Just for a change of pace, a bit of hopeful news from another front entirely

According to the BBC for April 30,

[s]ome 19,000 former Liberian combatants have handed in their weapons, the United Nations mission there says.

This is almost half of the 40,000 fighters, many of them children, who took part in Liberia's long civil war.

The ex-combatants from all sides are eager to disarm, a UN spokeswoman told BBC News Online.

The long, bloody, vicious war, marked by widespread cruelty and more broken ceasefires than a reasonable person could keep track of, finally ended last year with the departure of the murderous Charles Taylor.

The UN now has 14,000 peacekeepers in Liberia, but has yet to deploy in the far southeast, an area held by rebels. Still, no one seems to think that there will be problems in completing the disarming of the various groups so that the new power-sharing government can have a chance to stabilize and begin rebuilding the country.