Anyone following the US ‘War on Terror’ will probably be aware that America is increasingly using drones – unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – to carry out airstrikes. They may also be aware that remote-controlled robots are being used for the purposes of bomb disposal in places such as Iraq. The growing use of unmanned platforms [Read more...]

What do the Great Fire of London, the rise of Adolf Hitler, and the attacks of September 11 2001 have in common? Though their occurrence spanned hundreds of years and different continents, they were all predicted well in advance, and by a single man. Michel de Nostradame, a.k.a. Nostradamus, the 16th century seer who used [Read more...]

In case you didn’t notice, Sunday December 27 marked the 30th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which we now know was a pivotal event in world history. It was partly with this anniversary in mind that I recently read Artyom Borovik’s The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist’s Account of the Soviet War in [Read more...]

“If you have a lot of what people want and can’t get, then you can supply the demand and shovel in the dough”. – Lucky Luciano
It’s a simple enough concept, and one that helped make the father of modern organised crime in the United States cited above ‘one of the most influential builders and titans [Read more...]

My initial reaction at being handed the opportunity to review Riccardo Rebonato’s 2007 work on financial risk, Plight of the Fortune Tellers, was one of enthusiasm (the name’s not Risk Watchdog for nothing). However, while the book proved insightful, I realised early on that I was reading it two years too late.

Prior to Lehman’s 2008 [Read more...]

Global politics and commerce have long been centred on major basins, starting with the Mediterranean, then shifting to the Atlantic and later the Pacific oceans. In recent years, the Indian Ocean has emerged as the focus of a new geopolitical competition and a realm for promoting ‘South-South’ trade and investment, especially between China-India and Africa. [Read more...]

At a time when the global financial crisis has brought the majority of economies around the world to their knees, Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It reminds us that for a significant portion of the world’s population, the events of the ongoing ‘Great [Read more...]