The featured topics on Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Somalia have been updated.

ecoi.net introduces scheduled maintenance period: each day at 05:15 CET the ecoi.net database will be deactivated. The downtimes will range from a couple of minutes to about an hour. This blog will remain usable during the maintenance periods.

The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has published a training module on researching and using COI for their asylum adjudicators. The document contains guidelines, examples and exercises for asylum decision-makers.