World

Apologies for absence. I was, indeed, away last week — in airports, in limousines, in meeting rooms booked under false names in secluded hotels, and in the engine-rooms of my financial advisers, urging the number-crunchers on. Secrecy was of the essence, as with all coups, and there can have been few so dramatic as this since Lionel de Rothschild backed Disraeli to scoop up the Suez Canal. Mine, too, represents a financial solution to a financial and economic problem with political overtones. This week the wraps will come off Project Rubicon. It will be a revelation to the money managers who are now scouring the world in search of trading

Bob Geldof has urged us not to dwell on ‘the corruption thing’ — but, says Aidan Hartley, corrupt African leaders are using Western aid to buy fleets of Mercedes Benz cars ‘Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz,’ prayed Janis Joplin, and the Lord obliged. With or without divine intervention, the late Pope had one. So does the Queen. Erich Honecker hunted at night by dazzling the deer in his Mercedes jeep’s headlights until he got close enough to blow them away. Mao Tse-tung had 23 Mercs. Today Kim Jong Il owns dozens, all filled to the gunwales with imported Hennessy’s cognac. Hitler, Franco, Hirohito, Tito, the Shah, Ceausescu,

At this time of year, like every head in the country, I watch over my school with a mixture of pride and concern: pride that so many of our pupils have obviously prepared well for their exams (and have turned up!), and anxiety for those who are finding the ordeal difficult or who will be failing to do themselves justice. But I have a wider concern, too. I have been progressively losing faith in the examination system to inspire stimulating and exciting lessons, and to assess pupils in ways that challenge and that properly differentiate between them. The cry every August, when the exam results come out, is that they

All sorts of revealing things have been said in recent days about the survival chances of the euro. Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, declared that talk of disintegration was ‘complete nonsense’, as crazy as the suggestion that California might break away from the dollar. EU economics commissioner Joaquin Almunia reached for a different comparison, describing the euro as ‘an old-style marriage where divorce does not exist’. Meanwhile a spokesman for the German Bundesbank said the bank’s president, Axel Weber, considered the euro to be ‘a unique success story’ and that ‘he will not participate in such an absurd discussion’ — despite a story in Stern magazine that

There has to be a first time for everything, and now the French have taken my advice. ‘Allez France’, so I urged them last week, ‘votez Non, votez souvent’ — and they did. Offered Europe’s new constitution on a plate with lettuce round it, they sent it straight back like a grounded soufflé. Now I expect to be told that the soufflé’s collapse was all my fault. It has to be somebody’s. Blame is drifting round the Eurosphere like a dark cloud, looking for someone to rain on. Jacques Chirac and Tony Blair now look all set to blame each other. Eurocrats blame the folly of asking impossible questions like

Lord Beaverbrook always pronounced it ‘yat’. He said, ‘Let me give you some good advice, Mr Johnson. Hesitate a long time before you buy yourself an expensive steam yat.’ There are at least 40 different ways of spelling the word, from yeagh, holke, yuath, yought, yott and yuacht, to jact, zeaghr, yoathe and zoughe. ‘And all of them expensive,’ said Lord Curzon who, like his enemy the Beaver, had burnt his fingers with these millionaires’ toys. Yet I have a hankering to own one. ‘The great thing about a yacht,’ said old Aristotle Onassis, sitting on his boat the Christina in Monte Carlo harbour nearly half a century ago, ‘is

Deadly recipes Andrew Gilligan takes a characteristically certain view on what the headline describes as ‘Ricin certainties’ (23 April). Mark Easton researched the background to the trial over several months, travelling across Europe and pressing reluctant police and intelligence officials to talk. The BBC also attended every single day of the court hearings. Mark’s report was based on that experience and his own judgment of the risks posed by the failed plot to make and use ricin. We cannot be sure that Mohammed Meguerba wasn’t maltreated, but his extraordinarily detailed confession led police to the Wood Green flat and the arrest of Bourgass. Andrew mocks the possible impact of a

