Contemporary Articles Trimester Two and Three

Articles will be updated weekly. Scroll down until you find the desired article:

Article One
Do questions 1, 2, 3, and 7

Al Qaeda
Al Qaeda is an international fundamentalist Islamic terrorist network. In Arabic the phrase means “the base.” Al Qaeda has several goals. First is to drive Americans and other Westerners out of Muslim nations. Second is to destroy the nation of Israel. Third is to overthrow Muslim governments “corrupted” by Western influences. And fourth is to unite all Muslims in a single Islamic nation.
Al Qaeda was formed in 1988 by Osama bin Laden, a Saudi-born millionaire. It began as an organization to recruit and train Muslims to fight against the Soviet occupation (1979-89) of Afghanistan. In the mid-1990’s, after the Soviets had been driven out, a fundamentalist Islamic group in Afghanistan called the Taliban seized power. The Taliban allowed Al Qaeda to maintain its base of operations and terrorist training camps there.
Al Qaeda terrorists were responsible for the attacks that took place in the United States on September 11, 2001. Within a month’s time, the United States and a coalition of allied forces invaded Afghanistan. They attacked and ousted the Taliban, which had harbored the terrorists. They forced bin Laden and other top Al Qaeda leaders (including second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri) to go into hiding. In the years that followed, thousands of Al Qaeda members were killed or arrested. Chief among those caught was Al Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He was killed in a U.S. air strike in 2006.
Today Al Qaeda is estimated to have several thousand members. They work in small operational units (called cells) in as many as sixty countries. Allied terrorist organizations also exist in Egypt, Yemen, Uzbekistan, Sudan, and elsewhere.
Al Qaeda has been responsible for many additional attacks worldwide. Among them were the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York City and the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Al Qaeda is also believed to be responsible for the 2000 attack on the Navy destroyer the USS Cole in Yemen and the March 11, 2004, bombings in Madrid, Spain.

Elaine Landau

The New Book of Knowledge 2007
Grolier Online
http://nbk.grolier.com/cgi-bin/article?assetid=a2041694-h

Article Two

Time for Kids
World Report: March 10, 2000
Trouble on the Table
By David Bjerklie
What do you get when you cross a chicken with an apple? A daffodil with rice? A flounder with a tomato? These aren’t jokes waiting for a punch line. Believe it or not, combinations like these may make their way to your dinner table. There’s a brave new world of agriculture that has some people excited about new superfoods. Others are very nervous.
For thousands of years, farmers improved their crops by patiently crossbreeding plants that have good traits. They would take pollen from the sweetest melon plants and add it to the flowers of plants that produced the biggest melons to create new plants with melons that are both sweet and big. But crossbreeding doesn’t always work. Even when it does, it can take decades to get good results.
Now, thanks to advances in gene science, there are amazing shortcuts. Genes are the instructions inside cells that help determine what a living thing looks like: its size, its shape and countless other traits. Using the new tools of genetic engineering, scientists can take a gene from one living thing and put it directly into another plant or animal. That way, says John Mount, professor of agriculture at the University of Tennessee, “you can make changes more precisely in a much shorter period of time.”
Here’s how it works. First, scientists identify a gene that controls a desirable trait–for example, a protein in an Arctic flounder that helps the fish thrive in frigid waters. The scientists then use chemicals to cut and paste the flounder gene into the genes of tomato cells in a test tube. The cells grow into a tomato plant. Then the plant is tested to see if the fish gene still works. Do its tomatoes resist the cold? Yes, they do!
Scientists believe the new techniques can create crops that are pest-proof, disease resistant and more nutritious. Researchers are working on rice that has an extra boost of vitamin A from a daffodil gene. The rice could help prevent blindness, even death, for millions of kids who don’t get enough vitamin A in their diet.
Are we making monster food?
Not everybody is convinced that pumping up our food with foreign genes is a good idea. Many people say these genetically modified, or GM, foods may end up harming the environment and humans. They fear that plants with new genes forced into them will accidentally crossbreed with wild plants and create pesticide-resistant superweeds. They also say GM foods could carry genes that trigger allergies or other side effects. Already, there’s evidence that some GM corn crops may be harmful to the caterpillars that turn into monarch butterflies.
“We are rushing headlong into a new technology,” warns Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association. “We are courting disaster if we don’t look before we leap.”
Nearly half the U.S. corn and soybean crops are now genetically modified. Health concerns are growing. Many groups are demanding that GM foods be labeled. Last year public worry forced the Gerber and Heinz companies to stop using GM ingredients in baby foods. Just last month Frito Lay announced that its snacks would be free of GM ingredients. Companies are seeing that GM foods can be bad for business, even if they haven’t been proved to be bad for health.
So far, GM foods haven’t harmed anyone. Most genetic researchers believe that if troubles do crop up, they will be manageable. “We’re not talking killer tomatoes here,” says Norm Ellstrand, a University of California geneticist.
As the battles go on, will we continue to see GM food on our tables? “I hope so,” answers Allison Snow, an ecologist at Ohio State University. “Even though I have concerns, I think it would be silly not to use this technology. We just have to use it wisely.”

