Category: Latest News

The great Pelé, dead at 82, had some great flaws. They involved dictators and racism.

3 January 2023 By Paul Martin

By Paul Martin, Exclusive. Pelé’s legacy has two very big shadows: his willingness to serve dictators and his astonishing silence on racism. Despite his humble origins and the racism of his society, Pelé often seemed willing to consort with hardline right-wingers — a stain on his otherwise demigod status.   During the period of the military dictatorship […]

South African rugby rocked by a sex scandal.

1 October 2022 By Paul Martin

Elton Jantjies, the 31-year-old star Springbok fly-half with 46 Tests to his credit, has issued a humiliating apology for having noisy sex with a woman in a guest house close to the rugby ground  — where he was playing a crucial match for his country.   Last week he was dropped and from the South African national […]

Halt funding after Abbas outburst, says a German politician. And also, he says, make sure full compensation is paid to victims’ families for five decades of German blunders and indifference to the 1972 Munich Olympic killings.

23 August 2022 By Paul Martin

VERSION ONE Exclusive. A senior German political figure has called on the Federal Government to halt the flow of funds to the Palestinian Authority, as a result of the “50 Holocausts” remark made by the PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas in Berlin last week. Ludwig Spaenle held the posts of Minister of Culture, Sports, Science and Education over […]

Meeting Ayman Zawahiri’s family in Egypt, I gained some special insights into the now-assassinated Al Qaeda leader.

2 August 2022 By Paul Martin

Ayman Zawahiri,  successor to the slain Osama Bin Laden, warned the world in an Internet message soon after he became leader, that Al Qaeda would remain a ‘source of horror and a nightmare chasing America, Israel and their allies’.  That, of course, included Britain.  It was a message that intelligence communities took very seriously.  The evidence from his own life story […]

Is it all change in Ukraine’s Black Sea port. A grain of truth, or a Russian charade?

29 July 2022 By Paul Martin

By Paul Martin, Chornomorsk Port. Right opposite the port that could become the first gateway for wheat to leave Ukraine stands a grey lamp-post..  The area around it is now called Freedom Square, but until the Soviet Union ended it was known as Lenin Square.   The name-change is part of a pattern across the Ukraine, of becoming more and more distant […]

Sri Lanka’s Cardinal offers legal aid to foreign families. Can they hold the deposed ruling family accountable for the mass murders of Easter 2019?

17 July 2022 By Paul Martin

Exclusive.   David Linsey, whose younger brother and sister were killed in a suicide bombing in a hotel in Sri Lanka three years ago, has supported calls for an urgent investigation into who lay behind the terrorist attacks. He believes the collapse of the Rajapaksa family’s decades-long grip on power may make a proper investigation easier. “I […]