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Come here for my reports ranging from the shanty towns of Kenya to the boardrooms of the City as I cover an agenda of "people, planet and profit".
12:37 UK time, Thursday, 28 March 2013
Banks in Cyprus have reopened after a two-week closure sparked by discussions over an EU-IMF bailout, amid tension over possible large scale withdrawals. I am in Cyprus to find out what is going on.
"In two months' time all this will be brown," says the taxi driver, breaking the spell of the fresh, green landscape rolling past us.
15:02 UK time, Friday, 22 March 2013
I am blogging instead of broadcasting today as I have laryngitis. But I might still get shouty. The question people in financial markets are shouting about is: what on earth does Germany think it is doing? It triggered the Cyprus crisis and is playing hardball, rejecting the Cyprus government's latest attempt to solve it. Here is my take on what is happening.
First the facts.
15:42 UK time, Wednesday, 20 March 2013
There is one graph that has been mesmerizing policymakers for the past two years. It is not the Spanish bond yield, nor China's latest guess at its own growth rate.
It is this graph of debt to GDP in the developed world after WWII.
11:48 UK time, Tuesday, 5 March 2013
Paul Mason catches a new play at the Royal Court inspired by the financial crisis, which paints a picture of society on the brink of breakdown.
"What actually is a bond?" asks Lucinda, chief executive of a designer chocolate startup, in Anders Lustgarten's controversial new play at the Royal Court.
17:49 UK time, Tuesday, 19 February 2013
When it comes to seeking asylum, Greece is the gateway to Europe. But the Greek asylum system is a mess. Paul Mason spoke to one man who has spent more than a year on the road - in squats, living rough and for a time in detention - about the experience of trying to claim asylum on Europe's frontier.
It was hard to forget Mohamed Lamhoud. I met him in a shattered factory in Patras, Greece, squatting there alongside hundreds of other young, male migrants. Their clothes were filthy; many had wounds consistent with being beaten up, or fleeing being beaten up. They were drinking and washing from a standpipe.
21:14 UK time, Wednesday, 13 February 2013
Greece is a country where economic crisis has given way to social crisis.
The far right on the march, tube strikes have paralysed the capital. Now there is growing political violence.
16:06 UK time, Thursday, 17 January 2013
Just off the vast expanse of Albert Square in Manchester is a smaller square named after an American president.
Unnoticed, for the most part, by post-pub revellers and shoppers, Abe himself towers above the scene in Lincoln Square, hatless, tousled hair flying and brow furrowed.
16:07 UK time, Tuesday, 18 December 2012
Valencia, Spain: You go down a track, cross a puddle and enter a low pine forest, strewn with fly-tipped construction waste, cigarette packets, beer bottles. You find a track big enough for an open truck to get down. And there's the wall. It is about three feet (one metre) high, faced with concrete and full of bullet holes.
This is the wall against which, between 1939 and 1956, two thousand three hundred people were executed. They were Republican prisoners, brought from jail in batches of fifty - men and women on the losing side in a civil war.
16:41 UK time, Tuesday, 20 November 2012
In the era whose secret he uncovered, a journalist's office would have looked just like the one where Yang Jisheng works now. The tiled floor, the grimy window panes, the desk piled two feet high with papers, envelopes and books. The Mao-era radiators. The cigarette ash and the dust.
Under Mao Zedong, Yang's good fortune was to find a job as a reporter with China's state-run Xinhua news agency. His misfortune had been to see his father die of hunger in 1961, at the height of the famine that killed an estimated 36 million people:
17:23 UK time, Wednesday, 14 November 2012
Getting in was easy. My press pass was barcoded so that as I walked though the backdoor of the Great Hall of the People an LCD screen flashed up for all to see a personal welcome screen with my photo.
Then the queuing started. While the Communist Party's 18th Congress elected its Central Committee, we, the journos, queued, and queued and finally sat on the carpet and slumped against the marble walls and queued some more.
17:05 UK time, Thursday, 1 November 2012
There's a joke running around about social media: Facebook is how you want people to see you, Twitter is how you see yourself; Tumblr is - "Hey look! Funny cat picture meme!"
