of December.

Hopefully I'll go to South Africa and visit my Aunt, Uncle, cousin, and god-daughter for a few days, before transiting through Denmark. I fly out of Nairobi on the 19th, land in Copenhagen on the morning of the 20th, and then turn around and fly to Maine on the 22nd. That means I am transitioning from around 40-45 degrees of heat to probably negative 20 degrees... in less than a week. My system is going to kill me, I'm sure.

However, I won't have a lot of time in Denmark to freeze. I have 2 days in which to meet with my employer and hand over all my stuff, collect all my cold weather gear from my parents house, go to an application interview for the MBA I'll hopefully be starting in January, see some family and friends, and then fly out. For those of you I don't manage to see - I'll be back in DK on a more permanent basis (like 21 months permanent...) on the 29th of December.

That is all for now. I'll be back with more, as the situation develops.

Reporting Live from Juba, this is JubaJoe - back to you in the studio, Tom.