News Feature

In June 2018, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali told Parliament that the post-1991 government used torture and killing to terrorise its people. Perpetrated in police detention centres, dungeons and prisons across the country, the state-sanctioned violence recounted by the prime minister amounts to crimes against humanity in international criminal...

Sexual networks among men who have sex with men (MSM) are not different in nature from those of other groups, Lilith Whittles, an infectious disease modeller at Imperial College London, stresses, but a core group of people are much more densely connected than people outside the MSM community. They change...

Ever since monkeypox started to sicken thousands of people worldwide this spring, two big questions have loomed: Why is a virus that has never managed to spread beyond a few cases outside Africa suddenly causing such a big, global outbreak? And why are the overwhelming majority of those affected men...

Researchers are finally making headway in understanding how the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus causes loss of smell. And a multitude of potential treatments to tackle the condition are undergoing clinical trials, including steroids and blood plasma. Once a tell-tale sign of Covid-19, smell disruption is becoming less common as the virus evolves....

Four months on from the landslide, the devastation was still clear to see: long and wide fissures crisscrossed San Isidro’s few main roads, running both down and across the hillside, while the collapsed and dangerously cracked buildings remained eerily empty. “I worked hard to have this and to raise my...

SAFEBOW, a grassroots organisation set up by Rain Dove and other activists, has helped more than 4,000 refugees from marginalised groups – including LGBTQI+, disabled, and elderly people, as well as Indian, African and other international students who were studying in Ukraine – leave Ukraine since Russia’s invasion began. The...

In just over three months since Russia began its full-scale invasion, nearly seven million people have fled Ukraine as refugees. The vast majority are Ukrainian women and children who have been received in neighbouring countries, mainly with open arms. However, an untold number of LGBTQI+ Ukrainians, especially trans-women, trans-men and...

Faisal Fayaz was just 10 months old when his father was killed by a landmine in north Kashmir’s Bandipora district in the winter of 2000. Like several thousand other Kashmiri men, Fayaz Ahmad Mir had spent years as a counterinsurgent – working alongside Indian authorities to fight Kashmiri militants battling...

Life is growing increasingly unbearable for academics in Afghanistan, almost a year into the Taliban’s rule. It has become particularly tough for female scholars and students. Since the Taliban seized power last August, the country has descended into a humanitarian crisis. Many Afghans are not getting enough food; there is...