From the Frontline: September 2007 Archives
Burmese Junta detains journalist
Authorities in Burma were detaining a journalist reporting for a Japanese newspaper for the third day Sunday, his family members said. Min Zaw, a Burmese national working for The Tokyo Shimbun, was taken from his home early Friday by plainclothes security personnel who said he would be held temporarily for...more
Burma 29 September 2007
Only the milita who surround the journalist are willing to be interviewed. When he asked them what they thought, as Buddhists, of the fact that the junta had shot monks, they replied that it was not the monks who were demonstrating, but rather people desguised as monks, paid by powerful...more
Not Twittering but CBoxing the saffron revolution
Twitter might be the trendy kid on the microblogging market, but it's CBox that's getting used. Here's a 'live' sampling, 28 Sep 07, 17:43 Ko Hla: Protesters are shouting slogan on 33rd street (between 83rd and 84th Street) in Mandalay. 28 Sep 07, 17:40 forthecountry: Myanmar PM Soe Win is...more
Burma cuts the net
But, The Irrawaddy continues to get information out from sources on the ground (I've added relevant links) Rangoon; Afternoon—Trucks loaded with troops raided the offices of Burma's main Internet service provider, Myanmar Info-Tech, located at Rangoon University (Hlaing campus) around noon on Friday in an effort to cut all public...more
From the frontline to the Press Gazette
The Press Gazette run a piece about what we're all about. Vaughan talks about plans for the club and for supporting journalism online which is what fromthefrontline.co.uk is essentially all about, “I think the future is going to be journalist.com, Fredbloggs.com and if that’s the case, then we’re in the...more
Kenji Nagai shot dead in Rangoon
What appears to be footage of the Japanese photojournalist, 50 year old Kenji Nagai shot dead on the streets of Rangoon yesterday. Nagai was working for the Tokyo based APF video and photo agency. Killed for taking photos of protesters and soldiers. Here is an emailed tribute to Kenji Nagai...more
Eve-Ann Prentice dies
From the Herts Advertiser, Author and journalist Eve-Ann Prentice died this week aged 55 after a four-year battle with cancer. Eve-Ann, who has a house in Albert Street, St Albans, lived in the city until her marriage to Irishman Aidan Morrin more than a year ago. She then moved...more
Traders
In what looks set to become a latter day Hotel Le Royal the Traders Hotel in Rangoon is allegedly where the foreign journalist contingent find themselves housed. Or at least they did, until this afternoon according to The Irrawaddy, Rangoon, 3:30 p.m.—Soldiers entered Traders Hotel, situated in the heart of...more
Death of a journalist
The Daily Telegraph has a series of photographs that purport to show the death of a Japanese photojournalist in Rangoon, Burma today. I suspect these photos originally surfaced on Ko htike's blog...more
Cellphone journalism
"This time, compared to 1988, there are lots of new technologies to get the news out of Burma ... People are able to take pictures, videos to evidence what is going on. It is quite amazing for Burma, which is a very poor country," said Vincent Brossel, director of the...more
Lacking correspondence
Writing on the Guardian Editor's blog, Murray Armstrong explains how the newspaper is approaching the Burma story without having a correspondent in the country, Colleagues on Guardian Unlimited reported this morning that they had been working with Burmese-speaking translators yesterday and today to gather as much information as possible from...more
Bloody saffron revolution
Reporters Without Borders is appalled by the death of a Japanese news photographer on the streets of Rangoon this morning. Another foreign journalist was reportedly injured. The press casualties came after the security forces opened fire on demonstrators near the Tarder Hotel in the centre of Rangoon. link Meanwhile......more
You're all mad
Interesting nuggets aplenty in the NPR interview with Paul Watson I linked to previously. Including this, Are you saying being a war correspondent is a form of mental illness? I think it is. I've spent enough time around people who do this a lot. In my opinion and I include...more
Media made easy
In yet more film news, War made easy is showing in "select theatres" across the USofA. The Valley Advocate says War made easy makes an easy job of the media, Perhaps more searing than its indictment of the politicians who lead us to war is the film's unflinching critique...more
Latest from Rangoon
The latest from Rangoon courtesy of Irrawaddy, At least two protestors were shot by security forces in downtown Rangoon near Sule Pagoda on Wednesday afternoon. One protestor reportedly died, according to people who took part in the demonstration. The source said the soldiers continued firing at the demonstrators, who numbered...more
Where war lives
In his new book - War lives here - Canadian foreign correspondent and Pulitzer prize winner Paul Watson is haunted by a split second decision he made in Mogadishu on October 4, 1993, "The crowd parted, forming a manic horseshoe around the corpse. My eyes panned the frenzy like a...more
Richard Gere goes to war
