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By Alice Ross, The Guardian

A former senior director at a British firm says that it employed mercenaries from Sierra Leone to work in Iraq because they were cheaper than Europeans and did not check if they were former child soldiers.

Bulgaria, which abolished conscription as of January 2008, is planning legislative amendments that will enable the compilation of a register of people aged 18 to 32 eligible for military service, in a move intended to bolster the country’s military reserve, Defence Minister Nikolai Nenchev confirmed on February 24 2016.

The list of young people, men and women, will be drawn from the records of the Civil Register and Administrative Services directorate, on the basis of proposed amendments to the Defence and Armed Forces Act.

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Source: The Sofia Globe | Photo Moche Fedor

This year on the 22nd of March, the Bolivian Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal (PCT) rejected the right of conscientious objection as an alternative to its obligatory military service. This has occurred in spite of the generally agreed-upon right to constitutional protection, brought to attention by 18-year-old objector Ignacio Orías Calvo, who claimed refuge under this fundamental right based on his religious beliefs.

By Rory Fanning 

For a decade, Afghanistan vet Rory Fanning has been battling the desire to inflict pain on himself. Instead, he visits schools.

Early each New Year’s Day I head for Lake Michigan with a handful of friends. We look for a quiet stretch of what, only six months earlier, was warm Chicago beach. Then we trudge through knee-deep snow in bathing suits and boots, fighting wind gusts and hangovers. Sooner or later, we arrive where the snowpack meets the shore and boot through a thick crust of lake ice, yelling and swearing as we dive into near-freezing water.