Kim Ghattas is an incredible journalist. Her body of work shows a huge range, from intellectual synthesis and scoops of insight to emotive stories from the frontlines of conflicts. She got her start in her hometown of Beirut before joining the BBC, Financial Times and the Dutch daily de Volkskrant
In Bangkok these days anger over the Thai king’s use of state wealth for personal reasons is at boiling point. In a country where criticism of King Maha Vajiralongkorn can get you locked up, people refer to him as “Super V” in whispered conversations to avoid problems.
There’s
What will become of the letters of Napoleon Bonaparte?
In 2012, then-Prime Minister Karim Massimov reportedly spent nearly €100,000 on original letters written by Napoleon. The Kazakh "Renaissance Man" was also a collector of antiquarian books, such as a 1907 edition of Chinese Diaries and the 1886
At Project Brazen, we’ve been drawing up our rankings of the world’s richest people who don’t appear on the Forbes list, or who are on it, but with a vastly understated level of wealth. The world’s richest people have many reasons to hide their true holdings,
It was about time we confronted one of the big candidates in our search for the world's richest person head-on. There's no better place to start than Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, a former intelligence operative who went on to become one of the most powerful and long-running
Cyrus Janssen is an interesting character. He graduated from Florida State in 2006, according to his LinkedIn, which also shows he’s a PGA-certified professional golfer.
About 15 years ago he landed in Shanghai working at a golf club. He got involved with Chinese television, helping produce a “golf and
Here's some ingredients: chess lover, likes to sit quietly for hours at a time in a dark flotation chamber, wears sunglasses indoors, runs a Middle East spy agency, cycling fanatic, eats one meal a day, believes he can live to age 150, controls billions of dollars and is
As results were tallied up on the night of the the 2020 presidential elections, one high roller was floating a whopping $2.5 billion worth of bets that Donald Trump would lose, according to our sources. He was betting against two counterparties.
Even with Trump refusing to concede and threatening
Forbes Magazine in September listed Changpeng Zhao, a.k.a. CZ, the Chinese-born founder and CEO of crypto-trading exchange Binance, as the 22nd richest person in Singapore, a tiny island nation of 5.5 million people. The magazine put the wealth of CZ, as he’s known, at $1.9
Imagine a distant island part of a crescent-shaped archipelago. Atop a hill
there sits an enormous pink palace with dozens of rooms, gardens and a heliport.
Everyday the household staff wake up to maintain the property, cleaning rooms
and dusting off the Louis XIV furniture. The hedges are trimmed. Seasons
The lack of justice in the “Fat Leonard” bribery case, the subject of our new nine-part podcast, is only just starting to be understood. Most admirals involved with Leonard Glenn Francis, a contractor who bribed his way to a military fortune, supplying women and gifts in return for sweetheart deals,
