September 2009's Issue

Returning to Britain was the start of a difficult new journey for the detainees held without charge at Guantánamo. They meet every six months at a London restaurant to swap anecdotes and shake off memories of imprisonment. Oliver Shah reports.

Reverend Billy is a bleached-blond dog-collar-wearing cross between Elvis and a televangelist; he’s also a candidate for the New York Mayoral elections this November. NItalks to him about his hopes, fears and crazily eccentric dreams.

‘Make do and mend’ is a time-honoured Egyptian talent, discovers Maria Golia.

At a new age festival in Sweden, a group of people who’ve never met before explore tree-hugging, sweat lodges, shamanism, tantric sex.

The top tourist destination in Niger until the late 1980s, the city of Agadez – located in the dead centre of the country – is today no more than a shadow of its former self.

Jeremy Seabrook visits Bangladesh to better understand the roots of child labour.

CDs that didn’t quite make a full review, but are still worthy of a mention.

It takes a singular talent to make a book of 1,000 pages that is as hard to put down as it is to pick up. Despite its size, 2666 retains the agility of a thriller.

Mike Bonanno is a cultural activist and one half of the Yes Men. Five years ago he and sidekick Andy Bichlbaum were invited on to BBC World News pretending to represent Dow Chemicals, whose environmental legacy included the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster.

The editor’s picks from the NI website

A graphic adaptation of the book by Studs Terkel by Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle.

Guy Stringer, director of Oxfam, chair of Devopress who initially published New Internationalist magazine in 1974.

Climate camps around the world.

Facts and figures on bees, honey & the food connection.

Nick Harvey reports on the position of the Hmong – both inside Laos and the bleak refugee camps of Thailand.

Pakistan’s army offensive has wrongfooted the Taliban. But the larger war of ideas has yet to be won. Pervez Hoodbhoy explains.

A road movie cum Western. Or, rather, it’s a railroad movie and the ‘West’ - where innumerable migrants are headed on railroad wagons - is more accurately the ‘North’, the US.