Marseille is making headlines — as usual for the wrong reasons. Back in October, two teenagers were caught up in the deadly gang wars that have long plagued France’s second largest city. The first, aged 14, was arrested for killing …
The West enflamed Haiti’s nightmare
Yesterday, as television and radio sets across Haiti issued warnings about a tropical storm churning across the Caribbean Sea, its residents could be forgiven for wondering what they did to deserve such torment. Already the poorest country in the Western …
El Salvador’s cryptic Bitcoin revolution
Driving along El Salvador’s Pacific coast, I’m greeted by a sign: “Bitcoin Beach. The future is here.” As I turn onto a dirt road, another appears: “Pay in Bitcoin, $10 Pupusas and Beer”. Finally, I arrive at the beach — …
Inside El Salvador’s brutal gang crackdown
In her cramped breeze-block home on the outskirts of El Salvador’s capital, across an alley from a school currently occupied by soldiers, 65-year-old Francisca Alas rolls down her sock to show a scar from the machete of a gang member. …
Idleness is the tool of the devil
Idleness is the strangest of Beveridge’s five Giants, an amorphous shapeshifter in comparison with the terrible lumbering colossus Want. It appears last in Beveridge’s sequence, a place usually reserved for the most baleful of adversaries — Death upon its pale …
Liverpool has been seduced by gangs
I was 12 when we moved to the Cantril Farm Estate in Knowsley. It was July 1976, and we didn’t have much choice: my family had been included in a housing deal to relocate 200,000 council tenants to one of …