Word: ruffing
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...merriest Christmas in years for Yelena Bonner, wife of Soviet Dissident Andrei Sakharov. Bonner, who was permitted to leave the U.S.S.R. last month for treatment of heart and eye trouble, gathered around the tree with her mother Ruf, son Alexei, daughter Tatiana, their spouses and her three grandchildren. At the celebration in Newton, Mass., where the families live, there were special gifts brought from the homeland, including fine black caviar and vodka. But the day was tempered with sadness. In two months, Bonner must return to Gorky, where Sakharov remains in "internal exile." While her agreement with Soviet authorities prevents...
...certificates to prove that they do not come from “conflict” mines. Amnesty International, OXFAM, Global Witness and other human rights groups have spent years railing against conflict diamonds because the diamonds are a double dose of misery. In Sierra Leone, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) captures mines and then forces locals to forage through the mud looking for diamonds. After extracting days of slave labor from these hapless workers, the RUF thanks the workers by hacking off their arms with machetes...
...make. They heard on various radio reports that “Americans were coming!” Edgar’s mother, originally from the US, discovered that an US jet carrier boat would be arriving the next day to transport all American citizens to the nearby Guinea. With RUF leaders declaring that no one would be allowed to leave the country because the entire state was on lock down, the Edgar family faced a perilous decision. “I really didn’t want to go”, Edgar recalls. “But deep down...
Edgar, his mother and his brother eventually found a way to come to the US; from their new home in Memphis, Tennessee they watched as the political and economic situation in Sierra Leone remained dire. The RUF signed a peace treaty with the UN-supported government in July of 1999, but broke it in May of 2000 by capturing 500 UN peacekeepers. Then in November of 2000 another peace accord was signed and some of the violence in the western part of the state, including Freetown, subsided. The RUF still controls much of the east, however, including Sierra Leone?...
...business. The violence in much of Freetown has subsided and the UN and neighboring African countries have been proposing various war crimes courts and tribunals to punish the men responsible for 10 years of bloodshed. On May 26th of this year, in a promising reversal of past wrongs, the RUF released 600 children, between the ages of 6 and 10 years. old who had served as ‘soldiers’ in the rebel army. With her sons at Harvard and in boarding school, Edgar’s mother returned to Freetown and to her husband, whom she hasn?...