BIRN details the creation of a shadowy, heavily-armed and potentially illegal police unit at the exclusive, 24-hour beck and call of the man who led Bosnia’s border police for nine years and is now a fugitive from arrest. On December 30, 2014, the then head of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s border …

As Nizam* sped toward Italy on a crowded migrant boat, he filmed what he believed was the final stretch of his harrowing journey. The 21-year-old house painter from Bangladesh held up his phone, framing his face before panning to roughly 50 others packed onto the white fiberglass vessel. Behind him, …

Their plight was already dire, but in the evening of June 21, 2024, things got even worse for Bilal and the other refugees and migrants trying to cross the border of Bosnia and Herzegovina with European Union member Croatia. Asylum seekers euphemistically call it ‘The Game’ – the moment they …

Shanghai veut concurrencer New York, Londres et Zurich et devenir le nouveau gardien des réserves d’or étrangères. Pékin a commencé à inciter activement d’autres pays à acheter des lingots d’or et à les stocker chez eux. Cela pourrait aider la Chine à renforcer le rôle du yuan en tant que …

Avant toute analyse, un hommage s’impose. Ceux qui se battent et tombent sur le champ de bataille portent le fardeau ultime de cette guerre. Leur courage et leur souffrance ne doivent jamais être oubliés, surtout face aux voix lointaines qui, bien à l’abri derrière leurs écrans, ou sur les plateaux …

The fall of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024 revealed the ongoing significance of multiple foreign fighter organizations in Syria, groups that proved instrumental in Hayat Tahir al-Sham’s (HTS) campaign for Damascus. Among them were two primarily ethnic Uzbek fighter groups that originated in Central Asia: the Imam …

Slovakia’s intelligence chief, Pavol Gaspar, is facing allegations of academic fraud after an investigation by the daily Sme found that his 2011 law thesis on corruption was largely plagiarised. The thesis, written at the private Pan-European University in Bratislava, lifted about two-thirds of its content verbatim from four published sources, …

Syria’s transitional government is cracking down on the production of Captagon — an illicit synthetic stimulant that flourished under the sponsorship of the Bashar al-Assad regime until its fall in December. But production and trade of the drug are continuing, particularly in parts of Syria not yet under the control …

The Lebanese government’s efforts to secure a monopoly over weapons are advancing, but can it ignore Iran? The decision of the Lebanese government on August 5* to officially endorse the state’s monopoly over weapons was an important milestone. Yet it was also incomplete, because it didn’t really address a dimension …

Knitting law and politics together into a constitution that serves as a repository of hard-won agreements is a matter of trust and bargaining, rather than foresight. But Syria’s will need both. In March 2025, interim Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa issued a constitutional declaration to govern the country’s transitional phase. The …