News
Pre-Newsnight showing build up
The Newsnight film shows in half an hour – and just in case you’re still tuned in here – there’s a bit more background and preamble on the BBC Newsnight website, Twenty years ago I left the Grenadier Guards to become a freelance cameraman. Three months later I was in Southern Afghanistan filming Afghans shelling […]
Interview with Brigadier John Lorimer
[video:youtube:QGf7fY98RhM] As promised earlier, here is an interview with Brigadier John Lorimer, the Brigade Commander of 12 Brigade, currently in Helmand.
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 several thousand. link
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 camera guided by invisible hands. […]
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 movie’s entertainment value doesn’t end here, […]
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 his 30-year career with the […]
16 Minute Film on BBC Newsnight Tonight
Tonight is the night: 10.30pm on BBC 2. BBC Newsnight plan to show my 16 minute film. I could get bumped off by a major news event and if this happens it should then appear tomorrow night. The film might get picked up by BBC World and shown internationally. The 16 minute film was shot […]
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” project, in which veteran war […]
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.
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 that began when North Korea […]
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 to record. There’s still a […]
Mascot prompts YouTube frenzy
Dr. Simi is the mascot for chain of discount pharmacist shops here in Mexico, but he’s a lot more than that. Based roughly on the founder of Farmacias Similares founder Victor Gonzales, the marketing strategy has developed a cult following. [video:youtube:3AKOoClbdVQ] People dressed in Dr Simi costumes dance outside the highstreet pharmacies. He’s an easy […]
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. link
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 men and boys being beaten […]
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 the streets and in the […]
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, the countries that should be […]
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 and can add genuinely interesting […]
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 cool when a BBC journalist, […]
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 hoping to focus the news […]
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 will make no mention of the […]
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 made its way noisily down Stalin […]
Bushmungus
Do insurgents inhale? I really wouldn’t know, but they would appear to have plenty of opportunity should the need arise.
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. And that is why […]
“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, like wherever we are, whatever […]
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, each inscribed in letters 1.35 […]
Too much violence in contemporary photojournalism, says Magnum member
There is too much of an emphasis on documenting violence in contemporary press photography, and photojournalists should document other, non-violent stories in the world, according to Rene Burri. Speaking at the opening of his photo exhibition ‘Un Mundo’ (a world) in Mexico City’s Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Swiss-born Burri told NewCorrespondent that he deplores […]
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.
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.
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 was none of that. Eyewitnesses said […]
Leaving the Palace
The soldiers lead a semi-nocturnal existence between guard shifts and operations. Reveille is usually a salvo of incoming mortar fire. Almost every man smokes and few could tell me what day it is, let alone the date. They have already suffered the worst casualty rate of any British unit in Iraq, and yet are not […]