A police officer wearing a face mask at Wuhan Tianhe International Airport in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, April 8, 2020 (AP photo by Ng Han Guan).

The dusty border town of Taftan in western Pakistan is a frequent stopover for religious pilgrims. Many members of the country’s Shiite minority pass through it en route to visit holy sites in neighboring Iran. But after Iran emerged as one of the countries hit hardest by the coronavirus, the Pakistani government set up a quarantine camp in Taftan to prevent further movement, inadvertently turning the town into an epicenter for the spread of COVID-19. Testing in the camp is sporadic at best, while health facilities are abysmal. Many pilgrims reportedly paid bribes to escape back into Pakistan, and as […]

Sierra Leone’s president, Julius Maada Bio, addresses the Climate Action Summit at U.N. headquarters, Sept. 23, 2019. (AP photo by Jason DeCrow).

For decades, Sierra Leone has languished at the bottom of international corruption rankings. Despite detailed anti-corruption legislation that has been on the books since 2000, millions of aid dollars in technical assistance and repeated promises by politicians, corruption has persisted, even flourished. More recently, however, this has started to change under President Julius Maada Bio. Transparency International ranked Sierra Leone 119th out of 180 countries in its Corruption Perceptions Index last year, up 10 places from 2018. The Millennium Challenge Corporation, an independent U.S. foreign assistance agency, also recorded a jump for Sierra Leone in its annual anti-corruption scorecard, from […]