News
Those White Arab Horsemen At It Again…
Here’s how one UN official apparently summed up the Darfur conflict to an unnamed celebrity passing through N’Djamena recently… Un-named UN figure: (enthusiastically) “Yes, basically the janjaweed are the Arabs, you know the ‘white’ Arab horsemen who carried out the killings against black African tribes in Darfur” The full, rather comical exchange is posted on Celeste Hicks’ blog. […]
Frontline Broadsheet is coming
The quarterly Frontline Broadsheet is coming. It’s high quality. It’s printed – and yes I do mean on paper, we’re doing this the old fashioned way – and it’s subscription only. To find out more send an email to broadsheet@frontlineclub.com with the word BROADSHEET in the subject header. For blog readers and Twitter followers, here’s […]
MoD and digital media: “We haven’t gripped it, but we’re getting there”
"I could not write about the past week without mentioning the tragic death of Rifleman Adrian Sheldon. Shelly was a much loved member of the Fire Support Platoon here at FOB [Forward Operating Base] Inkerman and his loss has been extremely hard to come to terms with." In among the stories about political meltdown you […]
Tweeting and fixing with the BBC
Relations between estranged neighbours Armenia and Turkey is big news at present, and not least since the August war between Russia and Georgia last year and Obama taking the presidency in the United States. That’s also good news for yours truly because in addition to fixing for Al Jazeera English covering the story, […]
Video: American design duo launches arts and culture mag in Nicaragua
Nicaragua’s culture, arts and music scene is the focus of a new magazine launched by two American designers living in the country’s capital, Managua. Hecho, which means "done" or "made" in Spanish, is the project of Christopher Sataua, 27, from San Diego and Oliver Best, 31, from Oregon. I caught up with them from Mexico […]
Sharek961: Lebanon monitors its own elections
With just three days to go before the elections here, Beirut’s airport has been busy receiving observers from across the world – the most high profile of them being former US President Jimmy Carter. But one new project is hoping to reinforce the teams from the US, the EU and the Arab League by enlisting […]
Picture perfect this morning – Chapultepec lake
I was walking through Chapultepec park this morning on my usual route to the office and I had my stills camera with me for the first time in a while – I’ve been focusing more on video recently. The clouds were picture perfect, the lake’s almost too-green waters still as glass. Clouds reflected in one […]
The whole world in an airplane
The disaster of the Air France Airbus A330 is with no doubt an event that will remain in history. Today, after over 24 hours of search operations by the air forces of three countries, the first pieces of wreckage were found. The story will go on for weeks before all the questions are answered. One […]
WRL: Twitter and the Global Media Forum
A few war reporting links to keep you moderately entertained while I put together a hopefully more enlightening post. (I was hoping to have it for today, but there’s been a slight delay.) 1. Hello, Twitter: Goodbye, McKiernan. The US military has launched an Afghanistan Twitter feed. Just recently the feed has been providing updates […]
I can’t talk about these things…
Dutch video journalist Ruud Elmendorp spent almost a week in Mogadishu, the embattled Capital of Somalia, at the end May. The insurgents led by the Al Shabab and Al Hizbul movements are trying to topple the internationally recognized government of president Sheik Sharif Ahmed. In this guest post for the Frontline Club, Ruud reports from […]
Dodging Antonovs in Darfur
It wasn’t much more than a speck. A tiny, white fleck in the wide blue sky above us. Our 4×4 lurched to a halt as Yahia, the driver, peered through the 10 inches of windscreen scraped clean of the mud that camouflaged the rest of the vehicle. Then we were off again, lurching over the […]
Steve McCurry on becoming a photographer
Steve McCurry is one of my favourite photographers. Famous for his images of Asia, his work is always a pleasure to come back to. His richly-textured collection South Southeast is one of just a handful of photo books to have carved out a space on the small bookcase in our living room. Perhaps more importantly, […]
On Bruce Riedel
By now Bruce Riedel is pretty well-known, so I’ll spare you the CV: intimately involved in US foreign affairs in this general area (Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Central Asia etc) he helped run one of the reviews of Afghan policy that Obama requested at the beginning of the year. Nowadays he’s still quite active; writing, advising […]
Magnanimous Mahinda and the Foreign Media Mob
Some little man in a Colombo cafe started shouting abuse at me the other day. I don’t know him, and I don’t know why. That sort of thing is very rare here, but perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, given the current "you’re either with us or against us" climate. The vast majority of the Sri […]
Meanwhile in Somalia…
Another very powerful slideshow of images from Mogadishu in the Boston Globe’s Big Picture section this week. The caption for the image above by Mohamed Dahir reads, 31 Local journalists take pictures at the scene of the killing of a Somali government soldier near Mogadishu stadium, on May 11, 2009. Remains of dead soldiers littered […]
Armenian opposition: Down, but not out?
