2020/01/03

Mariss Jansons renowned for performances of Mahler, Strauss and the Russian romantics

Mariss Jansons, who has died aged 76 after suffering from a long-term heart condition, would feature very near the top. Indeed, in the first decades of this century he was frequently awarded the accolade of greatest living conductor.

How Africa’s Richest Woman Exploited Family Ties, Shell Companies And Inside Deals To Build An Empire

Two decades of unscrupulous deals that made Isabel dos Santos Africa’s wealthiest woman and left oil and diamond-rich Angola one of the poorest countries on Earth

Her father was president of Angola, a country wracked by poverty and civil war, for 38 years (1979 to 2017), and his administration was widely held to be corrupt. In 2013, Angola ranked near the bottom of a corruption index published by Transparency International

The hacker, Rui Pinto, handed over a hard drive "containing all data related to the recent revelations concerning Ms Isabel Dos Santos’s fortune" to a whistleblowing organisation in 2018, his lawyers said.

The records and articles also show how a plethora of financial firms, lawyers, accountants and government officials worldwide have stepped up to enable the schemes


Prosecutors say that they are tracing money allegedly moved out of the country by the dos Santos family and associates and that they are collaborating with the U.S., U.K., Switzerland, Brazil, Portugal and Congo

The index, which ranks 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of public sector corruption according to experts and businesspeople, uses a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean. More than two-thirds of countries score below 50 on this year’s CPI, with an average score of just 43. It reveals that the continued failure of most countries to significantly control corruption is contributing to a crisis in democracy around the world.

Corruption Rank

Iran’s Deadly Puppet Master and the massacre of innocents

His brilliance, effectiveness, and commitment to his country have been revered by his allies and denounced by his critics in equal measure. What all seem to agree on, however, is that the humble leader’s steady hand has helped guide Iranian foreign policy for decades—and there is no denying his successes on the battlefield. Suleimani is arguably the most powerful and unconstrained actor in the Middle East today. U.S. defense officials have reported that Suleimani is running the Syrian civil war (via Iran’s local proxies) all on his own.

Suleimani has a long history of attacking U.S. service members and is responsible for the deaths of at least 600 Americans in Iraq alone, current and former officials say. O’Brien on Friday also cited Suleimani’s support for President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime in Syria and violent repressing of recent protests in Iran.


The downing of Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 on Wednesday came just hours after Iran carried out missile strikes on two airbases housing US forces in Iraq. The strikes were a response to the killing of senior Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani in a US drone strike in Baghdad on 3 January.