The News Review:

- Business News of Sunday, 27 August 2006
- THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 8-27-06; How Do You Take a Gun Away?
- Imprisoned correspondent among America’s most intrepid writers.

Business News of Sunday, 27 August 2006
ghanaweb.com – Aug 27, 2006
“It is envisaged that this phase of the project would help to establish the structures, which would allow for sustainability of the results of the project and also lead to an improved outlook of the banks on the SME sector”, Dr Boeh-Ocansey said. Mr Baba-Mustafa Marong, National Co-ordinator of the Interface Capacity Building Project of The Gambia, said capacity building and policy environment affected the performance of the SMEs. He said the SMEs needed to be equipped because they had less money to lobby; less in-house expertise; less time by managers for regulatory and policy issues and were also faced with the problem of high cost of searching for information and markets. Mr Marong called on the relevant State and non-State agencies to collaborate to create the needed synergies to make a lasting and positive impact on the growth and development of the SMEs in the West Africa Sub-Region. Mr Sanusi Deen, National Chairman of SLIBA, in a statement read on his behalf, said efforts to “find common solutions to our similar problems is a reflection of a new consciousness that we can find strength in overcoming the challenges that confront us, only through unity of purpose and co-operation”…
It would also train managers and executives of SMEs in the principles, practices and techniques in packaging financial requests to the banks. According to the Director General, the programme would be implemented in four phases, with the pilot project now taking place in Ghana. Two workshops, each in The Gambia and Sierra Leone would be organised, respectively, and would be followed by a sub-regional workshop in Accra with the participants of the two earlier workshops attending. Selected financial service providers and policy makers would, together with participants discuss the findings and recommendations of the country based workshops and chart the way forward. “It is envisaged that this phase of the project would help to establish the structures, which would allow for sustainability of the results of the project and also lead to an improved outlook of the banks on the SME sector”, Dr Boeh-Ocansey said. Mr Baba-Mustafa Marong, National Co-ordinator of the Interface Capacity Building Project of The Gambia, said capacity building and policy environment affected the performance of the SMEs. He said the SMEs needed to be equipped because they had less money to lobby; less in-house expertise; less time by managers for regulatory and policy issues and were also faced with the problem of high cost of searching for information and markets.

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 8-27-06; How Do You Take a Gun Away?
nytimes.com – Aug 27, 2006
Disarmament, like peacekeeping itself, offers a set of time-tested, codified practices that are quite effective under certain political conditions and futile in their absence. In 2000, I visited the dusty town of Port Loko, in Sierra Leone, to see a ”disarmament camp,” a desultory affair in which a knot of surly ex-rebels from a murderous force known as the Revolutionary United Front hung around waiting for $300 payments meant to enable their fresh start as farmers. Most of them still wanted to fight, and many probably returned to the bush. But then their leader was arrested, U. peacekeepers equipped with heavy weapons were deployed in the countryside and the R…
peacekeepers were able to leave. Sierra Leone is now patrolled by its own army and police force, though the country’s desperate poverty and political fragility could tip it back into warfare at any time. Kosovo provides another more-or-less-happy disarmament situation. After a relentless NATO bombing campaign in 1999 compelled Serbian troops to withdraw from the province, a NATO force filled the vacuum. But the home-grown militia, the Kosovo Liberation Army, viewed itself as the true author of the victory and thus was in no mood to surrender its weapons.

Imprisoned correspondent among America’s most intrepid writers.
Free with registration – Chicago Tribune – AccessMyLibrary.com – Aug 27, 2006
–> COPYRIGHT 2006 Chicago Tribune Byline: Evan Osnos and Matthew Walberg CHICAGO _ When Chicago Tribune correspondent Paul Salopek won his second Pulitzer Prize, he was not around to hear the applause in his home newsroom. He was en route that day in April 2001 from Sierra Leone to South Africa _ another journey in a nomadic, illustrious career that has twice netted him the top prize in American journalism and ranked him among the nation’s most intrepid writers. Today, Salopek is in a Sudanese jail, three weeks after pro-government forces detained him while on freelance assignment for National Geographic. Along with his Chadian interpreter and driver, the 44-year-old has been charged with espionage and two other criminal counts, which he and his supporters strenuously deny. To friends, family and colleagues, he is what years of clippings convey: an extraordinary journalist who spends weeks living and laboring alongside the people he chronicles, a man of rare talent and empathy who also has worked as a farm laborer and commercial fisherman. He became a journalist only by accident, when his motorcycle broke down in a New Mexico town whose newspaper happened to be looking for a police reporter.