News
Waiting for the President
The boss’s schedule will always screw you. It’s early morning on the Philippine island of Basilan. I’m here at the Marine HQ, awaiting the ‘surprise’ arrival of the Philippine president, Gloria Arroyo. Her advance team, all 150 of them, are sleeping on the floor of the bamboo hut that usually acts as the tactical operations […]
Inside Out – September 07
August finds me like most other Londoners who for various reasons are not on holiday in some exotic clime grumbling constantly about the dismal weather. And those of us in London are the lucky ones. No flash floods, no hurricanes, no monster storms, no death defying heat waves. But that said, we’d still like to […]
Sarko’s Struggles
The French are famous for their long holidays – never more so than in August, the sleepiest month of the year. It’s a month when the tumbleweed all but blows down the Champs Elysees. The cafes and shops that are still open here in August contain weary waiters and shop assistants, whose surly replies and unsmiling […]
Background posting
Simon Roughneen at the Asia Times, on the story I’ve just arrived to cover. More to come.
In Roddy Scott’s Memory
Roddy Scott was one of a rare breed of journalist adventurers – able to take physical hardship, utterly dedicated to finding stories about real people, and working throughout as a genuine freelance – the kind of person the Frontline club was set up to support. His picture is one of eight in the frame next […]
Perfect Hostage
Nearly two decades ago, the people of Burma came within reach of achieving the kind of “velvet revolution” that brought freedom and democracy to eastern Europe. The student uprising of August 1988 failed to rid Burma of the generals. Today, the country remains under military control, and its adored opposition leader, the Nobel laureate Aung […]
Chechnya – Russia’s “War on Terror”
When three planes smashed into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, few expected Chechnya to feel the impact. But 9/11 probably had the most far-reaching consequences for the Chechens since Stalin deported the entire population to Siberia in 1944. It also saved the career of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose […]
Saving Storyville
Over the last decade I have made half a dozen films for Storyville. That simple statement doesn’t begin to convey how crucial the BBC documentary strand has been for me – and, I know, for documentary-makers round the world. Many of us who ply the documentary trade have, I fancy, some fellow feeling with those […]
Bucking Broncos and Wounded Pride – 03/08/07
Buying Henry the Horse was one of the first things I did when I got to British Columbia. I simply couldn’t be the owner of a ranch and a self-respecting frontiersman without my very own steed. This most noble of acquisitions was accelerated by my impatience after many years of horselessness as I hopped from […]
NewCorrespondent.com
I’m trying out this multi-media experiment in journalism in Mexico. The idea is I upload film, audio, pictures and words as I go along, using the site both as an editorial resource as well as a means of pitching bigger, more traditional pieces to existing editors. At the moment it’s unfunded but I have a […]
Inside Out – August 07
They don’t make them anymore like Horst Faas. Anyone who had the privilege of hearing Faas at two recent Frontline Club events held in association with The Associated Press would have come away with that feeling. Faas, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for his photography, is now 74 and confined to a wheel chair. He […]
Behind the Release
The call came on March 12th. “I don’t want to worry you, but Alan Johnston has not been heard from for a couple of hours.” He had not conformed to his regular daily routine of calling his colleagues after he arrived home from leaving work. It was a routine which had been implemented after the […]
Fleeing Darfur
We had been sitting in the tiny, twin-engined aircraft for three hours when I first caught sight of the rugged green peaks of the Nuba Mountains. The plane fell abruptly through a hole in the black sky. Mike the pilot jabbed a finger through the left-hand window. ‘It’s your lucky day! There’s cloud all around, […]
Heatwaves and Hailstones – 19/07/07
Whoever said that living in paradise was going to be easy? The year began with an onslaught of thick, white powder snow that crept up over our sundecks to the lower reaches of the windows and then up, up and up steadily towards the roof. When that melted – and locals say that even in […]
Beware Falling Coconuts
The title of this book comes from signs nailed to countless trees all over Asia. A bit like terrorism, the warning is both necessary (hundreds die each year after being hit) and useless (because there is no time to get out of the way). No falling coconut hit Clapham on the head during his stints […]
Are We There Yet? Travels with My Frontline Family
Rosie Whitehouse’s account of motherhood is about uneasy juxtapositions: “The sun is shining and it’s exceptionally warm. How can a war start today?” It’s about exploring identity: “Suddenly, I realise I have come to Berlin to find out what really matters when you fall in love with and have children with someone from a different […]