Answer questions 1, 2, 3, and 5

Article Three
Do questions 1, 2, 3, 8

Scholastic News
1967: The Six-Day War
Much of today’s conflict between Israel and the Palestinians stems from a war 40 years ago that lasted less than a week.
By Sam Roberts

Even by Middle East standards, the spring of 1967 was a tense time. Israel was periodically being attacked by Palestinian guerrillas in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, territories controlled by Egypt and Jordan respectively, and Syrian troops were lobbing artillery fire from the Golan Heights.
In April, Israel retaliated by downing six of Syria’s Soviet-made fighter planes. After the Soviet Union spread rumors that Israel was planning to attack Syria, the Egyptian army mobilized 100,000 troops and 1,000 tanks in the Sinai Peninsula. The following month, Egypt’s President, Gamel Abdel Nasser, whose stated goal was the destruction of Israel, ordered United Nations observers to leave the area. He also blockaded the Strait of Tiran, cutting off Israel’s access to the Red Sea, a vital shipping route.
With war appearing inevitable, Israel decided to strike first. On the morning of June 5—while most Egyptian pilots were eating breakfast and their commanders were stuck in rush-hour traffic—the Israeli Air Force destroyed more than 300 of Egypt’s 340 combat planes, most before they had a chance to leave the ground. Israeli troops then swept into Gaza and Sinai, as Jordan, with backup from Iraq, began shelling the Israeli sector of Jerusalem. Syria then attacked from the north.
New Map
By June 7, Israel had captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including the Old City, home to many sacred sites in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. By the fourth day, June 8, with the Egyptians in retreat, Israeli forces had reached the Suez Canal. Two days later, after Israel captured the Golan Heights, Israel and Syria declared a cease-fire.
In six days—actually, a little less—Israel more than tripled the amount of land under its control, rewriting the map of the Middle East.
While the war demonstrated Israel’s military superiority in the region, it settled nothing: Even in the face of a humiliating defeat, Arab leaders remained committed to Israel’s destruction. And Israel’s occupation of areas with a Palestinian population at the time of about three-quarters of a million led to new woes on both sides, most of which remain unresolved 40 years later.
Arafat & The P.L.O.
Indeed, even before the war ended, as the Israeli government debated trying to capture the West Bank town of Hebron, another city with a rich biblical history, Israel’s Prime Minister asked his colleagues: “Have you already thought about how we can live with so many Arabs?”
The answer would soon become clear enough. A few months after the war ended, a West Bank revolt led by Palestinian guerrilla leader Yasir Arafat failed, but would nonetheless have a lasting impact. According to Yezid Sayigh, a historian at King’s College in London, the revolt “catapulted the general Palestinian public into the arms of the guerrillas because they’d seen that the people they’d hinged their hopes on—the Arab leaders and the armies they’d believed in—had been swept aside in a matter of days.”
Two years after the war, Arafat’s Fatah (largest and most important of the organizations that make up the PLO) movement took control of the Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.), a group founded by Arab leaders to represent Palestinian interests. With Arafat as chairman, the P.L.O. waged a decades-long guerrilla war against Israel.
In the last four decades, attempts to bring peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors have in some cases succeeded, but hope has often given way to more violence.
In November 1967, the U.N. endorsed Resolution 242, a “land for peace” formula that has so far been only partly fulfilled: Israel would withdraw from the territories it captured in return for diplomatic recognition from its Arab neighbors and secure borders.
Yom Kippur War
Six years later, in 1973, Egypt and Syria launched surprise attacks on Israel on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, pushing into Sinai and the Golan Heights. By the time the three-week-long conflict was over, Israel had largely repelled the attacks, though with the U.S. mediating after the war, Israel agreed to return part of the Sinai and the Golan Heights to Egypt and Syria.
