Scurvy killed more sailors than shipwrecks, storms and cutlasses, writes Keith Thomson in a new book about pirates

Travelling incognito, we recently gained a rare glimpse inside the secretive gulag state of Eritrea. Our reporter found a country that has taken an even grimmer turn after 19 months of war

Taken together the restricted exports account for 10% of calories on the global market

Should next year’s crop in Ukraine and Russia fail, hundreds of millions more people could fall into poverty. Political unrest will spread, children will be stunted and people will starve

The president’s economic model involves expanding the scope of the least productive part of the economy: the one that is run by the government

China began expanding its role in Africa for the same reason that America and Britain once did: to protect economic interests. But the impact of China’s military activity is unclear

There is no good reason to let civilians own guns that fire rapidly, or magazines that let them kill a room full of people before reloading

Western traditions tend to focus on femininity as something docile. But in other cultures femininity is associated with power and energy

The new “Top Gun” movie offers the same fantasy of benign American power as the original, only even more innocently, as if answering a deeper need for reassurance

It is hardly surprising that UEFA ranks the English and Spanish leagues as the two best