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A post I wrote last week described a “push” approach to AIDS prevention - circumcise men, tell people to use condoms, encourage them not to sleep around too much etc. The World Bank is trying a different tack, using a “pull” method instead: pay people not to get infected and let them work out for [...]

A new study published in Science claims that funds for HIV prevention (like most funds directed at Africa, cynics might argue) are being wasted. Telling people to use condoms doesn’t work, they say; asking them not to have sex is religion-inspired lunacy; testing for HIV has had little impact so far (although forthcoming research on [...]

A typically forthright and sensible article from former WTO head Mike Moore in the New Zealand Herald argues that we need more globalisation, not less, in response to the food crisis. He berates rich countries’ wrongheaded fuel subsitution policies - biofuels - as “a populist Green response to global warming that does the opposite of [...]

England football manager Fabio Capello went on an unusual overseas tour earlier this month. His destination? Maseru in Lesotho, where he visited an HIV testing centre. What was really unusual, however, was the ingenious method the centre used to grab the saturnine coach’s attention. They sat him in a room with a 14-year-old boy who [...]

The latest move in the long game between Turkey’s hardline secularists and its moderate Islamist government is perhaps the most worrying yet. The chief prosecutor in the country’s constitutional court has filed a petition to close the governing AK Party and ban its leaders from politics for five years, including Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan and [...]

A useful travel guide for would-be migrants, from Foreign Policy magazine. My only quibble would be their listing of Spain as one of the best countries to migrate to. This might be true if you’re a retired Brit with a fondness for sherry or cheap wine, but it will be interesting to see how tolerance [...]

A few weeks back the Guardian noted the transformation of Guinea-Bissau, a tiny, jungly and desperately poor country on the tip of West Africa, into the world’s first “narco-state.” Presumably this phrase means that its economy relies on drugs, though it has never been clearly defined and Guatemala and Afghanistan have also laid claim to [...]

News that Turkey is to publish a modernised revision of the Hadith - the traditions that govern the practice of Islam - will come as a shock to those Turks who think the government wants to turn their country into a hardline Islamic theocracy. Rather than returning to the past, the AK Party is attempting [...]

Reading Alex’s recent post on Kenya, I was reminded of a snippet I put on my own mini- and not-very-productive blog exactly two years ago today (excuse the blatant plug).
One of the “fundamental realities” that western governments engaged with Kenya “swept under the carpet” was, of course, corruption. Hillary Benn, then Britain’s Minister for International [...]

The debate over Turkey’s ban on headscarves in public buildings rages on. Over 100,000 people took to the streets at the weekend after the government announced plans to lift the ban in universities. Secular fundamentalists are up in arms, as they see the move as the first step towards Islamization. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan, on [...]

Mysterious goings on in Turkey, as a shadowy group of arch-nationalists with alarmingly close links to the army and government is arrested for conspiring to murder those less patriotic than themselves. Among their key targets was novelist and Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk recently escaped a prison sentence himself, having been accused of insulting the [...]

The humble low-tech wall continues to muscle its way stubbornly onto 21st century newsreels, with Palestinians tearing down the barrier that separates Gaza from Egypt and flooding over the border to stock up on much needed supplies. The UN reports that no less than half the population of Gaza has crossed into the Sinai. Egyptian [...]

A Dutch company has taken steps to address my complaint about the ugliness of Israel’s West Bank wall. You pay the firm 30 Euros and it pays a Palestinian to spray a message on the wall. Paper-free greeting cards, anyone?

Iran has taken a leaf out of its sworn enemies’ book by building a wall to keep out the PJAK, the PKK’s Iranian wing whose emergence I mentioned on here a couple of months back. Unlike the downright ugly walls America and Israel have built to keep out their enemies, Iran has at least decorated [...]

Just as I was wondering whether Turkey’s Kurds still had reasons to be grumpy, up pops the country’s Supreme Court to ban the leading Kurdish political party, the DTP, and expel its elected MPs from Parliament. This has happened many times before - a DTP deputy describes Turkey as a “cemetery of banned political parties” [...]

You know you’re in trouble when you need combat camels to save you. The latest masterstroke in the world’s response to the genocide in Darfur is to import specially trained Indian camels to transport African Union and United Nations peacekeepers around the province. The Sudanese government, the main aggressor in the conflict, has helicopter gunships, [...]

OK it’s Haaretz, a left-wing rag, but hey. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan, they argue, is the pick of today’s rum bunch of global leaders. Without him, “belligerent Iran, medieval Saudi Arabia or shaky Pakistan (caught in the calipers of sinister madrasas and a state of emergency) would be setting the tone.” Haaretz even parades [...]

The humble headscarf has become a key symbol in the simmering debate over Turkey’s secular future. In August this year it nearly brought down the government when the army opposed Abdullah Gul’s presidential bid because of his scarf-toting wife. The liberal middle classes of Istanbul and Izmir cite the AK Party’s apparent support for the [...]

Social capital, Sierra Leone style:
Youths along Sani Abacha Street on Saturday 10th of November, embarked on what they termed ‘Operation wash lunatics’, a voluntary move taken by them.
A member of the group spoken to who gave his name as Rashid Hindolo said after the conclusion of the general cleaning of the main streets they decided [...]

The Turkish confrontation with the Kurds takes an intriguing new turn, as Osman Ocalan, brother of the PKK’s incarcerated leader Apo, tells the Independent that pressure from Turkey is forcing the guerrillas to decamp to Iran, where Kurds have similar grievances to their Turkish counterparts. Ocalan, a founder member of the PKK, reports:
“There are 2,750 [...]

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