Sierra Leone

UNITED NATIONS - The Security Council increased the number of soldiers allowed in the U.N. peacekeeping force in Sierra Leone by 2,000 yesterday and is likely to expand the force by several thousand more in the next week or two. The Sierra Leone mission, originally limited to 11,000 soldiers by the council, is the largest U.N. peacekeeping operation. The increase was required after reinforcements from Bangladesh, Jordan and India arrived this week Those troops were expected to push the force above the limit set in February, before the United Nations took over peacekeeping in Sierra Leone from a regional contingent led by Nigeria.

After going on yearly mission trips dating back to the mid-1990s, four friends decided they wanted to do more. So in 2007, they began their own nonprofit, Baltimore-based Healing Hands Foundation. They focused on providing surgical care to underprivileged people and have since gone to Ecuador, Sierra Leone, Guatemala, the Philippines and Colombia. "When you do something like that, you get hooked and want to do more to help," said Marco Avila, an engineer born in Ecuador who began volunteering on missions as an interpreter.

MAJ. JOHNNY PAUL KOROMA shattered the 1996 accord ending five years of anarchy in Sierra Leone. On May 25, he deposed the elected president, Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, who fled. Major Koroma's troops are children with assault rifles and rebels who launched civil war in 1991.The coup undoes the progress that the poor country of 4.5 million people in West Africa was finally making. It repudiates the 53-nation Organization of African Unity's (OAU) slow march toward stability and democracy in Africa.

World Hope International, a Christian relief and development nonprofit group, has been providing charitable aid and small loans to farmers and entrepreneurs in Sierra Leone for years. Now the Northern Virginia group wants to go into business with those it aims to help. It has started a for-profit arm to build an industrial park and helped launch a juice plant that would process the West African country's bounty of mangoes and pineapples. World Hope's effort is part of a recalibration of how some nonprofit organizations approach their work — applying the strategies of capitalism to achieve their goals.

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone -- When drunken rebel leaders staggered into a downtown newspaper office recently and slapped around the editor, nobody was surprised. Nobody did anything about it, either, because the attackers could soon be ministers in the country's new government.The Sierra Leone peace accord, signed July 7 but not yet implemented, stipulates that Revolutionary United Front (RUF) warlord Foday Sankoh will become vice president. His officers have been guaranteed four ministerial positions and his troops, many of whom hacked off the limbs of civilians and raped young girls, have been offered amnesty.

The director of Catholic Relief Services operations in war-torn Sierra Leone said yesterday that he hopes to expand help to thousands more of the country's displaced civilians but is hampered by a shaky United Nations peacekeeping force and the persistence of rebel fighters. Jim McLaughlin, director of the Baltimore-based agency's operations in Sierra Leone, was in the United States this week with Sierra Leone program director Baika Sesay and Bishop George Biguzzi, the Roman Catholic leader in rebel-held Makeni, to lobby U.N. officials and the Clinton administration for better protection.

THE CALAMITY in the interior of Guinea is a slaughter of innocents. Civil warfare is invading from Liberia and Sierra Leone. The world community cannot bring aid to refugees of one country without confronting the anarchy of all. The crisis would not wait for the new regime in Washington to name its representative at the United Nations or chief policy-maker for Africa. It faces Secretary of State Colin Powell and President Bush now. Liberia, settled by freed U.S. slaves and modeled on U.S. institutions, sits on the west coast of Africa.

ANARCHY in Sierra Leone is a threat to larger Africa. By taking hundreds of United Nations peacekeeping troops hostage, ragtag rebels supporting Foday Sankoh have undermined the chief tool the world community and African leaders have devised for dispute resolution on the continent. Peacekeepers come in after peace is agreed, to maintain its terms and create confidence. Mr. Sankoh agreed last July to quit insurrection and join the elected government of Ahmad Tejan Kabbah. He just didn't mean it. The troops sent to police the accord, mostly Zambians, were lightly trained and not expecting war. Mr. Sankoh's followers had little difficulty disarming many, stealing their vehicles and mowing down protesting civilians.

NEWS OF THE capture of Sierra Leonean rebel leader Foday Sankoh was cheered last week by most residents of Freetown, the embattled capital of the small West African nation. But the U.S.-brokered peace accord and a United Nations peacekeeping mission there still teeter on the brink of collapse. While Sankoh is in government custody, an estimated 15,000 Revolutionary United Front (RUF) guerrillas still control large parts of the country and remain the single largest threat to peace. The security situation in the diamond-rich country improved somewhat after last week's insertion of 800 British marines, the promised airlift of 1,800 Nigerian troops, and the re-arming of pro-government militias and former Sierra Leonean soldiers.

Sitting shoulder to shoulder in crisp Catholic school uniforms, about 200 East Baltimore children gazed at three young West African visitors who came to thank them yesterday for collecting pennies to help them seek treatment for their war wounds: severed arms and legs. At SS. James and John Catholic Elementary School, pupils exchanged shy smiles with the small delegation from Sierra Leone, a country wracked by a decade-long war in which rebels have fought to gain control of its diamond mines.

