Not too much, not too little. That’s about the closest one can get when trying to translate the Swedish word lagom.

The American elections are this fall’s hottest news item. And in the centre of global attention is Barack Obama. Time for a conversation with one of the most respected African-American intellectuals: Cornel West. He supports Obama ‘because McCain is merely a continuation of the disastrous Bush policies’, but he does have some doubts concerning Obam ...

At the beginning of August, the Romanian department of Radio Free Europe closed the books. After almost sixty years, the station had become superfluous.

The resettlement of Iraqi refugees needs to become a greater priority on the European humanitarian agenda.

In Ireland and Great-Britain, about one in six nurses is foreign. Belgium organises additional training programs for qualified or semi-qualified non Belgian health workers.

Pentacostal churches in Kinshasa have their own TV channels, with religious music videos, talk shows with discussions on the Bible, confessions from former witches, and local drama series. These series work according to a fixed formula, containing three characters: the witch, the lunatic and the pastor.

In 2000, Didier Awadi and other Senegalese rap artists appealed to their fan base to vote for the presidential candidate Abdoulaye Wade, in order to end the decades of socialist rule. These days however, the Senegalese hiphop community remains strikingly silent in the public arena.

In September, Burma commemorates the crush of the uprisings of 1988. Twenty years later, the generals are still in firm control. Sue Tack travelled through Burma and stayed for a couple of months with Burmese refugees in the north of Thailand. She describes the powerlessness of the Kayan.

After the bloody election riots at the end of last year, a proposition was made in Kenya, whereby opposition leader Raila Odinga became the prime minister and his rival Mwai Kibaki remained president. One of the negotiators in the Kenya crisis was the Ethiopian professor Hizkias Assefa. MO* asked this specialist about possible solutions for Zimbabw ...

In September all countries of the world send their heads of state, government leaders or ministers of foreign affairs head to New York where, like every year, the General Assembly of the United Nations is gathering –the diplomatic high mass par excellence.

Ghana has two world famous export products: cacao and gold. Apart from that, bauxite and manganese is mined and recently, off the coast of Ghana, oil and gas has been discovered. The question is: do these resources provide sustainable development? On invitation of the Belgian NGO FOS – within the framework of their upcoming campaign about decen ...

Next October 6th, the European Union (EU) will open a Centre for Migration in Bamako, the capital of Mali. Refugee organizations strongly criticise this “Centre d’Information et de Gestion de Migrations” (Cigem) even before it has become fully operational. They call it an “outpost watchtower of Fortress Europe”.