A highland welcome

More than 700 refugees and asylum seekers have contributed their expertise to a new document produced by the Scottish government: the New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy. The Scottish strategy, which was partly written by refugees themselves, outlines the importance of providing housing, healthcare and education to help new arrivals become ‘part of the community’.

The document has been endorsed by UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, and comes after the news that Scotland has met its target to settle 2,000 Syrian refugees three years ahead of schedule.


Rhino forensics

DNA evidence is being used to put traffickers of rhinoceros horns behind bars, according to Current Biology. The Rhino DNA Index System works like human forensics and allows investigators to link black-market horns to the scenes at which they were poached – which are often thousands of miles away.

At least 120 criminal cases have been put together using DNA evidence, with one leading to a 29-year jail sentence. It comes at a time when the lucrative trade – rhino horns are worth more than gold or diamonds, per unit of weight – is experiencing a resurgence, with a 7,000 per cent increase in poaching incidents in South Africa since 2007.


Good sex in Rwanda

Rwanda is an African outlier in terms of gender relations. It ranks fifth in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, beaten only by Nordic countries. It also has the world’s highest proportion of female parliamentarians.

Although the immediate explanation for this is President Paul Kagame’s pragmatic response to the 1994 genocide, in which the majority killed were men, there is a progressive cultural phenomenon in Rwanda worth considering too: kunyaza. This is a traditional sexual practice according to which a woman’s pleasure – specifically, female ejaculation – is considered to be more important than a man’s satisfaction. Intrigued? Find out more in The Joy of Kunyaza on our website: nin.tl/kunyaza