John Griffin From the vantage point of a remote Portuguese hill village, life in faraway cities seems either quirky or crazed. The Celtic inhabitants—my neighbours—have managed to weather (or not noticed) the coming of the Phoenicians, the Greeks, Romans, Visigoths, and Moors. Self-sufficient farmers, their days are circumscribed by their small plots of land and …
New revelations now appearing in the German press via a chief suspect raise a number of alarming questions about how the British police and the journalists who worked alongside them were complicit in a Portuguese cover-up.
German prosecutors claims to hae the culprit of the kidnapping and possible murder of the most famous case of a missing person ever, Madeleine McCann – who was just three years old when she disappeared in a Portuguese family holiday resort in 2007.
The “lost child” endures as motif and theme, the stalking shadow of much literature, the background to a society’s anxiety. The child, often deemed innocent, becomes the ink blot of loss in such disappearance. In Australia, it was captured by Peter Pierce’s The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety (1999). In wide spaces, innocence has much room to go wrong in, to vanish and encourage judgment.
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 01/29/2020 During the 1990s, Portugal was devastated by a drug crisis where one in every 100 people became addicted to heroin and the rate of HIV infection soared to become the highest in the European Union. But, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, Portugal’s radical move to put an end to […]
Agostinho Neto declaring independence of Angola 11 November 1975
What I want to do here is something very simple. I want to explain how I began to search for Agostinho Neto. I also want to explain the perspective that shapes this search.1
As I sit on the small balcony on the top floor of an old house in the working class neighborhood of Alfama in Lisbon, Portugal, it is early evening, the time for wine and voices wafting on the fragrant breeze through the twisting cobble-stoned streets. The National Pantheon (Panteao Nacional) stares me in the face. I stare back, and then look up to the heavens and to the cross that is silhouetted against the blue sky. It crowns the Pantheon’s massive dome. On its façade stand three statues, only one of which I can see clearly. She is Santa Engracia, a Christian martyr from before the p
[Part 1 of this article addressed the need for Cuba’s participation in conflicts in Zaire, the Congo and Guinea-Bissau during the 1960s to remain concealed for over three decades. It covered the background to the struggles, what Cubans found in Africa, the role of race relations in Cuba’s campaigns, and the recruitment of doctors.
In his lesser known novel, A Small Town in Germany, John Le Carré skewers the diplomatic class in the old West German capital of Bonn. An investigator sent to the drizzly town on the banks of the Rhine discovers a fog of misdirection as he tries to track down a fled spy.
