News
White Elephants and Windfalls
As African airports go, Eldoret International Airport is one of the finest. The taps in the toilets all work, its runway is long enough for a 747 and there are no queues at check-in. All as it should be for an airport that opened barely 10 years ago and cost $49m. It’s a darn sight […]
Matthew Green talks Kony
[video:brightcove:1420186693] West Africa Correspondent for the Financial Times and former East Africa reporter for Reuters, Matthew Green talks at the Frontline Club about General Joseph Kony and unveils hidden and forgotten layers of the bloody conflict that plagues Northern Uganda. Matthew has been getting a lot of press lately for his book. Reuters has a […]
Frontline photographer wins award
Sean Smith was one of the winners at the Royal Television Society (RTS) journalism awards for 2007 for his report for Channel 4 News, ITN and Guardian Film’s called Iraq: Apache Company, The report by Guardian photographer Sean Smith – narrated by Channel 4 reporter Keme Nzerem – beat competition from Newsnight and al-Jazeera English, […]
Things I’d Like to Believe But Can’t
The road from the airport home was mercifully empty tonight. I arrived back in Nairobi at about 7-15pm just when you expect roads to be clogged with cars, matatus and trucks. But apart from three police checkpoints and the inevitable accident (the law requires drivers to leave their vehicles in situ until a police officer […]
The Talib who turned
There was little in the dismal reception room to dispel the all-pervading cold of the snow outside. Mice scurried among the relics of half-eaten food on plates scattered around an unlit wood-burning stove. Apart from a few blankets and a couple of kalashnikovs the space was bare. Perhaps I had expected finer trappings for Musa […]
Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq
Thank God for journalists like Patrick Cockburn: diligent, intelligent, clear-eyed, brave, experienced. In Muqtada al Sadr and the Fall of Iraq, his third book on the country, he assembles a narrative out of the conflicting mash of self-serving accounts, propaganda and rumour over the last bloody five years. In doing so, he renders all of […]
Israel – Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East
When Israel was occupying much of southern Lebanon in 1984, I recall reporting, in a paragraph or two in a larger story, that I’d just been in a trashed Shi’ite village where, amongst other things, a car had been run over by an Israeli tank. That evening I received a checking query from New York. […]
Public or Private?
Social networking sites like Facebook and Bebo are awash with video and pictures uploaded by the general public. News organisations are grappling with what they can and can’t use from the sites, but there is no agreed standard and recent months have seen them make a litany of mistakes. In January, Steve Herrmann, Editor of […]
Sexual harassment of foreign correspondents
Sexual harassment of female foreign correspondents is the topic in Mother Jones with Judith Matloff quoted on the harsh realities as she works on her second book, [Matloff] is also trying to challenge notions of a swaggering, hyper-masculine reporter at the center of a war zone. It’s an image, she says, that not only obscures […]
Back in the HotZone
Kevin Sites is back up with a post from Sri Lanka, Kevin Sites covered Sri Lanka as violence erupted between the government and Tamil Tiger rebels, pushing a nation with so much to lose back to the brink of all-out war. In rebel-held territory Sites interviewed Tiger fighters about their tactics and reported on the […]
The new Falklands war
At a great, rumbustious old fashioned Fleet Street leaving do, shortly before Christmas, one of the departing journalists recalled in his farewell speech that he has been looking through his old passports and found he has visited more than a hundred countries. That, however, was before he had fallen out with a new regime at […]
Video: Exhibition Remembers the Dead
Even today there is no definitive count of how many pro-democracy demonstrators were slaughtered by Mexican army troops in the Tlatelolco zone of this capital on Oct. 2, 1968. Was the death toll a few dozen, as the government claimed? Or closer to 300, as some intrepid journalists reported? Did President Gustavo DÃaz Ordaz approve […]
Tension
It feels like the least fun Christmas Eve ever here in Islamabad tonight. Voting in the Pakistani general election is due to start in ten hours, and every TV channel is running election coverage. They seem to have run out of new things to talk about, as such programmes do, but the tickers along the […]
The Point of Poetry
Call me a Philistine, but I’ve never much seen the point of poetry. Sure the War Poets did some good stuff. But when you are capable of stringing together sentences into a few coherent paragraphs why bother chopping it into lines and verses? It seems a bit, well, contrived. Maybe it takes a war? Whatever. […]
Ben Hammersley covers Pakistan elections
Founding Frontline club member and From the Frontline blogger Ben Hammersley is on the move. He heads to Pakistan today for a week to cover the upcoming elections. He’ll be blogging along the way and you can follow what he’s up to as soon as his blog reawakens here. Ben has more on his personal […]
