Journalism

With necks that can take them up to 8ft tall, an ostrich can see a threat coming from miles away. In the garden of the Executive Mansion in Monrovia, Liberia, Comfort Ero’s eyes flicker away from the giant birds prancing around and turn to the man sitting in front of her on a throne, surrounded by staff.

He is the president of Liberia, Charles Taylor. It’s 2003 and he’s wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity, for atrocities committed during the horrors of the 1991-2002 Sierra Leone c

n the 1990s, Ahlem Behladj learned to brave being hassled each day by the police officers that hung around outside the women’s shelter in downtown Tunis. This was during the 23-year-long dictatorship of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, and the dilapidated building was a rare protected space for battered women—and the place where a 19-year-old Behladj and her fellow activists gathered to fight for a law on violence against women.

It was a fight that would take decades. But on July 26, 2017, Behladj was

But many others suffered greatly—particularly those who were targeted by the Stasi. Stefan Trobisch-Lütge has focused his psychiatric career on helping these people, who, he says, suffer from a variety of problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression.

At Trobisch-Lütge’s practice here in Berlin, where haunting paintings of barbed wire and ghostlike figures line the walls, Chris Hendschke, a member of the group-counseling session, rhetorically asks the woman sitting

A converted villa in an affluent district of south Cairo is home to the Bardo Clubhouse, a buzzing cultural hub with a library on its ground floor. Founded by passionate book lover Omar Amin, who left his job in marketing in November to dedicate himself to the library full time, the multilingual collection is made up of donations, including a first edition Harry Potter and a 1927 edition of Kafka’s Amerika which Amin found while rummaging through the Egyptian capital’s book markets.

It is a ris

Given the brutality that has come to characterise Syria’s four-year war, it is understandable that discussion of the conflict has focused on violent deaths. But there is another scourge destroying lives in the country: economic ruin and crippling poverty – what a UN-backed report (pdf) called “an equally horrendous but silent disaster”.

Some aid organisations and policy experts are finding that, with more than four out of five Syrians in poverty, traditional humanitarian aid, while necessary, j