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US forces attacked Venezuela on the 3rd of January 2026 and kidnapped its President, Nicolás Maduro, and its First Lady.  They rendered the President and his wife to the US against their human rights and against international law; US Law Enforcement has charged him with various crimes against the US under the US legal system.  Trump will, no doubt, prevent President Maduro ever returning to power.

In September 2021 I wrote a couple of articles for Only Connect* looking at the arguments for and against hunting by rich Westerners in Africa. In the first I mentioned that I had been encouraged to do so by a friend:   A few days later I got a call from another old Africa hand. He had just left Zambia for the UK after forty-three years of work there – cattle-ranching, fish-farming, pig-rearing, and game-farming. He had also been a volunteer game guard. I had first met him

On 28th Dec 2025, we heard of the death of Brigitte Bardot, perhaps one of the greatest sex symbols of the 20th century. Yet fame doesn’t always last: neither my younger wife nor my two youngest daughters had ever heard of her.  But I am glad our editor has such a good memory because he reminded me of a story that I told him more than half a century ago. The story takes me back to 1966, two years before I left school.

Before we head south of the Equator, let’s head toward the Arctic Circle, to one of the last European colonies, a colony, of all places, of Denmark.  We are of course in misnamed Greenland, that huge, empty land of ice. There are few folk in this frozen wilderness, around 50,000, and whilst they would quite like to be independent, they can’t afford it.  The Danes have been kind and generous colonists and call it a “protectorate” and leave the Greenlanders pretty much to their

Last month Stoker brought you the press pack camping on the White House lawn as The Donald demolished the east wing of The White House.  This month; a few local journalists, more demolition, smaller scale .   To North Norfolk (again) where a little local difficulty is starting to blow up into a cause celebre.  Norfolk is flat and windy and when the wind is in the east, cold and wet into the bargain.  That means, if you are waiting for a bus to come along….;  but no, let us

I read with interest Stoker’s piece in last month's Only Connect - Mr Trump Leaves Town. As always, Stoker’s article was well informed, thought-provoking and amusing.  But I fear that his attempt to airbrush the extent of Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Mayoral elections in New York as “not quite so overwhelming for Mamdani as the BBC might have you believe” will fool no one.  With the Democrats’ vote split between Mamdani and former Democrat Governor, Andrew Cuomo, backed b

There are currently a whole host of things to write about. I considered a number of them for my contribution to this month’s Only Connect. Should I write about the worrying rise of anti-Semitism; the attempts by the Labour government to bring in a blasphemy law by the backdoor with their committee discussing a definition of Islamophobia; David Lammy’s proposals to do away with jury trials for any offence for which the maximum jail time is less than three years; the concomitan

The Danes have led the way, as so often these days. From 1 January, 2026 the national postal service, PostNord, will stop collecting and delivering letters. Their red post boxes have been disappearing fast, reflecting the 90% decline in the number of letters posted over the past twenty-five years. I thought about this as I fought to get ten Christmas cards destined for abroad into a British post box late last Sunday night. I hope the postie managed to catch the avalanche on o

The far northeast corner of Bangladesh pokes an uninspiring finger into India’s West Bengal. The landscape differs little from the rest of the country: a carpet of rice fields, more rice fields, scattered settlements and bamboo clumps. Flat as a paratha. The patchy tarmac road north of Panchagarh got progressively worse and eventually I stopped my Land Rover and gazed around me. I was hoping to see the the Himalayan foothills, less than 100 km away, yet even on a clear day co

 My first memory, very clear, is of me cosy in my pram, being pushed along by Opa, my loving German grandfather. We’re passing the pub on the corner near home; up to the right is Harp Hill, round the corner the newsagents, a little further on the council estate known as Waddon, something of a no-go area for my resolutely middle-class parents. Just one thing is odd: the point of view is a few yards away, outside the pram and about eight feet up in the air.