The word “relationship” has for some time now become, in the nursing profession at least, one of those terms which, due to its indiscriminate use, has lost any specific meaning and has come to be just another colourless expression endowed with whatever meaning the user may choose to give it. It may be bandied about as a weapon or as a form of justification, and the emotional content with which it is loaded simply helps to aggravate mutual misunderstanding and to stress ideological differences.

The second phase of the operation for the repatriation of Koreans from Japan, begun on 11 May 1971, under the auspices of the Red Cross Societies of Japan and of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, is going ahead. As already announced in our last issue, the first ship taking repatriates left Niigata on 14 May with 204 persons on board. A second ship sailed on 18 June taking 58 families, a total of 169 persons.

The Neutral Commission appointed by the ICRC to decide on applications by Polish victims of pseudo-medical experiments in Nazi concentration camps during the Second War World met for the third time this year from 1 to 3 July 1971 at ICRC headquarters in Geneva. It consisted of Mr. W. Lenoir, President of the Neutral Commission and judge of the Geneva Court of Justice, Dr. S. Mutrux, assistant director of the Bel-Air psychiatric clinic of Geneva, and Dr. P. Magnenat, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and assistant at the Nestlé Hospital university clinic at Lausanne.

On 14 June the ICRC Relief Service despatched by air 20 firstaid kits to the Sudan Red Crescent Society and 5 to the Togolese Red Cross.

On 28 June medical supplies of vitamins and antibiotics, quinine and other products to a value of nearly 5,000 Swiss francs left Geneva for Ecuador. The consignment is intended for prisons in that country following the last series of visits carried out by the ICRC.

Following the events in Ceylon, the International Committee of the Red Cross sent, from 27 April to 12 June 1971, its delegate, Mr. Roger Du Pasquier, who visited there hospitals and places of detention containing respectively the wounded and injured and persons under arrest.

As already stated in our issues of June and July, Mr. Du Pasquier travelled all over the island, accompanied by government officials and members of the National Red Cross Society, and made distributions of relief to detainees. He brought back an interesting record of his mission, in the form of travel jottings, which we give below.

It is common knowledge that the ICRC, in order to make the humanitarian Red Cross principles known throughout the world, has produced a school textbook entitled The Red Cross and My Country, followed by a Teacher's Manual. It has already been issued in fifteen languages. More than a million copies have been printed and it has been distributed in schools in fifty-five countries.

Subsequently, it appeared necessary to publish also a handbook for officers and other ranks of the armed forces. It was entitled the Soldier's Manual. Its inspiration was the same as that underlying the school textbook. However, while the latter is designed to inculcate in schoolchildren, by means of short illustrated texts, the principles of the Red Cross and of humanitarian law, the Soldier's Manual summarizes the rules of the Geneva Conventions which should be applied in all circumstances when armed conflict breaks out.