The only war in which Jonathan Manthorpe felt compelled to hire bodyguards was in Somalia. Lessons were learned the hard way in Somalia’s last quarter century, but as a glimmer of light now illuminates the country, at last. An excerpt of his
Long John Baldry was the British blue-eyed blues pioneer who taught Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart and Elton John how to sing blues-based rock ‘n’ roll. But, as s Arts columnist Brian Brennan reports in his new time capsule piece, Baldry got left behind when Jagger,
Today marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, when Soviet troops freed the survivors of the Nazi death factory. More than one million people were murdered at Auschwitz, most of them Jews. Read Auschwitz: ‛It took from three to 15 minutes to
‘The American people’ do not exist, writes Tom Regan, author of F&O’s Seeking Orenda column. “They are as much of a myth as Sasquatch, Area 51, Nigerian yellow cake, and the Tooth Fairy.” An excerpt of his new column, Why the ‘American people
On January 25, say Scotch drinkers the world over, we are all Scottish. Today’s the birthday of Robert Burns, the Scottish bard and one of the first Romantic poets. ’tis as good an excuse as any to pour a dram of single malt.
For years the world has watched Greece, the cradle of democracy, implode in protests and economic decline. Indebted Greece has long been ill-served by its political and business leaders, and lately beholden to creditors bent on austerity. And today when the Greek
January 23, 2015 Scientists, including 17 Nobel laureates, this week moved the minute hand of their terrible Doomsday Clock two minutes ahead, as they urged world leaders to defuse nuclear and climate-change threats to the world and humanity. We humans have, metaphorically, just
ANDERS SANDBERG, University of Oxford January 23, 2015 The second hand of the Doomsday Clock is now only three minutes to midnight. This is the closest to apocalypse we have come since 1984 – the coldest of Cold War years, just a year
It’s not unusual for environmental risk to come up at the World Economic Forum, held this month in Davos, notes Natural Security columnist Chris Wood. “What appears to be harder for the high-net-worth and high-power-quotient individuals meeting in the Alps to accept, is
CHRIS WOOD: NATURAL SECURITY January, 2015 The one percent are meeting in Davos, Switzerland, this week—or at least, that fraction of the one percent that retains either a trace of social conscience or an instinct for personal survival that entails more than