Kenya’s Aid Irony
Nairobi is the aid hub for East Africa and the Horn. The city is filled with charity workers flitting to Somalia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and so on. Its vast United Nations complex is reckoned to be one of the biggest contributors to the city’s economy. But when it comes to tackling a […]
Mexican Human Rights Commission is ineffective, says report
Human Rights Watch released a damning report today, calling Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission ‘ineffective’ and ‘disappointing’. ‘When it comes to actually securing remedies and promoting reforms to improve Mexico’s dismal human rights record, the CNDH’s performance has been disappointing,’ reads the report, which also points out that the Commission’s failures hasn’t been due to […]
Tim Hetherington talks
Frontline Club founding member and this year’s World Press Photo of the year award winner, Tim Hetherington, is in conversation with Der Spiegel this week, It was Hetherington’s third tour there with US forces. The British photographer was once again traveling with the 2nd Platoon of Battle Company, part of the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry […]
Frontline fodder
British food bloggers descended upon the Frontline Club in London last week for our monthly Food and Wine event. Fortunately, all seemed to come away very impressed. Fraser from Blogjam and the Observer Food Monthly blog had his say, wine blogger Andrew blogged his experience at Spittoon.biz and Jeanne from Cook Sister! promises me she […]
Hans Jaap blogs from Baghdad
Hans Jaap is a Dutch journalist working for Radio Netherlands and he’s based in Baghdad. It’s not the threat of bombs that bother him in the Iraqi capital, it’s the fear of kidnapping. And for a moment the other day, he thought it was about to happen to him, My interpreter Ammar and I had […]
Dozier secures sacred cat
The Milwaukee Press Club announces that CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier is to become the 2008 Sacred Cat Award honoree. The Sacred Cat Award has been doled out annually since 1973. It recognizes excellence in journalism at the national level. Dozier will accept the award at the club’s annual Gridiron Dinner, April 26, at the […]
Knifepoint on Valentine’s Day
La Marquesa is a sprawling national park and forest out in the mountains between Mexico City and Toluca, and seemed like the perfect place for me and my man to get some time alone today, the day for lovers. As it turns out, it wasn’t such nice place to be alone.
Zimbabwe inflation part two
Hmm. well, seems my clever bit of maths was wrong. The government announced today that inflation is actually over 66000 percent. Good work, lads.
The Carsten Thomassen Kabul library
A new library in Kabul is to be named after the journalist Carsten Thomassen who was shot dead during an attack on the Serena Hotel in the Afghan capital in January, The Afghan Minister of Education has announced that the new library at the National Institute for Leadership and Adminstration will be named after Thomassen. […]
From the Mosul frontline
Salam Adil at Global Voices does an excellent job of rounding up the latest from the folks on the streets of Basra, Mosul and beyond. He dedicates a blog post “to the extraordinary bloggers of Mosul who are living on the front line of a war zone” Here are the words of Aunt Najma, In […]
Reporting Iraq like reporting on the Chinese government
Is reporting in Iraq really like reporting on the Chinese government? Well, according to some longtime journalists it is. Talking in the The Norman Transcript Oliver Schell, director of the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations, describes it as it is, He described a trip to Baghdad to visit the Times’ bureau, complete with its […]
Journalist shot dead in Iraq
From the International Herald Tribune, yet more tidings of joy for journalism in the Middle East, An Iraqi journalist who disappeared after leaving his offices to buy some supplies was found shot to death Tuesday in central Baghdad, according to his organization. Hisham Michwit Hamdan, 27, went missing Sunday after he left the offices of […]
Mexico still deadliest country in the Americas for journalists, says RWB
Mexico remains the deadliest country in the Americas for journalists with two murders in less than a month, and three disappearances, according to today’s annual report from Reporters Without Borders. Three journalists were murdered last year, and three media workers were shot dead. Those levels are an improvement on 2006, when nine journalists were killed, […]
Commuting with Putin
Ever wondered what Vladimir Putin’s ride to work is like in the morning? Luke Harding, The Guardian’s Moscow Correspondent, has been putting his multimedia reporting skills to work to try and tell you. Click the image above to check out Luke’s stalking skills. How about doing something like this next time you’re in Russia, Heathcliff?
Not taking any flak yet
The BBC TV war reporter comedy series Taking the flak was supposed to start filming in Kenya this month. Due to the unrest there, the project has been shelved for now. Richard Kay in The Daily Mail has more, Alas the £1million series – called Taking The Flak and starring veteran actor Martin Jarvis as […]
