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Jon Snow
For what it is worth, and it is worth very little, I think the Aussies are going to win the Lords test today. They will get the remaining 200 runs with one wicket to spare, and I say this after watching them for the two hours before bad light stopped play last night and watching most…
Gary Gibbon
Latest update from the Speaker hustings where potential candidates for the job are speaking.
Jon Snow
Gordon Brown will announce an inquiry into the Iraq war this week. My sources tell me that this will not be chaired by a judge, senior or retired. It will be chaired instead by a historian. The hot tip in Whitehall is that it is likely to be the respected Churchill and Holocaust scholar Sir…
Jon Snow
Ever since she was discovered to be claiming a room in her sister’s house in Nunhead, south London as her primary residence, home secretary Jacqui Smith has been in trouble. Her husband renting a couple of porn movies on the taxpayer didn’t help. But in truth the first woman home secretary, the second youngest holder…
Jon Snow
If the expenses scandal is about anything, it is about the public’s right to know what politicians do in their name and with their money. Yet as the parties attempt to purge the transgressors, all the indications are that the same secrecy and attempted cover-up that led to the leaking of MPs’ expenses to the…
Jon Snow
A hundred and fifty thousand people over 10 days, packing events and discussions that range through politics, philosophy, economics and high culture. The Hay festival appears if anything to have benefited from the recession. “Stay at home” Britain has come in its droves. I have never seen the place fuller.
The story of the unwanted visitor to the world’s only Nobel laureate-political prisoner makes truly bizarre reading. It’s so weird, in fact, that it could really only happen in a country whose political manoeuvrings are stage-managed by a military junta. Burma’s “ministry of truth” appears to have fooled only the generals into thinking that everything’s…
If you step away from the details of bathplugs, unnecessary taxis and sibling cleaning contracts, there is a staggering picture emerging about the MPs who decide our laws. During the biggest housing boom in Britain’s history (and some economists argue in world history) many of the politicians who had the power to rein it in…
As the week comes to a close, we notice Nick Paton Walsh’s report on a camp in Sri Lanka has consistently been the most-watched video on the Channel 4 News website since its broadcast on Tuesday – a likely reflection of the large international appetite for news from the country. The report features the first…
To mark the 15th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) has released photographs depicting the lives of survivors. These pictures come straight from DFID, and are not a product of Channel 4 News journalism, but they do tell an interesting tale of those who suffered, survived and have had…
Jon Snow
An overnight flight to Zambia. Haven’t been here in 20 years. Bigger, but still verdant green boulevards into town. Early morning bicycles laden with vast bags of charcoal struggle along the dust tracks at the roadside. I’m here for a conference, of which more in the next blog.
They worry this is the tip of the iceberg. Swat used to be called the Switzerland of Pakistan. A tidy, idyllic valley where the elite used to ski, the surroundings themselves so beautiful as to make you feel rested. But today, that’s all changed. About two years of intense clashes between the army and militants there…
Jon Snow
Several readers of this blog have commented on my interview in last night’s programme on the back of Lindsey Hilsum’s report on the Pope’s trip to Africa. En route to Cameroon, Pope Benedict remarked that condoms were not a solution to the spread of Aids but part of the problem. After the piece, I spoke…
Jon Snow
The Pope’s remarks outlawing condoms yet again, this time in a sermon delivered in Yaounde, Cameroon, call to mind an eerie experience we had on this programme next to a swimming pool in Kampala back in 2005.
Iran has the largest heroin problem in the world. But when Foreign Correspondent Jonathan Miller and filmmaker Mehran Bozorgnia went to meet addicts, they found a progressive treatment programme.