Elections are a dry business in Thailand. Sales of alcohol are forbidden from the evening before voting until polls close.

This weekend, Thais vote in a general election shadowed by rumours of a military coup or the return of an exiled politician. The alcohol ban is enforced to lessen road deaths as millions travel home to vote.

“There may even be a coup. It has happened many times in Thailand. We say we are a democracy but in fact we are not at all,” says monk Phra Sang Pen, visiting Dublin to discuss Ireland’s first Thai-Buddhist temple.

About three thousand Thai people live in Ireland. Head of the Thai-Ireland Association, Wichit Isarotaikul has lived in Dublin for 30 years. But he keeps a close eye on the country where many of his family live.

Ruairi Kavanagh, a journalist who specialises in security and military affairs, visits Kerem Shalom, the only currently functioning crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip and reports that the economic plight of the people of Gaza is a sub-plot of the current impasse between the Jewish State and the Hamas regime which governs Gaza that has repeatedly vowed to bring about the destruction of Israel.

The border crossing at Kerem Shalom is a tense place. The manager of the facility, Amos (not his real name), shows me around the tightly fortified plazas which are filled with trucks delivering cargo, which is then scanned and examined by teams of customs and security workers before, if allowed, being transferred to Gaza side of the crossing, which is run by Hamas. The fact that Hamas and Israel jointly run the crossing, albeit under a small UN monitoring presence, only adds to the surreal nature of the place, which is situated just a mere stone’s throw from the Egyptian border.

The process of allowing goods into and out of the Gaza Strip is a tightly orchestrated and seemingly fluid affair. A truck arrives, its goods are unloaded. They are then examined by the Israelis for banned items of ‘dual purpose’, such as building materials destined for private companies in Gaza. Approved items, the list of which the Israelis say has greatly increased, are then loaded onto a sterile truck and driven to another plaza where they are then loaded onto another truck for delivery into Gaza itself. Walls and barriers, and weapons, are everywhere in Kerem Shalom. Human contact is minimal but according to Amos, this is the way it has to be and this is the way it works.

At a population conference held in London in May, Babatunde Osotimehin, head of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), called for action on family planning to curb the growing global population, which is set to hit 7 billion this year.

But Osotimehin isn’t just concerned about the burgeoning population. Poor sexual and reproductive health can have serious consequences. Every day, 1,000 women in developing nations die in childbirth or botched abortions. And in 2009, 1.8 million people became infected with HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa alone.

The UN will draw attention to these concerns on 11 July, World Population Day, calling on policymakers to strengthen their commitment to sexual and reproductive health.

Excluding men

Most reproductive-health programmes target women, but some experts say that this strategy is flawed — sidelining men could mean that such programmes are doomed before they even begin.