Stephen Phelan

FOR years he was a ghost. Then, suddenly, a corpse. On the night of May 1, 2011, President Barack Obama announced that US forces had located and killed Osama Bin Laden at a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. More of the details emerged in later statements from the White House, Pentagon and CIA, some of them contradictory.

AT this late stage of his life and career, Don DeLillo has been called a prophet so often, for so long, that he is now being sold as such. The publicity materials for his latest novel draw heavily on quotes and blurbs from peers and critics awed by Delillo’s prescience – his spooky receptivity to currents and portents in the culture, his novelistic gift for reading runes in news and sports and weather reports, then telling us how we’re going to die.

ON December 5, 2015, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced that the long-lost San José treasure galleon had been found at last, some 307 years after it was sunk by English warships off his country’s Caribbean coast. The vessel was carrying a fortune when it went down – bullion, coins and gemstones en route from the mines of the New World to the coffers of Spain’s King Phillip V and his French ally Louis XIV.

ON a recent visit to Morocco, I had a touch of déjà vu. It was my first time in the country, my first sight of the capital, Rabat, and the Kasbah of the Udayas. But walking up the outer staircase of that 12th-century fortress, a vivid image came to mind – a lucid memory of a silver car flying down these same steps, through the air, in the opposite direction. “Maybe you’ve seen Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation?” asked my guide Aziz Goumi. Oh yeah, I thought.

IT WAS the first confirmed sighting of Jason Bourne in almost eight years. A recently released photograph showed Matt Damon getting into character on the set of the new Bourne film, as yet untitled. He’s shirtless and conspicuously ripped, strapping up his knuckles like a prizefighter, gaunter and tougher-looking than in the original trilogy.

EDINBURGH smells of sea salt and brewer’s yeast. The Scottish capital is a touristy city, pretty as a snow globe and selling the most superficial brand of Scottishness at its romantic, historic center – toffee, whisky, tartan, bagpipes. Beyond the well-preserved world heritage sites of its gothic Old Town and neo-classical New Town, it is also a prosaic modern conurbation, ringed with affluent suburbs such as Craiglockhart, and comparatively deprived housing schemes in neighbourhoods like Niddrie and Craigmillar, which still suffer from some of the gang and drug problems that blighted them badly in the 1980s.

IN an independent Scotland, the rain would keep falling regardless. Whether we vote yes or no in next year’s referendum, the nation’s future will likely be at least as wet as its recent past, and probably much more so. The best educated guesses are now suggesting that the floods to come will alter our landscape and our way of life to a vastly greater extent than any constitutional sea change.

MADRID turns awfully cold in December. The city sits high and dry on the Meseta plateau, about half a mile above sea level but nowhere near the sea. As the temperature drops, the engine fumes rise into the still air to knit a winter cap of smog overhead that locals call “the beret”. Pollution is a major issue in the Spanish capital. Homelessness is another.

THERE was once a tiny island in the Parana River, barely big enough to give a fisherman a seat or save a drowning swimmer. That river was and is one of the most turbulent on Earth, crashing down through Paraguay and making a musical sound where it rushed around that particular rock. For centuries, native Tupi and Guarani people had called it “Itaipu”, meaning “singing boulder”.

THE whole world remembers what Neil Armstrong said about small steps and giant leaps as he climbed down that ladder to the moon in 1969. Fewer Earthlings could now quote the words spoken by lesser-known astronaut Eugene Cernan when he stepped lightly off the lunar surface three years later. “America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow,” said Cernan, the commander of Apollo 17. “We leave as we came, and, God willing, as we shall return … ”