Frontline Club bloggers
Winning a battle, losing the war: an odd tribute
Despite having only been in Beirut for a few days, I decided to jump ship on Friday and head for Damascus for the weekend. I won’t bore you with a tourist’s guide but it was three days of great food, magic carpets and mint lemonade. On Sunday morning, though, I ditched the white-socks-and-sandals combo, left […]
Elections in Armenia: Filling in the cracks?
Local elections in Yerevan — you gotta love ’em. After years of being ignored, residents of the capital finally get a look-in during every campaign period with the distribution of vote-bribes or the sudden asphalting of back yards, something that happened this weekend outside my apartment building. With a pre-election campaign meeting by the […]
Africa Handshake, Part Six: The Floating Schoolhouse
With two expensive land wars draining the treasury, the Pentagon wants to prevent future conflicts without spending a lot of money. Two years ago the Navy launched its first, roughly annual Africa Partnership Station, sending ships on solo cruises up the West African coast to deliver training and humanitarian aid. The idea: to win new […]
A historic wall in Baku
Well, not as historic as the Berlin wall, but still interesting one with graffiti across all spectra of political scale. Slogans vary from "Sexual Revolution" and "Our Fatherland is USSR" to "Death to Israel" and "F@#$ Bush!". With an English guide by the members of local OL! movement.
Barack Obama singles out Azerbaijan
In his statement in honor of World Press Freedom Day, U.S. President Barack Obama singled out Azerbaijan among the "corner[s] of the globe" where journalists are in jail or being actively harassed: In every corner of the globe, there are journalists in jail or being actively harassed: from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe, Burma to Uzbekistan, Cuba […]
Taxi-driver conspiracy theory on swine flu outbreak
If you’ve spent any time in Mexico, especially Mexico City, then you’ll be acquainted with Mexicans’ love of conspiracy theory. As Ken Ellingwood wrote last year, "many Mexicans feel their leaders have lied so many times about so many things over the years that it’s hard to believe them, even when they might be telling […]
Video: Swine flu outbreak brings quiet to Mexico City
— Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for La Plaza.
Save Darfur, Eat de Waal
Me, I love a good feud. The best ones are not between people with wildly opposing views (I’m thinking Creationists against Darwinists) but between people who should basically be on the same side (say Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins). Generally these are motivated not by intellectual differences but by pure loathing. So too on […]
So long, farewell, dictatorial media law
The repeal of a military era Press Law by the Brazilian Supreme Federal Tribunal was praised by most in the media industry. Instituted in 1967, a year before the military government started violently censoring the press and torturing journalists who denounced the regime, the Law was clealy a legacy of those times. Among other things, […]
First impressions of the Nokia N82
Have no doubt about it. Frontline Club blogger Guy Degen has plenty to answer for. Not only has he been pretty much showing off in recent posts on this blog about streaming live video in Africa from a Nokia N82 mobile phone, but he even had the audacity to rub salt into the wound […]
Baku shooting: some unanswered questions
According to Reuters on 30 April, 2009, a gunman entered State Oil Academy in Baku, Azerbaijan and “went from floor to floor firing on teachers and students after the bell rang for morning classes” before killing himself. According to official sources 13 people, including the gunman himself – Georgian citizen of Azeri descent, Farda Gadirov […]
On the run in Zimbabwe
Wilf Mbanga, a Frontline Club regular and editor of The Zimbabwean Weekly, writes about Press freedom in The Guardian on the eve of World Press Freedom Day. Wilf highlights the cases of Freelance photojournalist Anderson Shadreck Manyere who will be spending World Press Freedom Day on the run, Last week, Manyere was eventually released on […]
The Adams family across Africa
Founding member Robert Adams, family and friends have been busy trekking across Africa these past few months. Robert, one of the original Frontline TV agency cameramen, has been blogging the whole journey along with a little help from the rest of the entourage. Team Jangano 2009, as they’ve called themselves, recently reached Rwanda, where Robert […]
Nationalist party quits government, prepares for municipal election
Nothing is ever simple in the South Caucasus, and no sooner had world leaders hailed a ground-breaking announcement from Armenia and Turkey that might set the scene for the normalization of relations between the two estranged neighbors, than nationalists throughout the region became agitated. Here in Yerevan, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation — Dashanktsutyun, for example, […]
Video: Mexico City vendors feel the effects of swine flu
You can’t have failed to notice that Mexico is in the grip of a swine flu outbreak. Schools, museums and theaters are shut, people have been warned by the government not to kiss or shake hands when they say hello, and around half the people on the street are walking around wearing surgical face masks. […]
A Confession
OK, I’ve been found out. I don’t know how many people have died in Darfur. This was helpfully pointed out by Guy Gabriel on the Making Sense of Darfur blog… The use of these figures in the media is inconsistent; both individual journalists and newspapers themselves vary in the numbers they use. For example, a […]
Nationalist party quits government, prepares for municipal election
Nothing is ever simple in the South Caucasus, and no sooner had world leaders hailed a ground-breaking announcement from Armenia and Turkey that might set the scene for the normalization of relations between the two estranged neighbors, than nationalists throughout the region became agitated. Here in Yerevan, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation — Dashanktsutyun, for […]
Africa Handshake, Part Five: Sao Who?