Richard Gere's latest film stars the former gigolo as a war reporter - "the war-zone equivalent of ambulance chasers" - as Style Weekly has it, Gere and Howard are soon turned into international journalism's Starsky and Hutch, on the trail of a Serbian war criminal called The Fox. The...more
Bell up north
The bloke in the white suit, ex-war reporter and shrapnel magnet Martin Bell, will be speaking in Lancaster next month. Mr Bell will speak about his long career as a war reporter and MP for Tatton in a lecture called Reflections on War, Peace and Politics on October 18. In...more
Out of the hotzone
Kevin Sites, him of hotzone fame and self-styled multimedia internet war reporter - we'll all be one of him one of these days... - has announced that his latest film will be shown 'exclusively online', "A World of Conflict" is the documentary about the "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone"...more
Burmawatch
The troops are out, but so are the monks and the people in what must now be one of the most heavily cameraphone filmed protest movements in the history of the devices. The Guardian's Matthew Weaver is blogging developments and showing video from the streets and temples....more
Halberstam's hermit kingdom years
New, and last, David Halberstam book is out covering the "forgotten" Korean war. Editor & Publisher argues that the book, called The Coldest Winter, overlooks the victims, It unsparingly exposes the foolishness and arrogance of U.S. strategy and strategists - in failing to prepare a pared-down Army for the war...more
Rene Burri prefers soft focus
Frontline Network member Deborah Bonello had a natter with Swiss-born veteran Magnum snapper Reni Burri. He's had enough of blood and guts, What I deplore is this kind of focusing on violence and almost pornographic views on what’s going on. There’s a big wide world out there which is fantastic...more
Charlie don't surf, but he does have cameras
Filmmaker Deborah Scranton talks about and shows clips from her documentary The War Tapes, which put cameras in the hands of Charlie Company, a unit of the National Guard, for one year in Iraq. The soldiers' raw footage and diary excerpts tell a powerful, unsettling story of modern war....more
Monk power
picture link from ko htike I couldn't resist snarling this photo to extend our Burma coverage into another post. Either come down hard on the Buddhist monks leading the protests -- and risk turning pockets of dissent into nationwide outrage as reports and grainy mobile phone images of revered, maroon-robed...more
Some are calling it the Saffron Revolution
At least The Times is. But, if 1988 is anything to go by it's still far too early to call. I've been watching the numbers go up over the last two days; 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, 50,000 and today 100,000. Them be the number of protesters, both monks and non-monks, on...more
Journalists in Congo
A great essay from Congolese journalist Fidel Bafilemba Bienda about the ongoing situation in Congo, western media's lack of interest, UN "peacekeeping" and the deaths of local journalists, ...I wish we would get more journalists to come here and see for themselves. But as fighting continues and innocent people die,...more
The three wise blogs
Not all journalists can blog, some breeze into it, but some just don't grasp the dynamics. Old blogging journalist hand Adam Tinworth is working on blog guidance for journalists. He spies three key blog types for journalists, The Expert - If you have a depth of knowledge of your subject...more
John Sweeney is stupid
The Venezualan President said it, so it must be true. Following the mauling he gave the Mormons, John Sweeney finds himself on the receiving end in the oil rich home of Hugo Chávez, During his weekly TV program "Aló presidente" of Sunday, September 16, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez lost his...more
Austin to Africa
ITV ups the African ante this week as news presenter Mark Austin returns to the region to take up residence on the banks of the Limpopo river in easy striking distance of Zimbabwe, "By sending our top presenter undercover and anchoring our main bulletins on location this week, we are...more
Rewriting history
You won't be finding any of the above mentioned in the latest Harper Collins travel guide to the beautiful and smogstuffed city of Beijing, One might find it a little surprising that HarperCollins is to publish a guide entitled Travel Around China to coincide with 2008's Beijing Olympics that...more
Freedom for South Ossetia
South Ossetia wants to break free, she's wanted to break from the shackles of Georgia ever since the Soviet Empire imploded and well... we all know the rest, don't we? The wannabe South Ossetians have declared an Independence day and it sounds like an awful lorra fun, The parade...more
Bushmungus
Do insurgents inhale? I really wouldn't know, but they would appear to have plenty of opportunity should the need arise....more
Taking more flak
Talking of flak, shrapnel, war wounds and the like. The latest fashion fad in the Caucasus for the dogs of the Russian Federation is - you guessed it - fancy flak jackets poodle style,"Dogs in Chechnya neutralised land mines and other explosive devices which are not seen by mine detectors....more
"We have one flak jacket that all of the correspondents share."