Overall, the war restored some of the Arab pride that had been so badly wounded in 1967, arguably enabling some of the peace efforts in the decades that followed.
In 1977, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat astonished the world by announcing that he was ready to go to Jerusalem and meet with Israel’s leaders. A year after Sadat’s trip to Israel, U.S. President Jimmy Carter brought Sadat and Israel’s Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, to Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, where the three men broke a 30-year stalemate in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Egypt & Jordan
The Camp David Accords led to a formal peace treaty in 1979 between Israel and Egypt: Israel returned the rest of the Sinai, and Egypt became the first Arab state to recognize Israel. (Other Arab states denounced the treaty, and Sadat was assassinated in Cairo in 1981, as he reviewed a parade commemorating the 1973 war.)
Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, but Israel and the Palestinians have remained, in essence, at war. Thousands have died on both sides in two Palestinian uprisings, or intifadas (Civil Uprising; Arabic: ‘shaking off’), in Israeli military campaigns in the occupied territories, and in suicide bombings and other attacks on Israelis.
Israel wants the Palestinians to renounce terrorism and genuinely accept its existence, while the Palestinians seek statehood, a capital in Jerusalem, and the right of Palestinian refugees displaced by the 1948 war to return to Israel.
“Each people believes that justice is totally on its own side,” David Shaham, executive director of the International Center for Peace in the Middle East, wrote in The Times some years ago. “Each nurtures its own sufferings and grievances and remains almost completely oblivious to that of the other.”
In 2000 at Camp David, President Bill Clinton brought the two sides to the brink of an agreement: Israel would return to its pre-1967 borders, with adjustments, and the Palestinians would get an independent state with a capital in East Jerusalem, in return for the Palestinians’ destroying all terrorist groups. But Arafat, to the consternation of Clinton and even Arafat’s Arab allies, walked away from the negotiations.
According to Leslie Gelb, a former State Department official, Camp David’s failure demonstrates the difficulties of bringing the two sides together.
“Israelis said if the Palestinians won’t buy this great deal, they don’t want peace,” Gelb says. “The Palestinians said this was an Israeli trick. The result is what we’ve seen all these years.”
Within months of the collapse of the Camp David talks, a second, more violent intifada began. Militants carried out dozens of suicide bombings in Israel, and Israel responded with a harsh military crackdown.
The U.S. Role
In the last few years, Israel has been trying to unilaterally “disengage” from the Palestinians. It began construction of a controversial security barrier to keep suicide bombers from entering Israel, and in 2005, shuttered its settlements in Gaza and withdrew its forces, leaving all of Gaza under the control of the Palestinian Authority. In the West Bank, different areas remain under Israeli, Palestinian, or joint control.
In 2006, Hamas, a radical fundamentalist group that calls for Israel’s destruction, won a majority in the Palestinian parliament, leading the U.S. and other nations to cut off most aid to the Palestinians and refuse to deal with Hamas members of the government.
Most Middle East experts believe that Israel and the Palestinians will eventually reach agreement, but only when moderates on both sides have gained the upper hand over extremists.
Gelb predicts that a final settlement “will be close to the Camp David terms on almost all issues.”
Until then, “it’s important for the U.S. to keep the negotiating flame lit, and for the moderates on each side to keep connections and avoid despair.
“But conservatively,” Gelb says, “it will be years before the two sides are in a position to make a final settlement.”

http://teacher.scholastic.com/scholasticnews/indepth/upfront/

Bibliography: Online service or database

Contemporary Article Nine and Ten Due 12/10/07
Sam Roberts
Jan 15, 2007
New York Times Upfront

How the Middle East got that way: the seeds of much of the conflict in the Mideast today were planted by Britain and its Allies after World War I, when they carved up the remains of the Ottoman Empire.

