̽��ֱ��

An analysis of a new drug’s journey to market, published today in the BMJ, shines a light on financial practices that see some major pharmaceutical companies relying on a cycle of acquisitions, profits from high prices, and shareholder-driven manoeuvres that threatens access to medicines for current and future patients.

Researchers describe IMF as having an “escalating commitment to hypocrisy”, as study reveals that strict lending conditions have returned to pre-crisis levels, while ‘pro-poor’ targets frequently go unmet.

Lawrence King (Department of Sociology) and Piotr Ozieranski ( ̽��ֱ�� of Bath) discuss how EU member states use complex policy instruments to determine how much they are willing to pay the pharmaceutical industry for its products.

Researcher Alex Wood calls on new DWP Minister Stephen Crabb to acknowledge distinction between flexible scheduling controlled by managers to maximise profit, damaging lives of the low-paid in the process, and high-end professionals who set their own schedules – an issue he says was publicly fudged by Ian Duncan-Smith to justify zero-hour contracts.

Shana Cohen (Woolf Institute) discusses the anti-advocacy clause in government contracts that means charities will no longer be able to use public money for lobbying activities.

Shana Cohen (Department of Sociology) discusses censorship and free speech in Morocco.

India is home to one of the most vibrant, engaged and mystifying democracies on the planet. Cambridge academics, across a wide range of disciplines, are working on the ground – with citizens, charities, NGOs, fellow scholars and politicians – to try to untangle it.

̽��ֱ��UK lags behind other countries in preparing social scientists for the world of big data, says Dr Brendan Burchell, Director of a new centre set up to teach undergraduates the advanced quantitative skills they will need to work with massive datasets.

Researchers have developed a new technique that trawls the enormous amounts of public procurement data now available across the EU to highlight unscrupulous uses of public funds: from national and regional levels to individual contracts, companies and politicians.

We can but hope, argue sociologist Dr Jeff Miley and Gates Scholar Johanna Riha, who here summarise some of their observations following a recent field visit to Rojava in northern Syria, and give a brief overview of the political and social ideologies underpinning the Kurdish revolution.