Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s socialist president, remembers ”with great affection” the day he went to see Queen Elizabeth II in 2001. ”There’s something I’ll never forget. When I got out of the car at the entrance to the palace, I spotted a coin lying on the ground and picked it up, and saw it had her face on one side. So I took the coin,” he says.
Iraq’s embattled Prime Minister, Ibrahim Al-Jaafari, speaks to Jonathan Steele in Baghdad in the leader’s first interview since United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s recent move to break the Iraqi political deadlock.
Still ashen-faced six days after escaping death, Dr Ali Faraj pulls his hair aside to display a scar above his left ear. One of Iraq’s top cardiologists, he was seeing a patient when a group of kidnappers wearing ski masks stormed into his Baghdad clinic, knocked his receptionist to the floor and when he emerged to investigate, ordered him to come with them.
With its surging economy and a new middle class of about 300-million, the preference gap between air and train travel is matched by a growing divide between urban and rural people. India is still a predominantly agricultural country and a decade of growth has left half a billion people behind.
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/ 2 December 2005
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World Aids Day was marked around the globe on Thursday as a moment for much concern, and a small amount of hope. Tentative signs of progress in preventing the spread of HIV and treating those with it are outweighed by the failures of governments, both donors and recipients, to confront the pandemic with the urgency it deserves.
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/ 19 October 2005
The Nile has witnessed more centuries of human eccentricity than any of the world’s great rivers, but what it is now experiencing must rank high in its annals of misery. Hundreds of people laden with bags, bedding and bicycles wait disconsolately on wharves. Under the unremitting sun, anxious passengers crowd the flat decks of rickety barges meant only for cargo.
Robert Zoellick is the archetypal United States government insider, a man with a brilliant technical mind but zero experience of any coalface or war front. Sliding effortlessly between Ivy League academia, the US Treasury and corporate boardrooms (including an advisory post with the scandalous Enron), his latest position is the number-two slot at the State Department.
Saddam Hussein’s effigy was pulled down again in Baghdad’s Firdos Square last weekend. But unlike the made-for-TV event when United States troops first entered the Iraqi capital, the toppling of Hussein on the occupation’s second anniversary was different. 300 000 Iraqis were on hand, and they threw down effigies of US President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair as well.
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/ 19 December 2004
Come to Elephant Pass to witness a rarity: a place where the contradictions of the ”war on terror” have not produced the usual regression. In most of the world the fight against ”international terrorism” has had negative effects. But here in northern Sri Lanka, a group that Britain, the US and other western governments label terrorists administers a huge chunk of land with its own police and courts.
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/ 11 November 2004
In the days when Britain was being forced to give up one colony after another, the phrase ”father of the nation” was much in vogue. Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, Archbishop Makarios in Cyprus and Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia were among the many who won this informal title. Forty years on from the age of decolonisation, Yasser Arafat is the last man who can claim that status.