Africa

Never lighthearted, my African political exile friend sounded particularly lugubrious on the line from Washington. His voice was low and pensive. For the past few months, he said, he’d been hearing of plans hatched by the regime back home for his assassination. ‘They are very gruesome, very gruesome indeed.’ It was not the first time. In the past he’d always passed the details on to the FBI, which had also called him up several times when they thought he was in danger. This time he hadn’t bothered. ‘I always ask them: ‘What are you doing to protect me?’ and they say, ‘Well, if you see anything suspicious, call 911.’ I’ve

Pope Francis has used another mid-flight press conference to make a statement of significance to millions of Catholics. Asked if the Church should drop its opposition to the use of condoms to stop the spread of Aids (a teaching already modified by Benedict XVI), he effectively declared that the debate was a waste of time. He referred to Jesus’s practice – opposed by the Pharisees on legalistic grounds – of healing on the Sabbath. ‘Healing is obligatory!’ he said. Earlier in the interview, the Pope took aim at Catholic ‘fundamentalists’ whose attachment to rules was ‘idolatrous’. Here’s a transcript from RomeReports: Question: Aids is a serious problem in Africa, the epidemic continues. We know that prevention is

Let us suppose that along the coast of Normandy up to one million non-EU migrants are waiting to be packed like sardines in small unseaworthy vessels and to cross the English Channel. Let us suppose that first the Royal Navy, then the navies of a dozen other EU countries, start to search for all such vessels in the Channel right up to the French coast, out into the North Sea and the Atlantic even, and then ferry all the passengers on board to Dover, Folkestone, Hastings, Eastbourne and Brighton in a surreal modern-day never-ending version of the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940. Would the British government agree to take them all?

A few weeks ago someone very dear to me passed on a question about The Spectator, asked them by a friend. The friend, who I know and like, had read Douglas Murray’s recent report from Lampedusa about the poor Med-faring migrants, and her question was this: ‘Is everyone at The Spectator a racist?’ Some insults brush past without leaving a mark, others pierce the skin and sink in. This one sunk like a splinter, and like a splinter I’ve been worrying away at it ever since, turning what was a small injury into a painful, bloody mess. I can dismiss the accusation easily enough — the Spectator office is multi-racial,

My favourite moment in the crisis engulfing football’s governing body, Fifa, came with the intervention of a man called Manuel Nascimento Lopes. Manuel is the Fifa delegate from Guinea-Bissau, an African country which occupies 130th place in the Fifa world rankings but which, far more importantly in this context, punches well above its weight when it comes to institutionalised corruption. Thirteenth in the world, according to the organisation Transparency International — not a bad showing for a smallish sub-Saharan rathole which has been almost permanently engulfed in civil war since the Portuguese got the hell out. Manuel suggested that to vote against Sepp Blatter remaining as boss of Fifa would