A new type of hedge fund was invented in the mid-1990s. It was eponymously called ‘vulture fund.’ These funds are used to ‘buy debts racked up years ago by the poorest countries on earth, almost always when they were run by kleptocratic dictators, before most of the current population was born.’ They buy the debt [...]

The war in Congo has been going on for a decade and a half. The conflict has many causes, among them the collapse of the kleptocratic regime of Mobutu Sese Seko. A case of an abandoned former Cold War ally of the United States, his fall led to a government that was not able to [...]

The mindboggling violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo over the past ten years has seen more dead bodies than the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur and Iraq combined. At the heart of the conflict are the so-called ‘blood minerals’ or ‘conflict minerals’ whose unregulated trade has been ruling the country, enriching its politicians and [...]

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is touted to be a ‘vast, mineral rich and war torn country.’ Some experts do not buy the image. One thing is certain, though. The country is a failure, especially in its attempts at conflict reconstruction. For starters, Congo seems to have the world’s largest franchise of human [...]

According to a very new law enacted in Afghanistan, it is legal to starve a wife who refuses sex. This is already a watered down version of the original bill that stipulates for a wife to have sex with her husband four days in a week. This law was signed just as Hamid Karzai was [...]

During her official trip to Africa, Hillary Clinton had planned to impress upon her interlocutors the need to fight against corruption. The head of American diplomacy even insinuated that people take to the streets to protest against their corrupt governments.
Among the themes that the US Secretary of State had chosen for this trip is violence [...]

The United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC), installed since November 1999 and a mission that has already been costing $1 billion, reported that its troops did not suspend the current military operations against the Front démocratique pour la liberation du Rwanda (FDLR) in the east. NGOs have requested the [...]

 
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Japan holds the record for having the world’s longest life expectancy – at close to 90 years. The country also has one of the world’s lowest child mortality rates, indicated by WHO statistics: ‘For every 1,000 babies of both sexes born in Japan, 996 will make it past their fifth birthday [...]