Sierra Leone

Can monsters be deterred? Or are the people who commit the most unthinkable crimes against humanity — mass murder, torture, genocide — so hell-bent on evil that the normal considerations of common criminals, such as fear of being caught, don't apply? If...

There are a couple of DVD versions of "Blood Diamond" hitting shelves this week. If you're at all interested in the real-life situation the movie dramatizes, lay down the extra six bucks for the two-disc special edition. The single-disc set will get...

Liberia offers an intense example of how a failed state needed more than money--more vigilance, more planning, more sharp-eyed justice--to recover from devastating civil war. Even in peace, it remains prey to corruption, deceptions, politicians seeking...

Leonardo DiCaprio, who next appears in Martin Scorsese's "The Departed," is thankfully still with us after suffering an injury on the set of his latest film. The actor suffered an minor leg injury while filming "The Blood Diamond" in Mozambique on...

Filled with angry indictments and images of horrific violence, Philippe Diaz's "The Empire in Africa" is a nerve-jangling account of the civil war that ravaged Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2002. It is also, from the title onward, a blunt and sometimes...

An ambitious film that can be viewed as either half empty or half full, "Blood Diamond" attempts something difficult and problematic. It can be pulled apart or appreciated, depending on your mood, but it should be recognized that movies like this have...

Primary Sources Log of the Ships Africa, Good Hope, and the Fox, 1757-1758, unpublished manuscript, Connecticut State Library. Newspaper and document collections at the New London Colony Historical Society, the Middlesex County Historical Society, the...

With this work, I hope to honor the generous assistance of Robert P. Forbes at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University; Joseph Opala of James Madison University; Mark Jones at the Connecticut...

The terrorist network led by Osama bin Laden has reaped millions of dollars in the past three years from the illicit sale of diamonds mined by rebels in Sierra Leone, according to U.S. and European intelligence officials and two sources with direct...

When Pedro da Cintra sailed from Portugal down the West Coast of Africa in 1462 he spotted a promontory that some say looks like the shoulders of a lion at rest and called it Serra Lyoa- Lion Mountain. The people who lived in the region around the...

"You are an idiot," the U.S. ambassador told Joseph Opala. Then 25 years old and finishing up a Peace Corps stint working with rice farmers in Sierra Leone, Opala had a degree in anthropology and no interest in viewing the 18th century ruins of a slave...

Gould piloted the Africa from New London to the Cape Verde Islands off the African coast in about 50 days, looping across the Atlantic in a slightly downward curve and working his way from "fresh gales with snow" to "fresh breises and hazey" off the...