Fifteen Filipino nurses have just started a new career in Melsbroek, Ghent and Antwerp. That’s after they waited two and a half years to get a Flemish work permit. Why do they look for a job 10,500 kilometres from home? We went to Manila to find out.

The Belgian ministry of Foreign Affairs has called back a Belgian diplomat from his post in Copenhagen on the suspicion of espionage. Consul O.G. from Bruges, who during 25 years had been in contact with the Russian secret services KGB and SVR, was suspended ‘in the interest of the service’. The Federal prosecutor’s office has launched a judicial i ...

The Newtopia-event in Mechelen states a very clear relationship between art and human rights, and in a broader sense between artistic creation and political action. The main exhibition Newtopia brings the work of Alfredo Jaar in a satellite expo to the ING Cultural Centre in Brussels from 10th October until 10th December. Title of the expo is Let T ...

Marwan Bishara, political analist of Al-Jazeera English, and producer and host of Empire, a programme that discusses world leaders and their agendas, was one of the prominent guests at the Friends of Europe congress on the Arab Spring. For Bishara, the Arab Spring is first and foremost a political revolution of consciousness. “The revolutionary see ...

Our ecological footprint reaches far beyond what planet Earth can sustain, and if our Western model of consumption and production continues to inspire people from China to Brasil, we will soon need ten planets. Still, the official discourse at the Rio+20 Conference was all about growth. Green growth, admittedly, but growth all the same.

In sixteen UN peace and reconstruction missions around the world, there are some 120.000 men and women at work.‘A real UN army does not exist’, says Marco Bianchini, head of the UN liaison Office for Peace and Security in Brussels. The growing need to prevent or control conflicts on the international stage results in complex UN missions   ...

She turned down a career as a model because she didn't like make-up. She lost her job as a journalist because she refused to back down in face of the censorship of the Suharto military regime. But as an author, she's the most succesful writer of her generation in Indonesia. Ayu Utami on freedom, monotheism and the expiration date of extramarita ...

The Mapuche, an ancient Native American people from Chile and Argentina, have been the victim of human rights violations for decades. The government treats them as criminals, while large energy corporations gain an ever greater influence over their native lands. The Mapuche try to raise their voices through international means without much success. ...

I spent the last twenty days of June in the Congo. Most of that time, I visited people and communities at grass root level. In brief, I went to Fizi – Baraka – Uvira – Bukavu – Kalehe – Minova – Goma. All by road. I ended my trip in Kinshasa, trying to wrap with a more national perspective. What follows is not really an article, nor is it an elabor ...

Despite its 160 million inhabitants, Bangladesh is the kid brother of South Asia. Yet fascinating things are happening in the delta created by the Ganges, the Brahmaputra and the Meghna, as economic miracles coexist with political nightmares and social dream scenarios. An update from the land of water par excellence.

A quarter of all countries worldwide maintain a fleet of submarines. Submarines continue to be of crucial importance as nuclear deterrents, for espionage and for asymmetrical warfare. A survey of the geopolitical hotspots where submarines rule the waves.

In 2008, Africalia and the city of Ghent chose South African Ismail Farouk to create a work of art for Ledeberg, a borough of Ghent. His functional artwork ‘Smaaklik’ is not there yet, in the meantime Farouk shares his views on space and society in Ledeberg, Europe and his home country South-Africa.