Dispatches

‘The Tajiks are unnervingly friendly. They take the Islamic injunction of hospitality with grave seriousness. The hungry often sacrifice their only cow for a backpacker with a camera, and the regime has liberally welcomed boots and bases on its soil.’

‘Hadija laughs as she describes how Saudi women, once over the bridge connecting Saudi Arabia to Bahrain, elbow their husbands out of the driving seat to take command of the wheel.’

‘At last, a familiar sight: we drive past a Johnson & Johnson factory. “This place can’t be that bad,” I tell myself. “Daniel Pearl was executed near here,” the driver says unprompted. “Do you want to see where?”‘ – Shiraz Maher comes face to face with the Taliban 

The alternative human rights conference highlights causes that are too often ignored or forgotten by organisations like Amnesty International

Whilst travelling through Kyrgyzstan, our correspondent found himself witness to a brutal and bloodsoaked coup

Our correspondent provides an eyewitness account of the bloody and brutal coup in Kyrgyzstan on Wednesday 7th April

“It is almost impossible to believe this misery was once a beautiful German city known as Königsberg, where Kant thought, Herder wrote and Prussia began”

“Cuba is decaying at a scandalous pace, physically and morally. The social capital of civil values and mutual trust has evaporated and hatred is taking hold”

‘The fighting in Somalia can no longer be dismissed as an obscure domestic struggle in an unimportant country of no wider relevance to the world. The crackle of machinegun fire in Mogadishu, the regular thwump of mortars, the ground-shaking shelling by Amisom tanks and the sporadic suicide attacks by delusional youths represent the frontline in the international fight against al-Qaeda.’

The World cup in 2014 and the 2016 Olympics are an incentive and an opportunity to address inequality and drug-related violence in Rio de Janeiro. Will the state try to heal the problems in the favelas, or simply conceal them?