John Perry

In their general election manifesto, the Conservatives promised to ‘extend the Right to Buy to tenants in Housing Associations’. More than 1500 housing associations, all registered charities and some, like Peabody and Guinness, over a century old, would have to let tenants buy their houses at discounts of up to £103,000 each. The cost would be met by forcing local authorities to sell their most valuable council houses. After paying off councils’ debt, in theory these sales would not only provide enough to compensate housing associations for their losses but also allow replacement homes to be built both for them and for the councils. In practice, no one knows if the numbers will stack up: the financial details were removed from the Conservatives’ website shortly after they were put up and official figures haven’t yet been produced.

Every year the Global Footprint Network calculates when we have collectively used a year's worth of the earth's resources. Last year we reached it one day sooner than in 2013. This year we've brought the date forward by six days, to 13 August. Of the countries with a biocapacity deficit, the UK is 12th (one place lower than the United States; the worst performer is the United Arab Emirates).

Ten days in Honduras: a TV reporter and a cameraman, a radio reporter, a trade union leader, the head of an indigenous community fighting forest destruction, two transsexual activists, two bodyguards of the director of the agrarian reform institute and a lawyer were all murdered. The daily political killings are rarely investigated. Even if they lead to arrests, there is a backlog of 93,000 criminal cases awaiting trial.

In January 1983, police in Los Angeles arrested frogmen bringing 400 pounds of cocaine ashore from a Colombian freighter. But they missed their main target, the drug importer Norwin Meneses, who may have been tipped off by officials. In August 1986, a US Customs informant, Joseph Kelso, told his handlers that Drug Enforcement Administration officials in Costa Rica were sharing profits from Meneses’s LA drug shipments. The Costa Rican police arrested Kelso.

On the morning of 17 December, schoolchildren in Coralito assembled under the Cuban flag to sing the anthem before starting lessons. Early sunshine picked out five palm trees on the roadside opposite the school. They were planted in support of the 'Cuban Five', agents sent to Miami to disrupt anti-Castro plots by Cuban exiles in 1998, but arrested and imprisoned for spying against the US. There are symbols or images of the Five all over Cuba, often accompanied by Castro's declaration 'Volverán!' ('They will return'). Last February Fernando González, the second to finish his sentence, returned to Havana, but the remaining three had longer sentences: one, Gerardo Hernández, was serving two life terms.