Roads into Yerevan were reportedly blocked yesterday ahead of the first opposition rally staged after Sunday’s muncipal election, the first to indirectly determine the mayor of the capital in 15 years. Even so, that shouldn’t have made much of a difference in terms of attendance figures in a city with a population of well over a million and with […]
Waiting five years for a five-minute chance
This recent blog post by an Iranian blogger “cautiously speaking from inside Iran” sounded to me so familiar that I wanted to share it with you: As you might know, private television channels are forbidden by the law in Iran. In general, power-holders are really touchy about any media that could challenge their authority. […] […]
Mexico City museums ask for help after influenza
Visits to some of Mexico City’s museums have fallen by as much as 90% since the outbreak of the H1N1 virus last month that prompted a near shutdown of numerous facilities, according to reports in the local media. Owners of some of the privately owned museums in the capital are seeking financial help from the government and […]
Video: Training Day
Deborah Bonello reporting for MexicoReporter.com My breath is tearing out of my lungs and my leg muscles are screaming for a reprieve. I just scaled a 60-degree hill coated in thorny brambles and poisonous plants whilst being pounded by rain. In the dark. I thought it couldn’t get any worse, but it did. Later […]
Update: Who is who in Iran’s elections?
Well, two days ago, when I wrote a post about upcoming presidential elections in Iran, I should have guessed it – I was stepping into a mine field 🙂 Ethnicity was always a very sensitive issue in Iran, and my speculations about ethnic background of Iranian presidential candidates received some feedback from my Iranian readers […]
Opposition ready to rock Yerevan following disputed municipal vote?
An opposition supporter friend and blogger calls it a travesty of democracy, but many of us are instead resigned to elections being business as usual in Armenia. Indeed, Josef Stalin summed up the situation perfectly. "Those who vote decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything," he reportedly said, and after speaking to an American […]
How an ethanol company hired degrading labour
A recent article published by the excellent investigative organization Reporter Brasil exposed details of the way slave labour is organized in the ethanol industry. The journalist Maurício Hashizume obtained hard evidence that the company Brenco – Companhia Brasileira de Energia Renovável, a multimillion-dollar company that runs ethanol projects in Brazil aiming at the international markets, […]
Election time in Iran
I admit there are two things in Iran that we, Northern Azeris envy – the first is cheap petrol and the second is free an fair elections. No joke! Yesterday, American news magazine Time started one of its articles with this paragraph: The presidential candidate was greeted last Monday at the airport by a jubilant […]
Steve McCurry on becoming a photographer
Steve McCurry is one of my favourite photographers. Famous for his images of Asia, his work is always a pleasure to come back to. His richly-textured collection South Southeast is one of just a handful of photo books to have carved out a space on the small bookcase in our living room. Perhaps more importantly, […]
Dodging Antonovs in Darfur
It wasn’t much more than a speck. A tiny, white fleck in the wide blue sky above us. Our 4×4 lurched to a halt as Yahia, the driver, peered through the 10 inches of windscreen scraped clean of the mud that camouflaged the rest of the vehicle. Then we were off again, lurching over the […]
Mexican journalists put through their survival paces
Journalists in Mexico can have a pretty hard time doing their jobs, especially those who cover Mexico’s narco-trafficking and organized crime problems. A couple of non-profits who work on press freedom and protection issues here in Mexico, the Rory Peck Trust and Article 19, got together and ran a course just outside Mexico City […]
Georgia Wins Fashion Battle
Benetton clothing shops in Georgia have been closed for several days in protest against Benetton Turkey’s announcement that it was planning to open a store in Sukhumi, the capital of the disputed region of Abkhazia. "Protest Against Opening of Benetton Shop in Sukhumi" read signs hung in the shops’ windows in Tbilisi this week. The […]
Azerbaijan marks anniversary of its first republic
On 28th of May, Azerbaijan marked 91th anniversary of its first republic. Azerbaijan Democratic Republic or ADR as known by its initials is considered the first democratic republic in Muslim East with a functional parliament and clean record of human rights. As I wrote in my post last year, Proclaimed on 28 May, 1918 and […]
Remembering ’85’s earthquake
We had an earthquake last Friday. It was the second in a month also blighted by a new strain of influenza and economic recession – but that’s what life’s currently like here in Mexico. I was in the office when the quake struck, eating lunch (Mexican time – just before 230pm) with Lupita, the office […]
Mobile reporting from Yerevan municipal election rally
Finally a real opportunity to put the Nokia N82 to the test. Deciding to quickly pass by Yerevan’s manuscript museum to see if the 13th Century replica ship blocking the entrance to the main venue for the opposition to stage its rallies had been removed, I wandered into what can only be described as a swarm […]
