Historical Background   Côte d’Ivoire has experienced three periods of civil conflict in the last 20 years, all the result of disputed elections between characters still involved in Ivorian politics. President Alassane Ouattara, prime minister in the early 1990s, and president since 2010, is campaigning for a third term in office in the lead-up to […]

Incident   Overnight on Tuesday, a fire destroyed the Greek migrant camp Moria, on the island of Lesbos. The camp, which was designed to house 3,000 people when it opened five years ago, was home to 13,000 migrants at the time of the fire. Those living at the camp are now homeless, presenting both humanitarian […]

The NGS Operations Team was contacted by a Lloyds Broker on behalf of a large international client of theirs with a patient who had recently been diagnosed with symptomatic COVID-19 in Benghazi, Libya. The patient’s condition at the time was stable, but slowly deteriorating, and an upgrade in care was urgently required. The request was […]

The pandemic has been with us for most of the year, and as the seasons begin to change again, there is a potential for the pattern of the transmission to change in some parts of the world, depending on the regional environment. This week, the World Health Organisation made the hopeful statement that it believes […]

Historic Tensions   The relationship between Greece and Turkey has been poor for centuries, dating back to the Ottoman Empire’s involvement in south-east Europe, and to the years after the First World War, in which that empire was broken up. In more recent decades, there has been a long-running disagreement over ethnically-divided Cyprus, and in […]

Meteorologists are currently monitoring Tropical Storm Laura and Tropical Depression 14, which are at risk of strengthening into Category 1 hurricanes in the coming days, before making landfall in the US early next week. If the forecasts are correct, the hurricanes will contribute to what is expected to be a more severe than usual hurricane […]

Latest Incident – Mocimboa da Praia   At dawn on Wednesday, after several days of fighting, more than 1,000 Islamist militants took control of the port of Mocimboa da Praia, Cabo Delgado province, northern Mozambique. As many as 55 government soldiers were killed, and 90 wounded. By Friday morning, the military had still not retaken […]

The explosion in the Port of Beirut on 04 August has caused citywide damage, rendered the port non-operational, killed over 135 people, and has left thousands homeless and injured. Prior to this, Lebanon was dealing simultaneously with severe economic, political and health crises. The incident is set to have significant repercussions for the country, and is in danger of undermining its future […]

Introduction   SARS-CoV-2 was first identified as a new and dangerous pathogen in Wuhan, China towards the end of 2019. The world’s attention was drawn to the rapid growth  of new cases within China, before the disease started spreading first to neighbouring countries, and then into Europe via Italy, which was the initial epicentre of the […]

Latest Violence   Conflict has broken out between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Tavush and Tovuz regions (along the border) in the last few weeks, the worst outbreak of violence between the nations in at least four years. Both sides accused one another of shelling villages and military positions early last week. The previous weekend […]

There have been 1,327 reported cases of COVID-19 in Tunisia, and 50 reported deaths: after an initial surge of cases in April, there has been a second spike in mid-July. Tunisia has been significantly less affected than the rest of Africa, particularly its North African neighbours Morocco, Algeria, Libya and Egypt. However, the pandemic’s global […]

In the face of a second surge in coronavirus cases, countries who have already experimented with nationwide restrictions are now choosing to re-impose local lockdowns in an attempt to contain the virus in specific communities and areas.       Where and Why   As a number of countries emerge from nationwide coronavirus-related lockdowns, the […]