Rather late in my career I have become a paid employee of the United Nations. Unicef commissioned me to travel to Afghanistan and write what it calls a Child Alert - a report on the children who make up more than half of the country's population. Things are not as they used to be, and the UN especially has its very own way of doing them. So being assigned to [...]

Nguyen Vu Binh is a former journalist, an advocate of reform and an independent voice in politics. I fall into the same three categories myself. The difference is that I am a free man and he is in his third year of a seven-year prison sentence for spying, with three years' house arrest to follow.

Nguyen Vu Binh, 37, worked for a number of years on the Vietnamese Communist Party's [...]

The date of an election is creeping up on us - an election of considerable importance, but one without a campaign. At least, there is no official campaign for Speaker of the House of Commons. But friends of the dozen or so candidates are active, discreet messages are being delivered, and relevant back copies of Hansard regularly arrive in the mail. How fair and democratic it will be is another [...]