324 items found
Jon Snow
This G20 exists at so many levels. Take Brazil’s President Lula. Fearless campaigner against the carbon footprint. But having flown from Brazil to Doha and Doha to Paris, today he abandoned his plane, sending it empty to London while he took the train. But the high spot thus far has been the Obama-Brown press conference.…
Jon Snow
There is undoubtedly a historic feel to the impending arrival here of the new American president. But despite the ascent of Barack Obama, Grosvenor Square, in London’s west end, together with the looming hulk that is America’s embassy, will be the focus of anti-globalisation protesters tomorrow. As a clapped-out old protester myself – to my…
Jon Snow
I’m in a high-speed inflatable on the Thames, south of the barrier. What a godforsaken spot! The ExCeL centre where the G20 leaders will meet on Thursday is flanked by a large scrapyard and rather forlorn-looking Victorian dock.
Here’s another country on the global recession’s front line: Botswana, hailed as the longest continuous multi-party democracy in Africa. Botswana is classified by some economists as an “upper middle-income” country, but the wealth is very unevenly spread, so – according to DFID – 49 per cent of the population lives on less than $2 a…
Obscene would be putting it too strongly, but it did seem odd talking about dead African children amid the gilded Louis XIV interiors of Lancaster House last week. One of London’s finest townhouses, just across the road from Buckingham Palace, this is where Rhodesia’s independence from Britain was signed in 1979.
Zambia is reckoned to be the 13th poorest country in the world. Sixty-four per cent of the people live in poverty. More than one in six children die before their fifth birthday, and if you live to the age of 42 you are doing better than average. Britain is the largest bilateral donor to Zambia,…
Jon Snow
The EU President Jose Manuel Barroso is a boundless optimist. Most of our intersection yesterday was satisfactorily off the record. I say “satisfactorily” because, of course, you learn far more, and can eventually drip-feed what you learn subtly into succeeding perspectives as the months go by. But what I did learn whilst I was at…
Europe seems to be moving into gear on the “Eastern Question” – how to stop the financial crisis in Latvia and Hungary from coming back to haunt us. EU finance ministers, meeting in Brussels ahead of a G20 summit in Sussex this weekend, say they want to double the size of IMF funds to $500bn (£362bn).…
Jon Snow
We thought the collision of two satellites in outer space last week unlikely enough. Now we have the absurd spectacle of two submarines, one British, one French, so completely in their “Secret Squirreledness” that they’ve actually collided with each other. So secret, indeed, was the collision that we’ve only heard about it nearly two weeks…