The News Review:

- Fighting genital mutilation in Sierra Leone: activists in West Africa…
- Fallacies of Zubairu Wai: Ignorance!
- Children at War.(Book Review)
- Public health, ethics, and equity.

Fighting genital mutilation in Sierra Leone: activists in West Africa…
Free with registration – Bulletin of the World Health Organizatio… – AccessMyLibrary.com – Nov 1, 2005
–> COPYRIGHT 2005 World Health Organization Rugiatu Turay still remembers the pain she felt the day she and four of her sisters were sent to Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, on the pretext of visiting their aunt. “They reed a crude penknife, it was so painful I bled excessively for two days and fainted when I wanted to walk,” Turay said, describing how at the age of 11 she was subjected to female genital mutilation. Afterwards the scar itched and got infected. As a result she developed severe menstrual pains, blood clots and a cyst, she said. When Turay heard her younger sisters were due to undergo genital mutilation too she tried, in vain, to intervene.

Fallacies of Zubairu Wai: Ignorance!
Free with registration – Asia Africa Intelligence Wire – AccessMyLibrary.com – Nov 1, 2005
(From Concord Times (Sierra Leone) – AAGM) Byline: Gbondima Gbondo Writing in his homecoming write-up titled "Sierra Leone between Now and 2007: A Personal Reflection" Zabairu Wai made a very interesting reading in not an unfamiliar way. The Wai piece was couched in the usual negative propaganda arm-chair critics always paint the SLPP with, whilst most of its content really not evidenced by facts. Travel Wai could have returned to Sierra Leone peacefully and remained unnoticed except say by his immediate social circle had he not mistaken to have decided to go ballistic writing in one the local tabloids on October 26th, 2005. Wai has traveled a long way from Fourah Bay College where Student Union politicians always bask in the phantasmagoria of their unexperimented thoughts. Ideally, they always see themselves as the panacea of society, but they end up being sad at the reality on the ground upon graduation. Privileged Few For Zubairu Wai to be cautioned by his beloved mother not to drink from the running taps but bottled water bespeaks of how Wai belongs to the "privileged few" he is trying to decry. By all indications Wai is not an ordinary Sierra Leonean in the strictest sense of the word – except that he has an excessive hatred for the elite.

Children at War.(Book Review)
Free with registration – McGill Law Journal – AccessMyLibrary.com – Nov 1, 2005
Singer explains that historically well-known instances of the use of child soldiers, from ancient times to the US civil war and the Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth), are exceptions to the millennia-old prohibition on children as combatants. (4) More recently, however, approximately three-quarters of the armed conflicts around the world have involved armed children, some as young as six years old. (5) One of the most notable is Sierra Leone, where up to 80 per cent of all fighters in the Revolutionary United Front (“RUF”) are alleged to have been between seven and fourteen years old. (6) Rebel militias, paramilitaries, terrorist cells and even some state armies have opted to arm children in conflicts in Columbia, Lebanon, Liberia, Kashmir, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, and elsewhere. Singer provides a catalogue of many of the major armed groups in various regions of the world that have resorted to child soldiers to achieve their ends: up to 60 per cent of non-state armed groups are said to use child soldiers, and up to fifty states have recruited child soldiers in violation of international and domestic law. (7) The existence of girl soldiers and their sexual abuse as “soldiers’ wives”, including the atrocities that take place after their inevitable pregnancy, is a particularly troubling problem canvassed in this book. (8) Three main causal factors are provided for the proliferation of child soldiers.

Public health, ethics, and equity.
Free with registration – Bulletin of the World Health Organizatio… – AccessMyLibrary.com – Nov 1, 2005
In Sweden, the under-5 mortality rate is 3 per 1000, while in Sierra Leone it is almost 300 per 1000. In Austria, Denmark, Spain, and Sweden, the maternal mortality rate is less than 6 per 100 000. But in Afghanistan, Chad, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone, the rate is greater than 1000 per 100 000. The situation is actually worse than these figures suggest because national averages tend to mask inequalities within a country, Within particular countries, health prospects vary significantly and systematically with race, ethnic group, gender, region, and.