Paul Wood

Paul Wood was a BBC foreign correspondent for 25 years, in Belgrade, Athens, Cairo, Jerusalem, Kabul and Washington DC. He has won numerous awards, including two US Emmys for his coverage of the Syrian civil war

Trump should pardon Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden says that he didn’t mean to end up in Russia when he fled after leaking secrets from his job at the United States National Security Agency (NSA). He writes in his autobiography, Permanent Record, that he agonised about where to go. Europe was impossible because of extradition. Africa was a ‘no-go zone’ because the

The mood in Lebanon is for revolution

When 2,700 tonnes of ammonium nitrate left in Beirut’s port exploded last week, a three-year-old girl named Alexandra Najjar was torn from her mother’s arms as they ran inside from their balcony. In the same instant, every-thing in the apartment was flying through the air — doors, window frames, shards of glass, the air-conditioning unit,

Was the ‘pee tape’ a lie all along?

Sir Anthony Eden’s wife, Clarissa, famously said that at times she’d felt as if the Suez Canal was flowing through her drawing room. Over the past four years, perhaps American voters have felt the Volga lapping at their feet. There’s been no escape from Russia and even the Mueller inquiry did not put the matter

How much worse can things get for Lebanon?

Just before Twitter started firing out messages about a ‘bomb’ in Beirut, our cleaner rang us in tears, shaking, telling us our house had been damaged by an explosion. Video from her phone showed our windows blown out and splintered furniture. There was debris in the street and wrecked cars at odd angles. A man

Audio Reads: Rachel Johnson, Paul Wood, and Simon Barnes

25 min listen

This week’s episode features Rachel Johnson’s diary, in which she talks about becoming an aunt again; Paul Wood on why mass testing isn’t good enough – and why we should be testing everyone in the country; and Simon Barnes on why boxing is the most natural thing in the world.