“Car Bomb Kills 56 in Baghdad”
“Israel Hits Gaza After Palestinian Rocket Attacks”
“Lebanese Official Critical of Syria Is Assassinated”

This small sampling of recent headlines about turmoil in the Middle East–and countless others in the last century–raises the question: Why is that part of the world such a mess?

It’s complicated, of course, but the fact is that many of the current conflicts can be traced to decisions made after World War I by the victorious Allies (largely Britain and France) who divided up the territory of what had been the Ottoman Empire.

In drawing the boundaries of what would become today’s Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Syria, and Lebanon, they paid little attention to the ancient tribal, ethnic, and religious differences that are at the root of much of the bloodshed in the region 90 years later.

The result, according to historian David Fromkin, was the creation of a group of neighboring “countries that have not become nations even today.”

Beginning in 1914, the war in Europe pitted Britain, France, Russia, and eventually the United States, against Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire.

Ruled since 1299 by Muslim sultans in Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey’s biggest city), the Ottoman Empire spanned southeastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

After the Allies victory in 1918, peace talks took place in Versailles, outside Paris. But there and in follow-up negotiations, the Allies disagreed about what the postwar world should look like: They argued not only about how severely to punish Germany, but also about what should happen to the Ottoman territories, which were home to many ethnic and religious groups, including Turks, Arabs, Kurds, Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

Nationalism was a growing force in “the early 20th century and President Woodrow Wilson advocated self-determination. In his Fourteen Points, Wilson urged that all nationalities within the former Ottoman Empire be assured “an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.”

But the Europeans were more intent on preserving, and even expanding, their colonial empires, and they wanted access to oil, which was starting to be discovered in large quantities in the Mideast.

The Europeans also wanted to loosen Islam’s hold on the region by promoting secular government. But, as Fromkin writes, foreign powers trying to impose their own order would not be welcomed in places “whose inhabitants for more than a thousand years have avowed faith in a holy law that governs all life, including government and politics.”

Further complicating matters, the British had made a number of conflicting commitments during the war: They had promised Arabs independence in return for taking up arms against their Turkish Ottoman rulers. In 1917, in what became known as the Balfour Declaration, Britain announced its support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Finally, they made a secret agreement with their French allies to divvy up large chunks of Ottoman territory between them.

By the end of all the peace conferences in 1922, Britain and France had received “mandates” from the newly formed League of Nations to oversee much of the former Ottoman Empire, where they created several new states and installed figurehead rulers.

But even then, Colonel Edward House, Wilson’s confidant, gloomily predicted that the lines drawn in the desert sand by European diplomats were “making a breeding place for future war.”

Here’s how events unfolded:

IRAQ “In 1919,” the historian Margaret MacMillan recalls, “there was no Iraqi people; history, religion, geography pulled the people apart, not together.”

The Shiite and Sunni sects of Islam had split centuries earlier over who would succeed Muhammad as Islam’s leader.

But in creating the new nation of Iraq in ancient Mesopotamia, Britain cobbled together the Ottoman provinces of Baghdad (mostly Sunni), Basra (mostly Shiite), and Mosul (mostly Kurdish).

What kept Iraq together for more than 80 years was the autocratic rule of kings and dictators. In 1921, the British installed as king an outsider named Feisal, the son of the ruler of the holy city of Mecca (in present-day Saudi Arabia), who was a British ally during the war.

The monarchy was overthrown in 1958. After several military coups, the socialist Baath Party seized control in 1968 and brought to power Saddam Hussein, who was toppled by the U.S.-led coalition in 2003.

Since then, without a strongman holding Iraq together, rising sectarian violence has brought the country to the brink of civil war.

PALESTINE/JORDAN/ISRAEL The British mandate for Palestine included present-day Israel, Jordan, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In 1921, on the land east of the Jordan River, Britain carved out Transjordan and placed Feisal’s brother Abdullah on the throne. Jordan was granted independence in 1946, and Abdullah was assassinated in 1951. The current King, Abdullah H, is his great-grandson.

West of the Jordan River, the issue of a Jewish homeland played out over the next two decades. Most Arab leaders opposed the creation of a new Jewish state in Palestine, where the population was largely Arab. Supporters of Zionism (the nationalist movement for a Jewish homeland in Palestine) argued that additional Jewish settlement would benefit the entire region economically, and that Jews had a right to a state in the land of ancient Israel. The murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust during World War II increased world pressure for a Jewish homeland.

