Blood and Justice: The Women Who Took on the Mafia (Book Excerpt)
In Calabria, Lea Garofalo’s disappearance required no explanation. The local Mafia, known as the ’Ndrangheta, had a term for people who simply vanished: lupara bianca, or “white shotgun,” a killing that left no corpse. Residents of Pagliarelle, the mountain village where Garofalo’s family lived, added her name to […]
Why Everything You Think You Know About Africa is Wrong
In the great European immigration crisis, in which Europeans’ right to refuse entry to foreigners has for years been allowed to trump foreigners’ right to life, perhaps no contention is more unshakeable, and more false, than the idea that there are good and bad migrants. Good migrants are said to be refugees, people fleeing persecution […]
What Africa is Really Like
Between October 2010 and April 2012, a quarter of a million people died in a famine in Somalia. Even in the war years, no one had seen dying like it. In a few weeks in mid-2011, half a million people abandoned their homes in the south of the country and walked across the desert to […]
The bloated, arrogant aid industry won’t let Africa go without a fight
Africa is standing up. After centuries of poverty, the world’s largest continent is developing fast. Economic growth in Africa will be around 5 per cent this year and has doubled the global average for more than a decade. The proportion of Africans defined as absolutely poor – living on $1.25 a day or less – […]
Tracing Europe’s Migrant Crisis to the Mafia
by Alex Perry and Connie Agius It is a sunny morning in April 2015 on Sicily’s east coast and Mount Etna is a postcard, rising from a green-blue sea up through olive groves, orange orchards and steep hill towns to ascend a towering snowy cone ringed by cotton-wool clouds. But in the centre of this […]
Earthquake on the Roof of the World
On the roof of the world, the day of the quake starts early. It is high season on Everest and 709 mountaineers and Sherpas from 21 expeditions are at Base Camp, a small canvas town of yellow, blue, red, purple and green which stretches for a kilometre and boasts tents for sleeping, storage, medical treatment […]
The Unstoppable Romance of Alex Salmond
A bitter March wind is whistling off the Clyde, hurrying the last few commuters onto their trains at Glasgow Central Station, but a floor above, in the golden ballroom of the Grand Central Hotel, the man who would tear the United Kingdom apart is bathing in a warm glow of love. “Alex,” says a middle-aged […]
The Second Coming of Tony Blair
On a December morning in 2014, a four-car convoy of black SUVs swept out of the polished limestone arches of the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem and drove south. Skirting the walls of the old city, it passed Mount Zion and its small, ancient church where King David lies buried and where Jesus was […]
Once Upon a Jihad
ONCE UPON A TIME, NOT SO LONG AGO, in a land not far away, a British man who would become an icon to a generation of European Islamists fighting and dying in Syria and Iraq, sat down before a webcam in his parents’ modest home on England’s south coast and filmed a 90-minute tutorial on how to tie a turban. The […]
Cocaine Highway
CHAPTER 1: EVERYTHING CONNECTS IT BEGINS WITH A BOAT. Small, white, with two large outboards – a speedboat. The pilot has feathered his throttle and is crawling upriver. The scenery suggests an estuary. The water is a muddy aquamarine. Aside from the grassy bank where the soldiers have parked their pick-ups, the river has no […]
