Child-trafficking arrests are made in Ghana
Ghanaian authorities announced Thursday that they have snared four alleged traffickers of children and have two others in their sights. The detainees are accused of sending children, as young as 5, to work in fishing communities in Yeji, north of Lake Volta. Because of poverty, families in Ghana often send their children to work with fishermen, BBC reports. In an arrangement that sounds a lot like indentured servitude, families typically receive $50 for three year’s of their child’s labor, the news agency says. Children dive to untangle nets or to pick fish from them. “Their hands, especially the girls’, are not as coarse as the fishermen’s hands, so they actually use those little girls to be able to extract the fish from these winch nets,” Joseph Rispoli of the International Organization For Migration told BBC. “They even cut their hands open on the scales sometimes.” In October, when a 4-year-old boy drowned in Yeji, it put police on the trail of the trafficking network, BBC reported. The organization said the arrests this week was a “major breakthrough a sign that the issue is now being taken seriously,” according to the news agency.

Brit gets 15 days in the Muhammad teddy bear incident
Sudanese court sent a British teacher to prison for 15 days Thursday for allowing her pupils to name a classroom teddy bear “Muhammad.” And when her prison term has ended, Gillian Gibbons must leave the country, her attorney told CNN. While she was found guilty of blasphemy, since the law prohibits having images or likenesses of the Muslim prophet, charges of inciting hatred and showing contempt for religious beliefs were dismissed. The 54-year-old Khartoum-based teacher was arrested after parents complained to the government that she had permitted the 7-year-olds to name the stuffed animal for a school project on animals and their habitats.

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