Dusk is falling over Kabul, and for Mortazar, a 17-year-old boy with an easy smile and a red waistcoat, it's time to go home. The silhouette of "TV Mountain", with its dense thicket of broadcasting towers, dominates the skyline. Every day, Mortazar stands for ten hours on one of Kabul's busiest streets, amid CD stalls and shop mannequins, hawking mobile phone top-up cards. He makes about $5 a day. "Nowadays [...]

Thick palm trees and dark canals slid past my window as the train eased slowly into Minya, a city on the west bank of the River Nile about three hours south of Cairo. It was good to escape the glare of Nasr City, the district in outer Cairo where my father and I had rented an apartment.

We had come to Egypt so that I could get to know my [...]

For collectors of ghoulish memorabilia with at least £35,000 to spare, Christmas came early. A black Mercedes Benz limousine reportedly owned by Pol Pot, the late leader of Cambodia's infamous Khmer Rouge, was put up for sale on the online auction site eBay.

"Everyone keeps talking about bloodstains on the back seats, but it had been used by farmers for transporting watermelons for the last five years," says Paul Freer, [...]

"You've picked a bad day to arrive in Tarim," said my taxi driver, Ahmed.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"It's Friday," he replied, shaking his head ruefully. "The hotels are full."

I sighed inwardly, guessing that this was another one of Ahmed's scams. He'd already tried tripling the taxi fare and had stolen two cans of Mountain Dew from a stall, claiming they should have been free for thirsty [...]

We may associate the word corruption with Russian oligarchs and African republics run by venal government officials, yet according to the watchdog, Transparency International, the world capital of dirty money is not Moscow or Mogadishu. It is London.

Although this year's Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) would appear to confirm that corruption is a developing-world problem (out of 179 countries surveyed, the 80 lowest ranked are largely poor African and [...]

At a ceremony to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade on 23 August, Ken Livingstone wept as he apologised on behalf of London and its institutions for their role in the transatlantic slave trade. The audience clapped and Françoise Rivière, assistant director general for culture at Unesco, praised Livingstone for being "the first high-visibility elected official to take such a historic stand". On the same [...]

On 16 August, the leaders of an influential but not widely known group called the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO) met in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek for their annual summit.

The SCO, made up of China, Russia and four former Soviet central Asian countries (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) gathered just as their armies were concluding their first joint military exercise in Russia, involving 6,500 soldiers and 500 combat vehicles.

The Tories may have turned to Iain Duncan Smith for new thinking on family policy. But for decades the British left has looked to the Nordic countries, Sweden in particular, for inspiration - and with good reason. Sweden excels consistently in education and childcare, coming second out of 21 'rich' countries in a recent Unicef report on child well-being, just behind the Netherlands. Britain came last.

Sweden invests in children [...]

The urban population of Africa and Asia will double by 2030, according to the latest annual UN population report. This rapid growth in the world's cities will result in a dramatic increase in the number of teenagers living in extreme poverty, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) warns, and will also lead to a surge in violent crime and HIV infection.

By 2030, 80 per cent of the world's urban population [...]

Some 300 members of the public crowded into a lecture theatre last month to learn how to help the Metropolitan Police combat terrorism. Project Griffin, as it is known, aims to make useful spies of us all.

First step is to identify your terrorist. Watch for tell-tale signs, we were told, including sweating, mumbled prayers, visible anxiety, bulky clothing and perhaps something (a detonator) gripped in one hand. But, slightly [...]