Society

We’ve seen over the last 48 hours the disruption that drones can cause – and frankly it’s surprising it’s taken this long for it to happen. The UK Airprox Board, which monitors air safety, says these incidents are on the rise: from 29 in 2015, to 71 in 2016, and 92 last year. Among those recorded are serious incidents like near misses with commercial aircrafts. This is largely because drones are becoming increasingly common. Having matured as a technology in the last decade or so, one unintended consequence of the mobile phone explosion making computer components smaller, cheaper and more powerful is that we’ve also made possible a world where these

Venezuelans are preparing for a difficult Christmas – the worst of recent times. The middle-class families I have spoken to in Barquisimeto, Venezuela’s fourth largest city, are not able to afford even the most basic of ingredients for their traditional Christmas meal of pork leg, hallaca, ham and potato salad. These are families who, in the 90s, owned two cars, bought second homes, studied abroad and went on regular holidays to the Andes or the coast. They enjoyed a standard of life much like middle-class Britain, but now their salaries and pensions won’t even stretch to cover a weekly shop. The average Venezuelan lost 11kg in weight last year alone.

About this time every month, diplomats, UN delegates, and humanitarian officials sit around the circular table in the UN Security Council chamber to take stock of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The meetings are a constant fixture on the Security Council’s agenda, yet the lack of any tangible diplomatic progress in the Middle East’s oldest dispute means that the sessions usually adjourn in much the same way.  The UN special envoy warns the chamber about the violence hovering just around the corner; the United States blames the Palestinian Authority for obstructing the process; and the rest of the Security Council reiterates stale talking points about a two-state solution. Yesterday’s meeting carried on

While they may be the bane of every driver who is stuck for a space in a busy city centre, most of us accept that when we’ve parked on those dreaded double yellow lines, we’ll inevitably have to pay a fine later. But that’s not the case for the various diplomats who inhabit the city of London. With the power of diplomatic immunity, the staff of embassies and consulates based in the capital are able to park where they like – and are not legally obliged to pay their fines. The result, as you can imagine, is some fairly huge debts racked up against the missions of London. In an

Whenever someone mentions the words ‘escape’ and ‘Turkey’ in the same sentence, I immediate think of the classic film, Midnight Express. While the details of how a former British solider jailed in Turkey for fighting against ISIS managed to flee the country are scant, this definitely has the beginnings of a Hollywood plot. To sum it up so far: In 2015, Joe Robinson from Accrington, Lancashire, travelled to Syria where he spent time with armed Kurdish groups, including the YPG. He says he was working as a medic, though he also admits to fighting Isis. He returned to the UK, but in 2017 made the fatal mistake of holidaying in

There’s something really safe and reassuring about the saying ‘same old, same old’. And while we may live in volatile times, there’s no end in sight for our love of buying, or, in the case of most young Londoners, attempting to buy, property. A man’s home is quite clearly his castle, and mortgage brokers have long been a central part of our house-buying experience, with over 70% of all mortgages now sold through brokers. And although digital mortgage brokers like Habito and Mojo are shaking up the market, brokers are set to be a key part of the market for some time. But what really drives your mortgage broker? Is