File photo of farmland in Sierra Leone. (Belen B Massieu/iStock/Getty Images)

Sierra Leone passes new laws to boost landowners’ rights

Reading Time: 2 minutes Freetown | Reuters — Sierra Leone’s parliament on Monday passed two laws that lawyers say will help boost the rights of rural landowners and women against land grabs by big mining and agribusiness firms. The West African country has a history of sometimes deadly conflict between local communities and foreign companies that have cleared huge […] Read more

A colorized electron micrograph from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) shows filamentous Ebola virus particles (in red) budding from the surface of a green monkey kidney epithelial cell. (NIAID photo courtesy U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

Now hunger threat shadows Ebola in West Africa

Reading Time: 4 minutes Freetown/Dakar | Reuters — The threat of hunger is tracking Ebola across affected West African nations as the disease kills farmers and their families, drives workers from the fields and creates food shortages. In the worst-hit states of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, Ebola is ravaging their food-producing regions, preventing planting and harvesting, and disrupting […] Read more