News

By Mustapha Sesay

The Freetown City Council (FCC) has disclosed that it is owed over Le11billion in tax arrears.

The Council is threatening to take drastic action against property owners within the municipality who are refusing to pay property tax.

By Hassan Ibrahim Conteh

Advocacy Network (KAN) on Tuesday commenced two-day leadership training for youths and child activists in the Western Area.

The training, being held at the conference hall of the child protection organization Don Bosco Fambul, in Freetown, is geared towards building confidence in public speaking and providing advocacy skills among children and youths in the country. The participants will be trained on various skills on how to develop annual work plans, budget and public etiquette.

By Septimus Senessie in Kono

Burnt-out houses are still visible in Koidu, the headquarter town of the diamond-rich Kono District in, east of the country.

Observers, researchers and academics have said that the Sierra Leone civil war was fuelled by diamonds, hence the term ‘Blood Diamond’, which informed the Hollywood blockbuster of the same name. The title refers to blood diamonds, which were diamonds mined in war zones and sold to finance conflicts, and thereby profit warlords and diamond companies across the world.

The Sierra Leone country director of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), Saffea Senessie has received the Sarlo Foundation Distinguished Humanitarian Service Awards for his “outstanding work” during the recent Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone.

The awards were established by the IRC global body in 2001 to honour IRC field workers and are given to those IRC staff whose “extraordinary dedication, sacrifice and achievement in serving the displaced and other victims of oppression and violent conflict have distinguished themselves and the IRC.”

By Mohamed T Massaquoi 

Momoh Kamara was 14 years’ old when the civil war broke out in 1991, east of the country. He had just sat to the Selective Entrance Examination and was waiting for the result when the fighting reached his town of Zimmi in the Zimmi Makpele chiefdom.

“My parents and some other people supporting me were now preparing for my junior secondary school when the war finally interrupted,” Kamara, now 39, and a commercial motor cyclist in Zimmi Makpele, recalls.

By Mustapha Sesay

Ten US Peace Corps Volunteers have arrived in Sierra Leone on Wednesday, marking the return of the US volunteers into the country.

The US Peace Corps mission was scared away by the Ebola outbreak and it temporarily suspended the programme.

In a press statement issued on Wednesday by the Chargé d'Affaires office of the U.S. Mission in Freetown, Laurie Meininger welcomed the ten Peace Corps Volunteers to the country.

By Kemo Cham

Sierra Leone was declared free-of the Ebola virus transmission for the second time last week after 42 days of countdown.

But unlike the first Ebola-free declaration at the end of last year, this time there was less buoyancy in the celebrations on March 17.The Ministry of Health and Sanitation (MoHS) and the World Health Organisaion (WHO) used the occasion to warnof a possible resurgence of the virus that has plagued the West Africa region for the last over two years.