The deadly serious special correspondent Aasif Mandvi for Comedy Central's "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" is interviewed in the Washington Post, Did they buy you an actual flak jacket? We have one flak jacket that all of the correspondents share and so we just mail it to each other,...more
Another 100 million bricks in the wall
From Edward Lucas The Economist's Estonia expert and author of the upcoming book "The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces Russia and the West", Imagine two walls, each 120km (75 miles) long, set at right angles and tapering to a height of three metres. They are covered in names,...more
Embed humvee driver of the month award goes to...
This American bloke. Hopefully his finger is not poised on the trigger. In fact, watch all 1 minute and 12 seconds and you'll see it's poised perfectly clearly....more
Reuters in Iraq
Residents are seen through a shattered windshield of a vehicle after clashes between U.S. forces and suspected insurgents, in Baghdad's Shula district August 24, 2007. From a Reuters 36 snap Iraq slideshow published today....more
Burmese days
Unlike the uprisings in 1988 beyond shutting the internet down, collecting every camera and every mobile phone in the country, the Burmese authorities know that if things kick off the chances are someone somewhere will capture events and upload them to YouTube, Flickr or a blog. In 1988 there...more
Air Zimbabwe
Gordon Brown's not happy about Robert Mugabe's possible appearance at the Euro/Affro summit in Lisbon in December. Not Sure Mugabe will be too chuffed about it either, especially if he has to fly with his nation's airline....more
EconoZimdiary
The Economist has a man - or is it a woman? who knows in bylineless world - in Zimbabwe and they're writing a diary, at least this week they are, The contact is late, he does not pick up his phone, and night has fallen. I feel increasingly uncomfortable. Something...more
What's in your bag?
Road reporter Naka Nathaniel has the weight of a New York Times satellite telephone budget behind him when he's on the road producing features like the film above with Nicolas Kristof. But, blasting through recent history it seems what goes in his rucksack hasn't changed *too* much since 2004,...more
Burma mapping the protests
Rather annoyingly my ISP appears to have blocked this protest map of Burma via fifty viss, but I understand it is really, very good. With news like what I've just pasted here below just in, the map editors will be busy today, Military officials in Burma have used tear gas...more
War book frenzy
The Press Gazette alerts us to a rabid battle being played out at the war end of the Amazon book charts, It’s hack vs. hack in the book charts at the moment, with a battalion of war reporters piling out new books on Iraq and Afghanistan. Veteran war correspondent Patrick...more
Wot a picture, wot a photograph
Move over Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass and all the BBC noddies. It's the photographer's turn at fakery. From The Observer, The iconic image of the young John F Kennedy Jr saluting the coffin of his assassinated father reappeared on television and in newspapers last month, accompanying obituaries for Joe O'Donnell...more
Surge splurge
Heading to Baghdad soon? Bin your Lonely Planet and head over to the New York Times. From Kadhimiya to Saydia, the Times has the surge covered. The state of life and death in the Iraqi capital is mapped out in pictures, text and video, To study the ground-level effects of...more
A Note from Baghdad
It’s three o’clock in the morning and the sound of mortarsand Katyusha rockets are my soundtrack. Gunfire is intermittent. Some is very close and some is far away. It does not matter anyway. I locked my building’s gate with an American-made lock and a large, stifling chain of steel. It...more
Crystal morning
A few days late on this, linkage from Blogs of war. Emergency services radio and phone calls were taken from publicly released tapes originally recorded on 11 September 2001. The "Melissa" speaking on the phone with an unidentified 911 operator was Melissa C. Doi. The recording of her phone...more
Cambodian house moves
Following on from the Magnum love of yesterday, Magnum's Cambodia-based John Vink writes an oddly third person blog - hey, maybe he doesn't write it all. It's misleading or just plain odd, but... the content should be worth a butcher's. Magnum are calling it the Khmer Chronicles, Except for a...more
Conflicted vision
Magnum Photos have put together a gripping audiovisual slideshow, or essay, of a recent history of conflict with the voice and views of Robin Lustig of the BBC World Service. Well worth going through the whole show. If only I could embed it here.... via Sambrook...more
Axe at war
While googling around for a half decent link for David Axe in the last post, I came across this comic strip, one of 19 based on 'the Axe' experience of war reporting. Axe blogs at the honestly titled War is boring....more
Vaughan talks...
