Across the world, speculation about the cause of Maxwell s death ran amok. There seemed to be three possible explanations: accident, suicide or murder
More than £1 billion in debt and just hours before a meeting where he would be asked to explain a £38 million hole in his Mirror Newspapers pension funds, Robert Maxwell s 22st body was found floating in the sea near the Canary Islands.
Last Sunday, in the first part of our serialisation of a gripping new biography of the tycoon, we told of the run-up to his death. Here, in the final extract, we tell how the fall-out from it still reverberates today.
In truth, winning the US presidential election and then the Senate ultimately depended on a tactical decision of grassroots activists to concentrate on mobilising disaffected would-be non-voters to vote out Trump. If Biden’s presidency is to mark a new beginning for democracy it needs to start with introspection and a new path away from an unregulated system of economy and state-surrender to the markets that has deepened misery for billions and imperilled our planet.
If we don’t grasp this nettle now an even bleaker future lies ahead.
To encourage us it’s worth recalling how, in 1989, lifelong communist Joe Slovo put on his big-girl underpants and wrote a reflection on socialism that required a deep and difficult introspection. The article,
Govt should cut taxes on individuals and firms and allow them to play a bigger part in the revival story. Confidence is back. An effective stimulus could address over-the-top taxation, such as cesses, which can be removed. It could also involve cash transfers to the poorer sections of the population, which will spend immediately.
Reporter’s Notebook: Meeting Tommy Lasorda [Daily Press, Victorville, Calif.]
Jan. 17 Former Dodger Manager Tommy Lasorda shook my hand and, with a wink of an eye, told me how much he knew about Victorville.
“That’s where Roy Rogers and Dale Evans had their museum,” Lasorda said during my interview with him in October 2010 at LoanMart Field, the home of the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes. “It’s also one of the last bathroom stops on the way to Las Vegas.”
Seven years earlier, my son, Jacob, and I visited Executive Club Level at Dodger Stadium before a game when, out of the blue, Lasorda walked up to us.