If so David Karp has raised a heck of a lot of money on the back of funny cat pictures. The 26-year-old who invented Tumblr is currently burning through $125m of venture capital in his quest to make Tumblr, at some point, make money.
19:30 UK time, Friday, 26 October 2012
Of all the operas written during Germany's Weimar Republic (1919-33), probably the most haunting is the last.
Kurt Weill's The Silver Lake, written with playwright Georg Kaiser, tells the story of two losers - a good-hearted provincial cop and the thief he has shot and wounded - as they make their way through a society ruined by unemployment, corruption and vice.
20:49 UK time, Wednesday, 24 October 2012
Newsnight's report on the Greek far-right party Golden Dawn made headlines across Europe last week.
In it, MP Ilias Panagiotaros claimed Greece was "in civil war" and indeed advocated a new kind of civil war, pitting the far-right against migrants, anarchists, etc.
17:02 UK time, Wednesday, 17 October 2012
Greece's far-right party, Golden Dawn, won 18 parliamentary seats in the June election with a campaign openly hostile to illegal immigrants and there are now allegations that some Greek police are supporting the party.
"There is already civil war," says Ilias Panagiotaros. If so, the shop he owns is set to do a roaring trade.
11:04 UK time, Monday, 15 October 2012
When most of us were still struggling to work our analogue modems, in the mid-1990s, one man had worked out where the internet was going.
Manuel Castells, one of the world's most cited sociologists, proclaimed the dawn of the "network society".
13:10 UK time, Thursday, 11 October 2012
International Monetary Fund (IMF) boss Christine Lagarde called on Thursday for a slowdown in the austerity measures being implemented across the world, including in Greece - where IMF officials are currently locked in negotiations to release a crucial 31bn euros (£26bn) of bailout cash.
The move came after IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard admitted the Fund's calculations of the impact of austerity had been seriously wrong.
17:23 UK time, Friday, 5 October 2012
If Catalonia does, one day, get its own air force, it will probably be able to afford something better than Spitfires.
For now the kit-built replica planes zoom acrobatically across the beach in Barcelona, the crowd's "oohs and ahhs" moderated by that essential Catalan characteristic: cool.
13:49 UK time, Tuesday, 2 October 2012
"Independence for Catalonia? Over my dead body… and those of many soldiers." That was how Francisco Alaman reacted to the 1.5 million strong demonstration in Barcelona last month, with many calling for independence for the region.
It's a view. Quite strongly held not just on the right in Spain but on the centre left. However Alaman is a serving soldier: a colonel. And it wasn't the only incendiary thing he said.
00:14 UK time, Sunday, 23 September 2012
The Spanish regions are heavily in debt. People rely on them for free health and education, but they can no longer pay their bills - and they can't expect much help from central government, as it too struggles under a huge financial burden.
You always know if an interview is going to be fun if the interviewee has a sharp, diagonal fringe.
19:35 UK time, Wednesday, 19 September 2012
On 26 July the European Central Bank (ECB) boss, Mario Draghi, assured the markets he would do "whatever it takes" to save the euro. "Believe me it will be enough," he added.
On 6 September 2012 he delivered on that pledge: the ECB finally agreed to buy up the debts of countries in danger of default and hold them.
Paul joined the BBC in 2001, making his first live appearance on the day of 9/11. He covered the corporate scandals that followed: Enron and Worldcom.
His groundbreaking reports on the rise of China as an economic power won him the Wincott Award in 2003. He has covered stories as diverse as Hurricane Katrina, gang violence on Merseyside, the social impact of mobile phones in Africa and the rise of Aymara nationalism in Bolivia.
Paul was one of the BBC's first bloggers and has twice been nominated for the Orwell Prize.
He covered the collapse of Lehman Brothers live from outside its New York HQ and, "has hardly stopped for breath since then", reporting on the social and economic impact of the global meltdown from the mean streets of Gary, Indiana to the elite salons of Davos.
Born in Leigh, Greater Manchester, in 1960 he studied music and politics at Sheffield University, switching to journalism in the early 1990s.
He is the author of two books: Live Working or Die Fighting, How the working class went global; and Meltdown: The end of the age of greed.
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