Moscow is increasingly cracking down on the minority community, forcing some to flee. In his early 20s, Mikhail* (not his real name), a gay man from the city of Ufa in Russia, was doing what he loved: drag performances. “I was going on tour, to competitions; I met new artists and planned that drag would be the grandfather to my life,” he told Al Jazeera. At this point, Mikhail said, he lived his life openly and had not experienced much overt hostility from the day-to-day public. But in (…)

I would like to start off by inviting everyone to reflect on the term “Food Security”. What should this mean to the planning departments in government agencies? How should national planners evaluate the status of our “security” with respect to food supply in our country? Is it by listing the self-sufficiency levels (SSLs) of the common food items consumed by our population? And then somehow summating them to give an aggregate over-all SSL? Should we give weightage to any of the food items? (…)