BY ALEX PERRY, SEPT 26, 2024 POLITICO The shipping containers were a familiar sight to the villagers of northern Mozambique’s remote and troubled Afungi peninsula: a dozen steel boxes lined up end-to-end with a guarded gate in the middle. They formed a makeshift barricade at the entrance to an enormous natural gas plant that the …
A Hidden Catastrophe, Uncovered Just after 2pm on March 24, 2021, 500 rebels from the ISIS-affiliated al-Shabab group in northern Mozambique attacked the coastal town of Palma, adjacent to a 16,000-acre liquid natural gas (LNG) plant being built by TotalEnergies, and other partners, on the Afungi peninsula, south of town. To assess the impact on …
“I’m Still Alive but Sh*t Is Getting Wild”: Inside the Siege of the Amarula Jun 1, 2022 When vast gas reserves were discovered off the idyllic coast of northern Mozambique, a crew of roughnecks flew in from around the world to make their fortunes. But in March 2021, Islamist rebels attacked, and the foreigners and …
Oct 18, 2021 Each year an estimated 300,000 smugglers, known as ‘kolbars,’ haul millions of pounds of contraband from Iraq to Iran over the 14,000-foot peaks of the Zagros Mountains. More than 50 of them will die—shot dead, killed in accidents, or freezing to death—and countless more will be arrested and imprisoned. Alex Perry travels …
Apr 19, 2021 When Konstantin Grigorishin—über-wealthy Ukrainian businessman, aspiring philosopher, former pal of Russian oligarchs—introduced the upstart International Swimming League in 2019, he made the first move in an ambitious plan that could blow up Olympic sports and usher in a new era of athlete fairness. He also commenced a game of chicken with some …
Apr 15, 2020 Last December, around 100 tourists set out for New Zealand’s Whakaari/White Island, where an active volcano has attracted hundreds of thousands of vacationers since the early 1990s. It was supposed to be a routine six-hour tour, including the highlight: a quick hike into the island’s otherworldly caldera. Then the volcano exploded. What …
In the fall of 2018, the 26-year-old American missionary traveled to a remote speck of sand and jungle in the Indian Ocean, attempting to convert one of the planet’s last uncontacted tribes to Christianity. The islanders killed him, and Chau was pilloried around the world as a deluded Christian supremacist who deserved to die. Alex …
I have had many names, but as a sniper I went by Azad, which means “free” or “freedom” in Kurdish. I had been fighting for sixteen months in Kurdish territory in northern Syria when in April 2015 I was asked to leave my position on the eastern front, close to the Turkish border, and join …
Edoardo Archetta first opened the folding doors of his Italian restaurant, Bucci, at 195 Balham High Road in south London, 33 years ago. Over time, it became the kind of establishment that completes a neighbourhood, that “little place I know”, loved by regulars for its homely preparations of risotto ai funghi and calamari al balsamico, …
One afternoon in April, as we climbed into an armoured car outside her office in Vauxhall, south London, I asked Lynne Owens, the country’s most senior police officer, to describe 21st-century crime in the UK. Her answer spanned most of the next two hours, as we crawled east through the traffic to Chelmsford, Essex where, …