“If someone is sentenced to death, they must be killed with a gun, and photographing the execution is forbidden.” So goes one of the directives handed down by Taliban leader Mullah Omar in an effort to avoid images that might cause a rift between the movement and supporters. It was part of a 69-point document, [...]

Transparency International’s latest Corruption Perceptions Index saw the ratings of many western countries drop. Scoring worst among the G20 countries, Russia’s ranking dropped to 154, its lowest ranking since the index began in 1995. Naturally, there are limits to how useful measuring a population’s perception of how corrupt their government actually is. Transparency International’s Francois [...]

Eric Johnston called it “the most important conference you never heard of”: You would think that a conference that was once billed as a meeting designed to come to an agreement  on a “Kyoto Protocol” for all living things would get just a bit more media respect. Or public attention. And indeed, having just returned [...]

In the wake of an Ugandan newspaper publishing the names and pictures of the country’s “top homosexuals” recently (with an appalling banner reading ‘Hang them’ on the cover), gay rights across the world and particularly in Africa have become a topic of discussion once more. As many Ugandan homosexuals said in response to the publishing [...]

Last week ISN Insights explored the following issues: The broken US-Mexican border in a piece by Peter Buxbaum The fate of democracy in Fiji in an article by Fergus Hanson China’s demographic dilemma in a piece by Robert Ash Turkey’s constitutional referendum in an article by Francesco Milan A Friday podcast discussing German defense reform [...]