Long Shot
‘Night after night, day after day, month after month, I had lain behind my rifle. Through scorching summers, chilling autumns, endless winters and wet, numbing springs, I had kept the enemy in my crosshairs. I had burned my eyes with looking. I had survived other snipers, gun attacks, suicide bombers, tanks, mortars, rocket grenades, booby-traps, […]
The Good Mothers
Founded more than 150 years ago by old shepherding families and orange farmers in the toe of southern Italy, the Calabrian Mafia is one of the richest and most ruthless organized crime syndicates in the world. Italian prosecutors say it runs 70% of the cocaine in Europe. It manages billion-dollar extortion rackets. It plunders the […]
The Rift: A New Africa Breaks Free
Taking the Great Rift Valley – the geological fault that will eventually tear Africa in two – as his central metaphor, Alex Perry explores the split between a resurgent Africa and a world at odds with its rise. Africa has long been misunderstood – and abused – by outsiders. Perry travelled the continent for most […]
Lifeblood
In 2006, the Wall Street pioneer and philanthropist Ray Chambers flicked through some holiday snapshots taken by his friend, development economist Jeff Sachs, and remarked on the placid beauty of a group of sleeping Malawian children. “They’re not sleeping,” Sachs told him. “They’re in malarial comas. A few days later, they were all dead.” Chambers […]
Falling off the Edge
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, international corporations and governments have embraced the idea of a global village: a shrinking, booming world in which everyone benefits. What if that’s not the case? Alex Perry, award-winning foreign correspondent, travels from the South China Sea to the highlands of Afghanistan to the Sahara to see first-hand […]