The News Review:

- Sierra Leone: Country Looks to New Bourse
- A Slave’s Great Journey
- The War Against African Women
- In Sierra Leone, Unprecedented!! Celtel to take Internet Use Nationwid…

Sierra Leone: Country Looks to New Bourse
AllAfrica.com – Feb 26, 2008
The journalists made the appeal at the end of a three-day workshop on budget and financial reporting convened by the Commonwealth Secretariat and the Centre for Policy and Development. Some 20 journalists attended the workshop held February 20-22 in the Sierra Leone Capital Free Town. GA_googleFillSlot(”AllAfrica_Story_Inset”); At the end of the workshop, the journalists formed an association and pledged to promote and improve the quality of business and financial reporting in Sierra Leone. They highlighted the need for more training opportunities as a way of encouraging more journalists to specialise in business and financial reporting – which is currently non-existent in Sierra Leone.

A Slave’s Great Journey
Washington Post – Feb 26, 2008
That turbulent exodus was tracked in James Walker’s scholarly history, "The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783-1870. " Following Walker, Hill shows that the refugees’ suffering and losses in Nova Scotia constantly reminded them that they may have come "up from slavery" but could not easily be rid of it. When the Sierra Leone Company — a philanthropic, business-oriented group of British abolitionists — come looking for "adventurers" to settle in their new colony in West Africa, Aminata assists in moving more than a thousand Nova Scotians to Sierra Leone and aids the abolitionist cause by revealing the realities of slavery to the British public. Horrified to discover that the traffic in slaves continues with the compliance of African people, she challenges the wrongdoing at every turn. Earlier this year, Simi Bedford also wrestled with the fate of early Sierra Leoneans in her novel "Not With Silver. " It is not surprising that at this time, when the bicentennial of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade is being commemorated and Sierra Leone has been so much in the news, that two comparable novels should draw on the same subject matter. Nor was I surprised, reading these chapters set in my ancestral home of Sierra Leone, to find myself wishing as Aminata does: "This story.

The War Against African Women
AlterNet – Feb 26, 2008
The War against WomenA Dispatch from the West African FrontBy Ann JonesKailahun, Sierra Leone — Greetings from a war zone that’s not Iraq. And not Afghanistan either. I’m checking in from West Africa, where I’ve been working with women in three neighboring countries, all recently torn apart by civil wars: Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d’Ivoire. The Iraq debacle has monopolized attention and obscured these “lesser” wars — now officially “over” — but millions of West African women are struggling to recover. For them, the war isn’t really over at all, not by a long shot…
Some men are making mud bricks and building huts to replace the spacious houses of embossed concrete and tile that once graced towns and villages throughout the region. Officially, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d’Ivoire are now designated “post-conflict zones,” but they are so fractured, so traumatized, and — especially in the cases of Liberia and Sierra Leone — so devastated and impoverished that they cannot be said to be securely at peace either. Sierra Leone has replaced Afghanistan as the poorest country on the planet and, like Afghanistan, it is a nation of widows. Visit one of these countries and you’ll see for yourself that, at best, real peace will take a long, slow time to come. The destruction in Sierra Leone’s Kailahun District, for instance, is as shocking as anything I ever saw in the devastated Afghan capital, Kabul. UN officials and an array of international aid organizations like to use the term “post-conflict” for such places in such moments. It sounds vaguely hopeful, even if it designates a desperate place embarked on a difficult period of “recovery” that may or may not be recognizable after a decade or two, or even a generation or two, as peace.

In Sierra Leone, Unprecedented!! Celtel to take Internet Use Nationwid…
Awareness Times – Feb 26, 2008
is now all set to take Sierra Leone to the next level of Information Technology with their planned launch of a nationwide Access Mobile Internet (GPRS) service. This unprecedented service will now take the Internet and full World Wide Web Browsing to every nook and cranny of Sierra Leone Celtel covers.