With two expensive land wars draining the treasury, the Pentagon wants to prevent future conflicts without spending a lot of money. Two years ago the Navy launched its first, roughly annual Africa Partnership Station, sending ships on solo cruises up the West African coast to deliver training and humanitarian aid. The idea: to win new […]
10 worst countries to be a blogger
On the eve of World Press Freedom Day, the Committee to Protect Journalists puts together a list of the 10 worst countries to be a blogger. Visit their site to find out more about the 10 countries and the justification for inclusion. The list, in order, is below and Burma comes out worst. Click each […]
Frontline bloggers – from Syria to Swine Flu
Our ever growing band of Frontline bloggers were busy this past week. Mexico City based Deborah Bonello reports from the unusually empty streets of the Mexican capital, the hospital wards and the restaurants as she follows the swine flu story. Nairobi based Rob Crilly continues to wrestle with mortality statistics as he battles his way towards a November deadline for his first book on Darfur. Meanwhile, we welcomed the latest addition to the Frontline blogging stable, the London and Damascus based Sasa, who will be reporting on and from the Syrian capital. Read more on the blogs…
Hospitals are my new Mexico City hangout
Given the local and international media coverage of Mexico’s current flu outbreak, I was expecting to find lines of people, all of them coughing into their government-issued face masks, winding around the block. Not so.
Breaking the Silence in Kazakhstan
I’ve just returned from this year’s Eurasian Media Forum in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where amid the high-level international debates on war reporting, freedom of speech and the nature of objectivity in an age of sophisticated propaganda, one courageous local journalist dared to raise the issue which no one had been talking about: media freedom in Kazakhstan […]
Frontline Club on Twitter
If you use the increasingly popular microblogging service Twitter, you might be interested to know who is on Twitter from the Frontline blogs, how often they tweet and how to follow them. First up, you’ll need an account, Second, find and follow the bloggers that interest you most. Here’s a round up of Frontline bloggers […]
Get a Grip British and International Media
Looking at British newspaper headlines courtesy of the Sky News website, you’d think that the world is in the throes of a Swine Flu epidemic as opposed to a pandemic. CNN International has become an All Swine Flu, All the Time channel judging by my periodic viewing here in Nairobi. Al Jazeera English (where in […]
Video: Mexico City vendors feel the effects of swine flu
Swine flu outbreak isn’t just taking its toll on people’s health. Local businesses are also starting to suffer as customers stay away. Watch the video for more.
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse in Mexico…
then Mexico gets hit by a 6.0 earthquake! As if grappling with an apparently deadly swine flu weren’t enough.
Banned in Kenya Sort Of
The one book all Kenyans ought to have the opportunity to read about their country is Michela Wrong‘s new "It’s Our Turn to Eat/The Story of a Kenyan Whisteblower." But only those Kenyans who get to travel or know someone who have smuggled the book in or read pirated excerpts on the Internet or can […]
Filming the knock-on effects of swine fly in Mexico City Sunday
I was out shooting all day in downtown Mexico City Sunday, trying to get a sense of how the swine flu outbreak is affecting local businesses.
Tulips, tourists and Taliban
The tourism sector, one of the corner stones of the economy of the Indian Administered Kashmir, seems to be in jeopardy. Tourist arrival rates have taken a nose dive ever since concocted media reports of the presence of ‘Taliban’ in the region. These reports dealt such a blow that local tour operators say that the […]
Swine flu doesn’t deter art fans in Mexico City
If you’ve been paying attention to any news out of Mexico over the last 36 hours, you can’t have failed to notice that we are in the grip of an outbreak of swine flu. As the mediareported yesterday, as many as 60 people have been killed by the outbreak and schools, public offices, cinemas and museums have all been closed by the government as a precaution.