In 1947, the United Nations voted to partition the narrow slice of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea into Jewish and Palestinian states. While Jewish leaders accepted the U.N. plan, the Arab states rejected it and attacked the newly declared state of Israel when the British left in May 1948.

Other Arab-Israeli wars followed. The Six-Day War in 1967 left Israel in control of the Sinai Peninsula (later returned to Egypt), along with the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and all of Jerusalem.

In 1993, an agreement between Israel and Palestinian leaders granted Palestinians limited control of the West Bank and Gaza, in anticipation of a future Palestinian state. Little progress was made toward that goal in the years that followed. The Victory in last year’s Palestinian elections of the militant group Hamas, which advocates the destruction of Israel, virtually froze peace efforts.

SYRIA/LEBANON In 1920, Syria became a protectorate of France, which claimed a special responsibility for safeguarding Christian enclaves in the Ottoman Empire. France carved out Syria’s coastal region into the separate state of Lebanon, whose legitimacy the Syrians still don’t recognize. Lebanon gained independence in 1943. Strife between Christians and Muslims developed, by 1975, into a 15-year civil war. The Lebanese invited Syria to intervene, but Syrian troops remained until 2005. They left after Syria was accused of ordering the assassination of a former Lebanese Prime Minister.

KUWAIT Under the Ottomans, Kuwait was at one time a district of Basra and was later overseen by Britain, until independence was granted in 1961. In 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, citing its historical connection to Iraq, and touched off the first Gulf War. A U.N.-sanctioned coalition, led by the U.S., liberated Kuwait early in 1991.

Today, three generations after the end of World War I, it seems that President Wilson’s aide, Colonel House, was right in his dire prediction for the Middle East. The question is, will the I conflicts there ever cease?

Professor Fromkin recalls that after the collapse of the Roman Empire, Europe struggled for 1,500 years over what form of Christianity to follow and: whether Europeans should be ruled by popes or kings. He wonders why the Arabs should be any different. “The continuing crisis in the Middle

East in our time may prove to be : nowhere near so profound or so long-lasting,” he writes. “But its issue is the same: how diverse peoples are to regroup to create new political identifies for themselves after the collapse of an ages-old imperial order.”

BACKGROUND

Much of the conflict in today’s Middle East can be traced to decisions made by Britain and its allies after World War I, when they carved up the remains of the Ottoman Empire into new countries. In doing so, they often ignored age-old ethnic and religious differences that are stilt at the root of much of the bloodshed in the region.

Must do (new) questions 1, 3, 4 and critical thinking question one:

* Consider the Europeans’ quest to expand their colonial empires. (After World War I, Britain controlled the largest empire in history, with a quarter of the world’s population under its rule.)

* Did the British and French victory in World War I give them the right to create colonies in the Middle East?

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/How+the+Middle+East+got+that+way:+the+seeds+of+much+of+the+conflict…-a0157946237

Bibliography: Online service or database

New York Times Upfront
The Perfect Weapon
Thousands of child soldiers have been forced into battle in some of Africa’s most violent conflicts.
By Jeffrey Gettleman in Nairobi, Kenya

When he was 13 years old, Ishmael Beah was given an AK-47, drugged up, and taught to kill.
It was 1993, and his native country, Sierra Leone, was in the midst of a civil war. Rebel soldiers had attacked his village and Beah was separated from his parents. After spending months fleeing danger and wandering through his war-torn country, he was forcibly recruited into the Sierra Leone army.

“I shot at everything that moved,” Beah recalls of the two years he spent fighting rebel forces.

Now 26 and living in New York City, Beah is one of the lucky few to have escaped.

At 15, he was rescued by UNICEF workers and sent to a rehabilitation clinic in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital. Two years later, after a difficult recovery from drug addiction and trauma, he came to the United States, went to the United Nations International School in New York, and then graduated in 2004 from Oberlin College in Ohio.

Now, he’s the best-selling author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, a chilling first-person account of his life as a child soldier.

Easily Manipulated

All around the world, from Sri Lanka and Colombia to Afghanistan and Uganda, children like Beah are being swept into armed conflict, robbed of their childhoods, and used to fight for greed and power.

