Frontline bloggers – from Syria to Swine Flu
Our ever growing band of Frontline bloggers were busy this past week. Mexico City based Deborah Bonello reports from the unusually empty streets of the Mexican capital, the hospital wards and the restaurants as she follows the swine flu story,
Over the course of the last three days I have been to five hospitals. Given the local and international media coverage of Mexico’s current flu outbreak, I was expecting to find lines of people, all of them coughing into their government-issued face masks, winding around the block. Not so. Read more on Deborah’s Mexico City blog.
Nairobi based Rob Crilly continues to wrestle with mortality statistics as he battles his way towards a November deadline for his first book on Darfur,
Why does any of this matter? A lot of people have died in Darfur so why get bogged down in numbers? Well, using the wrong number hands Khartoum another excuse to trot out its own underestimate and using inflated figures can push us towards the wrong solutions – overinflated numbers tending to increase the urgency of no fly zones and so on. Still, at least we can agree on the area of Darfur… about the same size as Turkmenistan, right? Read more on Rob’s blog from Kenya.
Meanwhile, please welcome the latest addition to the Frontline blogging stable, the London and Damascus based Sasa, who will be reporting on and from the Syrian capital,
American culture is everywhere in Damascus. This is not North Korea. Walk down any Syrian street and it won’t be long before you come across a shop filled from floor to ceiling with American DVDs – films, documentaries and TV series, all subtitled, all costing pennies, and many available here before they come out in the States. Read more on Sasa’s Syria blog.
These are just three of the highlights from the blogs this past week. We’re adding new bloggers all the time; all journalists, all working in interesting places and all talking about interesting things, so please come and check them out. If you use the popular microblogging tool Twitter, here’s a list of Frontline bloggers who are active on Twitter. For all the latest news from the Frontline Club, the world of foreign correspondents, war reporters, life on the frontline and the job of journalism. Follow @frontlineblog on Twitter.