Man with four lungs
The Serbs have a particular way of describing someone who lives life to the full. They say: “He moves with four lungs.” Tom certainly moved with four lungs in Serbia, where he did a lot of his best work – but also had plenty of fun along the way. Milena, his wife, asked me to […]
Fighting the Militants
The recent attempted bombings in London and Glasgow have highlighted the fact that Britain remains a prime target for al-Qaeda. Outside Iraq and Afghanistan, Britain is al-Qaeda’s most popular target, having faced more attempted attacks than any other country. Leaving aside various ineffectual plots, fundraising and propaganda efforts, the so-called Doctors’ Plot was at least […]
Watch this MySpace
The message “So and so has added you as a friend on Facebook” is about as common as offers for Viagra in email inboxes nowadays. Until September last year Facebook was restricted to people with .edu email addresses but they have grown spectacularly since opening their doors to everyone and are certainly the talk of […]
A wedding by the river – 23/06/07
It was, in the end, a notable event on the social calendar of our small, quiet valley. Journalists and cowboys, farmers and photographers, crooners, lawyers, professors, biologists, bikers, loggers, carpenters and former soldiers all came together earlier this month as Kristin and I got married at the end of our garden. For those of you […]
Bosnia’s Reckoning
There exists that constituency of people for whom the advent of July is less an occasion to relish summer than to cast the mind’s eye back to what Judge Fouad Riyad at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague called some of the ‘darkest pages in human history’- the bloodiest massacre on European soil since […]
Inside Out – July 07
I started writing this en-route to Frontline’s first event in Kiev amid rumours that Alan Johnston would finally be released. The nightmare for the Johnston family, his loved ones and colleagues looked set to end. At the same the staff of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) were just coming to terms with […]
Reporter’s diary
Lungi International Airport is a sight better than it was. It’s not long since livestock wandered across the runway. Now it has its international airlines back: BA three times a week. An independent called Astraeus operates an excellent service out of Gatwick and has understood something important about its market: its baggage allowance is a […]
Blood River
In 1992, I sat on the banks of the great Zaire River and watched Congolese cannibalise their capital, Kinshasa, looting shops, destroying buildings and ripping copper wire from telephone lines. As drunken looters drove brand new cars out of showrooms straight into the nearest walls, one had scrawled on the last remaining unbroken plate glass […]
Sand Cafe
There are funny moments in Neil MacFarquhar’s spoof of foreign correspondents holed up in Dhahran during the Kuwait War of 1991, but the greatest fun is working out who the characters might be: Thea, exotic female love interest, cable television reporter climbing her way to stardom on a musical voice and thick black fringe (Who […]
Bomber Boys: Fighting back 1940-1945
Night after night and at great risk, the daring young men of RAF Bomber Command rained indiscriminate death and destruction on Nazi Germany. They scored bulls-eyes on industrial and military targets. They also slaughtered innocents. “It’s a fair assumption that when Tom dropped our bombs women and boys and girls were killed,” one wrote home. […]
Inside Out – June 07
How about this for a stunning statistic? In February, more than a third (37%) of US internet users visited MySpace.com. When Rupert Murdoch -that mogul of moguls of old media – purchased MySpace in 2003 for $580 million he grabbed a sizzling hot property in the new media world. MySpace and its ambitious rival, Facebook.com […]
Rumsfeld: An American disaster
Donald Rumsfeld, Andrew Cockburn remarks in this critical biography, is “one of history’s greatest courtiers.” Rumsfeld’s sly performance at the courts of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and the Searle family (who helped him make his financial fortune) prepared him for his final role in George Bush Jr’s White House. Rumsfeld’s flaws emerged early in life. He […]
Kitbag: John Coghill
John Coghill is a marketing consultant, freelance copywriter and photographer. He set up Projector Media four years ago to provide marketing services to publishers and extend brands through video and events. Before that he worked in marketing and business development for The Economist. In 2003 he started the Radios for Africa charity that distributes Freeplay […]
Ukraine unravels
Just over two years ago it seemed Ukraine was firmly headed on a democratic path after its bloodless “Orange Revolution”. But for the last several months the country has been in political crisis and opposing demonstrators have crowded onto its streets. The crisis has revealed the ugly and deep-seated problems which endanger Ukraine’s very existence […]