Category Archives: Journalism
Survey of India – Sleeping giant stirs.
The rural masses show their consumer power, writes Jimmy Burns. Kherala, in the state of Haryana, some 50km south of Delhi, fits the image of the age-old village whose traditional values Mahatma Gandhi sought to preserve. But take a closer look and you’ll discover the modern age tentatively knocking on many a front door. Set well back from the main highway to the capital, the bulk of Kherala’s population of 4,000 live in squat huts made of crude cane and cattle dung. But most of the huts have TVs, electrical …
Argentina coach Diego Maradona writes another chapter in a turbulent life
By Jimmy Burns Published: 15 November 2008 Late one evening in September 1996, I sat sharing a table with former Argentine football star Diego Maradona in San Lorenzo’s in Knightsbridge, wondering if I was about to have my nose broken. I had just handed the world’s greatest football player a signed copy of the first edition of the unauthorised biography I had written of him, instinctively knowing that he might not like it, but feeling nonetheless that this was a necessary defining moment by which I could measure his willingness …
Guantánamo force-feeding claims spur calls for probe
By Jimmy Burns in London and Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington Published: October 7 2005 The Bush administration yesterday faced renewed calls for an independent inspection of its Guantánamo Bay detention facility following allegations that the US military was force feeding 20 detainees on hunger strike. Clive Stafford-Smith, a London-based lawyer acting on behalf of some of the detainees, said the prisoners were being fed through tubes in their noses. “To have my clients being restrained against their will, with a tube forced down their noses, after all they have been …
An invasion planned as a military coup
Published: April 1 2007 For a military operation which its commanders felt was blessed by God and the Virgin Mary, the conquest of ‘Las Malvinas’ by the Argentine junta got off to an inauspicious start. Around midday on 2 April 1982, the official raising of the blue and white national Argentine colours outside the Governor’s residence was interrupted when the flag got stuck halfway up the pole, snapped, and slid downwards. Two smaller flags – representing the Argentine navy and the 25th Infantry Regiment that had formed the main invasionary …
To bomb or not to bomb, asks the IRA.
Published: 25 June 1997 Sinn Fein may lose last excuse not to condemn violence. The word in west Belfast’s republican strongholds is that several “volunteers” have not been seen for days. Although some IRA activists continue to plot guerrilla tactics as they always have, an equal number – if not more – are engaged in one of the most critical internal debates in the republican movement since the run-up to the August 1994 ceasefire. At issue is whether the movement abandons once and for all its twin-track strategy of the …