...from Afghanistan, in between mortars, machine gun fire and RPGs on BBC Radio 5's non too shoddy Pods and Blogs show. Well worth a listen. There is plenty of discussion on how people report from Afghanistan and Iraq with war reporter David Axe. Get yourself a cuppa tea and listen...more
Keenian fallout
Rather predictably, various shards of shrapnel find themselves embedded within around the blogosphere after Andrew Keen's lessons in Web 2.0 whackonomics last night. First up, Lloyd davies is shedding a few tears, Andrew is a man who clearly gets something out of being (metaphorically) beaten up by one half...more
Liveblog: Andrew Keen vs. The Internets
The room is full(ish). Andrew Keen and Richard Sambrook are seated on the regulation frontline brown leather chairs, glasses of white wine are filled and we're off with a discussion about how the internet is, or is not, killing 'our' culture. Sambrook is setting the scene, there'll be plenty of...more
Is there a troll in Paddington?
The controversial trollesque figure of Andrew Keen descends upon the Frontline Club tonight. He's best known for his book the Cult of the Amateur. The Guardian's Emily Bell gave him a good rogering on Comment is free last month. Dave Weinberger, the inventor of RSS, isn't too enamoured with...more
Dessert warfare
Vaughan's chocolate bar chronicles spill over onto the Observer Food Monthly blog, The bigger question is, which minion in which ministry dreamt up this disaster in desert dining? Where's your all-weather food; your dried fruit, dried meat, nuts, oatcakes and wotnot? The Ministry of Defence website tells us: "Thankfully...more
Vaughan does Auntie
Vaughan gets picked up by the BBC's excellent Pods & Blogs show. Producer Chris Vallance spoke to Vaughan today and we hope to hear his master's dulcit tones on the show next week, I've just spoken with Vaughan about the embed and his decision to blog, vlog and twitter. His...more
Vaughan in the field
Vaughan's still in Helmand and a new post is coming within minutes... Here's a photo of the man himself enjoying the company of a large cuddly toy, a helmet and a wall. There are more Frontline Club photos, including more from Vaughan in Afghanistan, in the Frontline Club Flickr...more
"Do their photographs make any difference?"
That was the question posed by John G Morris writing about the Frontline Club War & Protest exhibition. Sorry to bombard this blog with video - and again from TED Talks - so early on in the game, just when we're searching for feet, taking first steps and all...more
Andrew Mwenda at TED
Over on the excellent TED Talks Blog Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda gives a provocative speech on how the media should focus less on the bad news coming out of the continent and more on the good and how the answer to Africa's problems is not more aid. As Ethan...more
From Pyongyang with pictures
On 27th September Yannis Kontos will be at the Frontline Club showing and talking about the photographs he took during 17 days in North Korea. It's not the easiest place to get to, and certainly not a simple spot to work in. Yannis will be telling us how he did...more
17 years young
And it doesn't look a day older... Transnistria, or to give it it's full name - Pridnestrovskaia Moldavskaia Respublica - the breakaway republic of Moldova and only remaining Stalinist outhold in Europe, is 17 years old this week. Click the video above to see the celebrations in the teenage...more
Shot by a sniper
Last week photographer John D McHugh popped into the Frontline Club to give a talk about his time in Afghanistan and to explain how he was shot by a Taleban sniper. He blogs about it on his personal blog, I went and got myself shot. Yes, that’s right, shot. In...more
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