Here's the message I'm trying to get out to friends and acquaintances these days: Don't forward any more stupid Internet jokes to my in-box. Don't forward any more videos with the subject line "YOU GOTTA SEE THIS!" that show a frightened deer leaping across six lanes of interstate traffic or a cute 5-year-old landing a 600-pound shark on his dad's fishing boat. Don't forward another "HEALTH ALERT!" about the latest killer staph infection or another "COMPUTER ALERT!" about the latest virus that's going to wipe out my hard drive.

I used to think no one in the whole world hated e-mail more than me, but that turns out to be wrong. Doctors, it seems, really hate e-mail. In fact, a new survey shows only 31 percent of doctors use e-mail to answer questions from patients outside the office. The rest still prefer the time-honored method of having a bored receptionist take your call, then calling you back days later, usually after your symptoms have subsided. According to a recent Associated Press article on the survey, there are lots of reasons doctors don't like e-mail.

INSIDE TODAY WHAT THEY'RE SAYING TODAY'S SUN COLUMNISTS Product of `farm system' Rookie linebacker Antwan Barnes, a fourth-round draft pick from Florida International, looks to be the latest example of a player coming up through the "farm system" on the Ravens' defense. Sports baltimoresun.com/steele A jaw-dropping number What number of killings in a year will engender outrage in Baltimore? The columnist answers. Maryland baltimoresun.com/kane other voices Laura Vozzella on cellist, demolition -- Maryland Rob Kasper on the bounty of basil -- Taste 5 THINGS TO DO TODAY Poetry meeting -- At 7 p.m., check out Poet's Ink, a monthly meeting sponsored by the Maryland State Poetry and Literary Society.

The millions spent on the trial could be spent on the people of Sierra Leone, to support the people who suffered. There are people for whom surviving is really hard. The wounds are in our minds." - MUCTARR JALLOH, 29, who moved to New York after enduring atrocities during the 10-year civil war in his native Sierra Leone, including the amputation of his right hand and ear, on the war crimes trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, accused of arming and controlling rebels who raped, mutilated and enslaved civilians NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE

WASHINGTON -- Nothing concentrates your mind out in the back roads of rural Africa like having a kid from some rebel army hold you up at gunpoint with a large, Russian-made assault rifle. Rory Anderson, a senior Africa policy adviser for World Vision, a Washington-based Christian aid and development organization, knows that experience. It happened to her and a carload of colleagues in 2003 in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, near Uganda's border. "Suddenly I was both frightened and brokenhearted," Ms. Anderson recalled in an interview.

SIERRA LEONE SERENADE The Refugee All-Stars of Sierra Leone, a six-musician group, came together at the Kalia Refugee Camp in Sierra Leone, on the border of Guinea. When rebel forces attacked Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital, thousands of civilians were forced to flee. The group will perform a free outdoor concert of original songs written in exile Sunday at the Kennedy Center in Washington. After the concert there will be a free screening of the documentary The Refugee All-Stars, which chronicles a three-year period in which the band left the refugee camp to go back to Sierra Leone.

WASHINGTON - Amid the destruction and crushed hopes in Sierra Leone, one of the most significant casualties is the credibility of United Nations peacekeepers, who have failed for the fifth time in less than a decade to prevent local hatreds from exploding into butchery. The hundreds of dead in the small west African nation, the kidnapping of 500 U.N. soldiers and the thousands of refugees have again exposed the confusion and weakness that regularly grip the world body in the face of war. "You have 7,000 peacekeepers on the ground in Sierra Leone.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Bob Moran, an American food aid worker with Baltimore-based Catholic Relief Services, described yesterday how he escaped the fighting in Sierra Leone with his 9-year-old son last week.Moran, 49, a program monitoring officer with CRS, was robbed of his Mercedes car and other possessions when intruders forced their way into his house at the height of the clash between rebel forces and troops of the West African intervention force, ECOMOG.His house had become a refuge for about 20 members of his late wife's Sierra Leone family and friends during the fighting.

CHICAGO -- A reporter asked Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf why she had come to America. She responded with five words that open doors, launch jetliners and move motorcades almost everywhere on the planet: "I was invited by Oprah." Of course, it is important to note that Ms. Sirleaf also was drawn by a humanitarian mission. She brought with her Musu Gertee, a 9-year-old Liberian girl who was fitted with a prosthetic replacement for the right arm and hand she lost in a rocket attack three years ago. Oprah Winfrey's staff alerted Ms. Sirleaf's government to Musu after the child was featured last year in a Chicago Tribune report about Liberia's young war victims.

Chimpanzees are supposed to be the "good" apes, cute and funny, the hairy little people depicted in thousands of films and TV shows. But recent news out of western Africa shows they can be brutally fierce. A chimp attacked and killed a Sierra Leone man who was driving Americans to a wildlife refuge last month. Another man lost part of his hand in the attack. Some news reports said a group of up to 20 chimps that had broken out of their enclosures gang-attacked the men, while other stories have pinned responsibility on one animal, possibly a chimp named Bruno, the undisputed alpha male of the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary.