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Jon Snow
It’s intriguing to be at the biggest gathering of heads of government that world has probably ever seen. Back here in Copenhagen 10 days on from when I was here for the opening of the climate change conference, the atmosphere is more frenetic, more suspicious, more angry. Thirty-six hours to go to its timetabled conclusion…
Jon Snow
I am standing on a balcony sixteen floors above the Amazon leaning on the railing talking with Brazil’s President Lula. An exceptional life story has taken him from a 12-year-old shoeshine boy, via work at a sheet metal factory where he lost the little finger of his left hand in an industrial accident, to his…
Climate change versus soaring global demand and prices of base products.
Jon Snow
He was the most tenacious, even ruthless correspondent I ever worked against. In the 1970s Brian Barron and I chased down the grim regime of Uganda’s President Idi Amin. We also reported on Kenyatta’s funeral in Kenya, and much else beyond. In learning of his death today from cancer, I feel one of my coordinates…
‘Grow your own veg’ is an oddly resonant message in uncertain economic times. I heard it first from my father, when he sent his youngest three children to help him tend to his Manchester Council allotment at Bradley Folds next to the River Mersey. Now I’d rather have been tending to a football than fetching…
I am told the Americans are in the midst of a major rethink of their policy towards Somalia, as fighting within the last few days threatens to topple the government in Mogadishu, such as it exists.
Somalia is off-limits to most western reporters and five Somali journalists have been killed there so far this year. Aid workers are frequently kidnapped – a million dollars is the going rate to have them released – and four WFP workers have been killed since last August. So, to put it mildly, this was…
The UN’s head of aid operation has launched an inquiry after Channel 4 News revealed thousands of sacks of food were diverted from refugees and sold by Somali businessmen on the open market.
Jon Snow
DFID, the UK aid department, asked me to volunteer to come down here to Lusaka in Zambia to help “facilitate” the launch of the North-South Corridor project for which they and other donors have thus far raised $1.35bn. It involved four presidents, the head of the WTO, a DFID minister, an EU commissioner, international banks,…
The images the President’s advisers hope will resonate most from his trip to Turkey are surely those from his tour of Istanbul’s Blue Mosque. It was commissioned by an Ottoman Sultan, Ahmed 1st, who wanted to placate Allah almost 400 years ago. Now America’s President wants to do the same.
The excellent writer Michela Wrong (okay – declaration of interest: she’s my friend. But she’s still a great writer) has a new book out: It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower. She has chronicled the extraordinary tale of John Githongo, the man tasked by the Kenyan government to stamp out corruption,…
I’ve just come up for air after several weeks investigating claims that dozens of Islamic extremists have returned to Britain from training camps in Somalia. The security services believe that they may end up using the skills they have learned in Somalia to commit acts of terror here in the UK.