Paragraph 1: The Night the Tenement Burned The swift, brooding Glasgow darkness had settled over the sandstone tenement, a familiar, comforting weight that usually promised a quiet night in the city’s East End. The wind carried the damp chill of the Clyde, and the streetlights cast a sickly amber glow on the wet pavements. Then, without warning, the peace was shattered. A flicker at a third-floor window became a hungry, orange tongue, and within minutes, the night was alive with the cacophony of blaring sirens and the thick, acrid scent of burning wood and plastic. Residents, half-dressed and disoriented, stumbled…

In the closing weeks of Ghana’s 2024 election campaign, a video began to move through the country the way the most dangerous things do: fast, shared, impossible to ignore. Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh, then the New Patriotic Party’s running mate, stood in front of a crowd of small-scale miners and promised that seized excavators would be returned to them, so they could go back to work undisturbed. In a country that had watched the Pra and the Ankobra rivers turn the colour of wet clay, that had argued about galamsey, the unregulated small-scale gold mining tearing at its land and…