To rebel commanders, children are the perfect weapon: easily manipulated, intensely loyal, fearless, and, most important, in endless supply.

Today, according to human rights groups, there are some 300,000 child soldiers (defined as under 18) worldwide. Experts say the problem is deepening as the nature of conflict itself changes, especially in Africa.

Africa didn’t invent the modern underage soldier. The Germans drafted adolescents when they got desperate during World War II. So did Iran, which used boys as young as 12 to clear minefields during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. Young people have fought in religion-driven or nationalistic conflicts in Kosovo (a largely Albanian breakaway province of Serbia), Afghanistan, and the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, where children have been sent into Israel as suicide bombers.

Greed & Power

In Africa, however, the problem is especially severe: In one country after another, conflicts have morphed from cause-driven struggles—like ending colonial rule—to criminal drives led by warlords whose goals are plunder, greed, and power.

“There might have been a little rhetoric at the beginning,” says Beah. “But very quickly the ideology gets lost, and then it just becomes a bloodbath … a war of madness.”

The typical rebel leader, operating from deep in the bush, doesn’t care about winning the hearts and minds of his soldiers or gaining the support of the public.

“These are brutally thuggy people who don’t want to rule politically and have no strategy for winning a war,” says Neil Boothby, a professor at Columbia University in New York who has worked with child soldiers around the world.

Few adults want to have anything to do with these rebel commanders, and so manipulating and abducting children becomes the best way to sustain the organized banditry.

As this kind of lawlessness spreads through parts of Africa, armed movements that rely on children as young as 9 are flourishing. Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Uganda are examples.

In Somalia, thousands have been killed in Mogadishu, the capital, in a complex civil war involving armies of teenagers. The war traces back to 1991, when the central government was brought down by clans fighting over old grievances. But soon it became a contest among warlords for control of airports, seaports, and access to international aid. (American efforts to restore order failed during the infamous 1993 battle depicted in the movie Black Hawk Down.) Today, 16 years later, they’re still blasting away.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), a civil war that started a decade ago to oust the longtime dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, is now a bloodbath of rebel groups fighting for control of timber, copper, gold, diamonds, and other resources. All sides rely on child soldiers.

Guns & Magic

In Uganda, peace talks are under way in an effort to end a reign of terror in rural areas by a rebel group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army, which has deteriorated into a drugged-out gang living in the jungle with military-grade weaponry and 13-year-old brides. Its ranks are filled with boys who have been brainwashed to burn down huts and pound newborn babies to death.

Children are often drawn into these movements, and kept there, with magic and superstition. They are taught that life and death depend on spirits, which are conjured up by their commander and distilled in oils and amulets. And leaders of these rebel groups use magic to demand supernatural respect.

“The commanders would wear certain pearls and said that guns wouldn’t hurt us,” says Beah. “And we believed it.”

By the time child soldiers in Congo were being told that eating their victims made them stronger in the late 1990s, the world had started paying attention.

World Reaction

The United Nations has since taken up the child soldier issue and passed protocols calling for the age of combatants to be at least 18. (The United States, which allows voluntary enlistment with parental consent at 17, and the United Kingdom, which sets the minimum age at 16, are among the countries that have not signed.)

But renegade armed groups continue to be a stumbling block.And as lawlessness spreads through parts of Africa, armed movements are spreading from the bush to urban-area slums.

“It’s ridiculous to appeal to human rights with these groups because they are so far on the criminal end of the spectrum,” says Victoria Forbes Adam, director of the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers in London.

Beah and other child-rights advocates are trying to draw attention to the plight of children in warfare—and are asking the world to intervene.

“No one is born violent,” Beah said during a conference in Paris on child soldiers earlier this year. “No child in Africa, Latin America, or Asia wants to be part of war.”

Do questions: 1, 2, 3 & Take a look at the map (link) below. Many of the countries where child soldiers exist today are countries that are in, or have been, in a state of civil war. Why do you think child soldiers are coming from these war torn countries that are dealing with civil war?
Check out the map online:
http://teacher.scholastic.com/scholasticnews/indepth/upfront/features/index.asp?article=f090307_African_Soldiers

Article Fourteen
Do Questions 1, 2, 4 and:
Would you rather have a democracy run by ineffective leaders, or a dictatorship run by effective leaders?

New York Times Upfront
Scholastic News