The man did say "extinguish"

The man in this case being Sudan vice president Ali Osman Taha, who said in the wake of the tentative peace accord ending a civil war between northern and southern regions of the country that "one of the first fruits of peace will be the extinguishing of the conflict in Darfur."

Perhaps truer than we knew. This from the BBC for June 4:

A catastrophe is now unavoidable in Sudan's Darfur region, the United Nations and aid workers say.

Some 300,000 people will starve, even if emergency aid is delivered immediately, according to the head of the United States aid agency.

Speaking to a donor conference seeking to raise funds for relief for the region, Andrew Natsios, head of USAid, added that without immediate aid, "it could be a million."

To make matters worse, the rainy season is about to start,

and roads will turn to quagmire.

Aid agencies say they will have to resort to air drops to get supplies through - a desperate measure which is rarely very successful. ...

Food and water are scarce, disease is spreading, crops have failed and famine now threatens, the UN officials said.

In some refugee camps, the infant mortality rate is already 25 times the international average.

And amid it all, the violence continues, pitting, in the words of Jan Egeland, the UK's Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, "totally defenseless people ... women and children for the most part," against "grown men with Kalashnikov automatic rifles."

Footnote: The US promised $188 million in aid over 18 months. By comparison, we have devoted roughly $160 billion to Iraq and Afghanistan, most all of it for military action. It's easy to get lost in the mills and bills, so let's put it another way: We have spent 850 times as much on Iraq and Afghanistan as we have pledged - not even committed yet, just promised - to ease the greatest humanitarian catastrophe now facing the world.

An apology to anyone who may have checked in within the last couple of hours. I had the article on which I intended to comment here and then absently-mindedly posted it instead of saving it as a draft. So if that's what you found, that's why.