Timur Kulibayv is known far beyond the borders of Kazakhstan. He is known as a buyer of lavish villas in Spain, a royal estate in Britain and some other outstanding properties. But what is the origin of the enormous wealth one should have to buy the most expensive villa in Switzerland? And then to buy the second and [...]

As a lethal virus scorches its way across continents, the leftwing Indian rights campaigner Gautam Navlakha has been reminding us of the words of Leonard Cohen, urging people to speak up for the right things: “There is a crack/a crack in everything, that’s how light gets in.” While many of us experience lockdown [...]

For the entirety of Ronald Reagan’s first term, despite overwhelming evidence that Aids was a public health crisis, he brushed off the disease’s severity, saying “it would go away”. By 1987, Aids had killed more than 29,000 Americans. In that same year, Don Francis, an official at the Centers for Disease [...]

On a bright autumn evening during last year’s Labour party conference, Concorde 2 – a well-known Brighton music venue – hosted a “Radical Variety Show” that brought party bigwigs together with younger activists, many of whom, until quite recently, had never been card-carrying Labour members. Under strobe [...]

The British are dying in “care” homes across the country without saying goodbye to their families. The government said goodbye to goodbyes on 13 March when it ordered care home providers to “stop all visits to residents from friends and [...]

British governments are notoriously bad at recognising a crisis until it impacts them, or their class, directly. London’s pioneering sanitation system was not developed until the cholera epidemics of the early 19th century had reached parliament’s windows, with the “Great Stink” wafting in from the Thames. [...]

The Luxembourg government has unveiled unprecedented economic measures in an effort to combat the effects of Covid-19 and prevent the country’s economy from [...]

In times of crisis, misinformation abounds. Covid-19 can be cured by ingesting fish-tank cleaning products. Coronavirus was developed in Chinese (or American, or French) labs. Cristiano Ronaldo and the pope tested [...]

This is an economic crisis and it’s right that government takes unprecedented steps to compensate employees and the self-employed from huge income hits. But how are we going to pay for these decisions? Eventually taxes will go up, but governments need to raise cash right now as tax revenues fall and spending surges. [...]

Fifteen years ago a group of rich countries gathered for its annual get-together at the Gleneagles hotel in Perthshire, Scotland. A number of African leaders were invited to the summit, from which a deal emerged: the west’s major powers would provide debt relief and aid in return for cleaner and better [...]