Rachel Polonsky says Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky is a prisoner of conscience, and his show trial stands as an indictment of the country’s criminal justice system Moscow In an iron cage in Hall 56 of the Meshchansky Court, the former chief executive of Yukos sits on his woollen hat, an anorak stuffed into the bars beside him. As his trial enters its 11th month, it is winter still in Moscow. The lumpen guard beside the cage fiddles with a pair of handcuffs, trying to stay awake. On the first row of visitors’ benches, the elderly mother of the accused clasps her shawl, holding her son in a steady gaze. Emerging from

When Michael Howard was asked about abortion by Cosmopolitan magazine he gave an entirely reasonable answer: that he himself supported the case for abortion, and was reconciled to the practice — a broad statement of principle that one might expect from the leader of a progressive party with hopes of forming a government. It was a right won for women in the 1960s about which there is now, rightly or wrongly, an overwhelming national consensus. But he went on to say what many have long believed, that the legal time limit for abortion should be reduced. It seems incredible that it is still legal to terminate a foetus at 24

The hurricane season has opened early in Florida, where a hedge fund has blown away, leaving some seriously rich investors seriously poorer. The $250 million question, so their attorney says, is whether the money was lost, stolen or strayed. The two Koreans who managed the fund seem to have left town, so it is no use asking them, but the money is unlikely to blow back again, and the attorney’s question was first raised by Fred Schwed in his Wall Street classic, Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? He put it this way: ‘Was it stolen or did you just lose it?’ The result might be the same, but investors have

Yes, our man (Yushchenko) and our system (democracy) won in Ukraine, and once again good triumphed over bad. Yet this presentation, so characteristic of the Western media, misses the point about what the struggle is really about. If the issue was fair elections, there would have been an equal furore about the grossly rigged elections by which Ilham Aliyev assumed the presidency of Azerbaijan in 2003 from his father, a ruthless KGB hardman in the former Soviet state. In fact the West turned a blind eye, in order to maintain access to Azerbaijan’s oil supplies after a $13 billion contract had been signed with BP in 1998. Equally, there would

Baghdad The election-night special on Iraqi TV, rather like the election itself, bore little resemblance to anything that British viewers might be familiar with. There were few candidates to interview (too scared), no counts to visit (too slow), and a merciful lack of macho electoral clichés. In Iraq, the terms ‘battleground seat,’ ‘war room’ and ‘political annihilation’ are not the concoctions of spin-doctors in suits trying to sound tough. They are all too horribly real. The Iraqi Dimblebys might not have had any exit polls to talk about — would you want to stand outside a polling station all day with a clipboard in this country? — but they did

‘What happened to him?’ I said, meeting the eye of a thin magpie through the bars of his cage. Andrew Meads, veteran bird rescuer and proprietor of Safewings wildlife sanctuary at Isham, near Kettering, Northants, related the following case history. A fortnight ago a man driving a stolen car suddenly lost control, mounted the pavement, crashed through a wall and came to a halt in a flower-bed of a suburban front garden. Confronted by the angry house owner as he got out of the car, the driver suddenly whipped out a live magpie from his coat pocket and brandished it at her as if it were a deadly weapon. He

Ross Clark says that the existing law allows us to defend ourselves robustly against burglars. We don’t need a licence to murder them This week sees an event about as common as a total eclipse of the moon: an alignment of views between the House of Commons tearoom and the taproom down at the Dog and Duck. On Wednesday Tory MP Patrick Mercer published a Bill which would allow householders greater rights in fighting intruders. Already the Bill has been enthusiastically backed by numerous MPs on both sides of the House and seems likely to become law unless the government blocks it in favour of its own, similar initiative. The

Max Hastings says it’s about time our leaders stopped playing political games and accepted that ‘international terror’ cannot be defeated by conventional military means If the leaders of the Western world want to do our security a favour, they could adopt a New Year resolution to economise on the use of the word ‘terrorist’ in their rhetoric. This proposal is based not upon indulgence towards al-Qa’eda or the IRA, but upon the need to think clear-headedly about how best to protect our societies. Through the ages, Britain has faced enemies of many creeds and nationalities. Today, a mind-boggling weight of verbiage is addressed to the perils posed not by Spaniards