Antioquia, Colombia If you’ve ever wondered what happened to drug lord Pablo Escobar’s enormous cocaine and occasional execution palace, as featured in the Netflix series Narcos, I can tell you. These days – following the violent death of Escobar in 1993 and the consequent escape of his pet hippos from his private zoo – the
Support for South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress, has just fallen below 40 per cent, which makes it very likely that, come the May election, there’ll be a coalition government. I’m surprised that support for the ANC is as high as it is. Across South Africa, states run by the ANC are failing.
How should the state fight terrorism? That is the question addressed by Jon Boutcher’s report ‘Operation Kenova: Northern Ireland Stakeknife Legacy Investigation’. The report was precipitated by the claims that the British Army had an agent at the heart of the IRA. ‘Stakeknife’ was head of the IRA’s Internal Security Unit and was responsible for
Is the Church of England going to apologise for Christianity? A report by something called the Oversight Group has declared that the Church should say sorry publicly, not just for profiting from the evils of slavery (through investment in the South Sea Company) but for ‘seeking to destroy diverse African traditional religious belief systems’. And
On Monday night Tories gathered on the Terrace Pavilion at parliament for the 1922 Committee’s spring reception, to which every backbencher was invited. The crowd was small, largely made up of Rishi Sunak loyalists eating steak and chips and drinking sparkling wine. The Prime Minister chose not to give opening remarks and instead chatted to
‘She was dressing half of Brixton at one time.’ A former plumber from south London is recalling the pretty, well-groomed shoplifter of his youth. Expensively dressed, her favourite place to target was Selfridges. ‘I don’t know how she did it but she got everything. You put in an order and she’d get it. Those days
Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1960s and early 1970s, would start his day by banging his head against his desk three times while chanting: ‘I hate the Church of England, I hate the Church of England, I hate the Church of England.’ Similar thoughts must surely have passed through the mind of Justin
Greed is good again. It’s early Saturday morning in a glum and airless back room of a Holiday Inn in London. ‘Raise your hand if you’d like to make some money this morning!’ says Chloë Bisson, ‘#1 Bestselling Author, Multi-Award Winning Entrepreneur, International Speaker’. People go ‘yep’ and ‘uh-huh’ and ‘too right’ and put their
How old will you be when Vladimir Putin’s next presidential term ends in 2030? Which of today’s world leaders will still be in office? By that time Putin will have been in power for 29 years, and just under half the population of the Earth at that time will have been born during his reign.
In the end, it was the sports kit that persuaded us to pull the plug: two technical training tops at a cost of £90. A directive had come down from the senior school that all pupils must be in new gear from Kukri (official supplier to county cricket clubs and Commonwealth Games England) by the
When US policy-makers supported Nato expansion in the 1990s, it was widely believed that America, as the sole remaining superpower, could impose its will and leadership across the globe. ‘An American century’, ‘indispensable nation’, ‘the unipolar moment’, ‘benign hegemony’ – these became the new buzz-words of Washington’s political class. The rhetoric turned bellicose after 9/11,
In his under-recognised 2007 book Think Big and Kick Ass: In Business and Life, Donald Trump dedicated a chapter to ‘Revenge’. He wrote: ‘My motto is: always get even. When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades.’ Vengeance is a lifelong theme in the Donald J. Trump story, narrated as it is by Donald
‘We fight for every inch,’ declared Nikki Haley after she won her first primary in the District of Columbia last week. Her fight didn’t last long. The former governor of South Carolina managed to win one state primary on Super Tuesday, handing the presidential nomination to Donald Trump. Haley’s campaign is over – and with
The Happy Clappies – evangelical Christians who clap along to worship songs during church services – have been around since the 1980s. The slightly derogatory term was coined in 1985, and the practice is still going strong: you can hear it as you walk past any evangelical church on a Sunday morning. But in the
Anyone who is a guest on Good Morning Britain, the Today programme or the like has an agenda. They want to promote something – themselves, their new film, a charity, a political point of view. Of course, the presenters don’t like being used as stooges. And they have the power, because their show is live,
Riga, Latvia At the age of 74, Inessa Novikova, who is ethnically Russian, was told she had to learn Latvian or she’d be deported. ‘I felt physically ill when the policy was announced,’ she tells me when we meet in an office close to Riga’s city centre. ‘I’ve lived here peacefully for 20 years.’ There
Who will rule Iran after Ali Khamenei? The question is being asked with increasing frequency and concern as the Supreme Leader approaches his 85th birthday amid rumours of ill health, and it will be raised again on 1 March, when Tehran holds elections to the parliament and the Assembly of Experts, the body which will
It’s been brought to my attention that it is no longer done to describe a person as fat. Better, apparently, to say that they are ‘living with obesity’. This weasel construction makes obesity sound like a malevolent squatter who refuses to be evicted. Or like a bit of genetic bad luck, such as ‘living with
Jerusalem After midnight on Thursday is dead-time for the Israeli media. The weekend editions have gone to print (newspapers don’t come out on Shabbat) and the Friday night TV news shows have been pre-recorded. The country’s journalists are yearning for respite from a long week covering the war. Benjamin Netanyahu chose that black hole of
I last saw a willow tit on my farm about a year ago. I’m searching for them again this spring, listening for their ‘chair chair’ calls, but I am worried that they may be extinct here. They are dying out everywhere: down by 92 per cent nationwide in the 50 years from 1967. And the