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For a long time, entry came with an unspoken price. Soften the accent. Shorten the name. Leave some part of yourself at the door. Something about that bargain appears to be changing. Arab and Muslim faces are gradually entering spaces that, a generation ago, seemed locked

A US President accused of sexual misconduct with an underage girl. In order to distract attention, the President orders a massive aerial bombing attack on a distant foreign country without prior consent from his allies. Of course this preposterous fiction could never happen in real life, but it was exactly this scenario which played out in the film Wag the Dog...

On the first anniversary of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, I crossed the Arctic Circle heading north. I wasn’t aiming for Greenland, hoping to stake my claim before Trump got there; I was chasing the receding polar night line. We never quite caught up with it; we arrived at Norway’s northernmost point three days late. North Cape had daylight. But the interval between nominal sunrise and nominal sunset was supposedly an hour and a half; it was hard to tell...

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.

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