Europe
Part 1: Frontline Club discusses Italian press after Berlusconi
Watch the event here. By Will Turvill The Frontline Club last night hosted a lively and informative discussion on what the future might hold for Italian media in the post-Berlusconi era. The event was hosted by BBC Radio 4 presenter Steve Hewlett who was joined on the panel by four Italians and an Anglo-Italian lecturer […]
Italy after Berlusconi: What now for media freedom?
On 12 November the longest-serving post-war Prime Minister of Italy Silvio Berlusconi resigned after losing his majority and public support.
While no longer Prime Minister, he continues to control one half of the countries terrestrial TV market and his company Media Set is a big player in the print and advertising sectors. Will Berlusconi continue to wield influence and manipulate the government through his party and media ownership?
ForesightNews world briefing: upcoming events 17 – 23 October
A weekly round up of world events from Monday, 16 to Sunday, 23 October from ForesightNews By Nicole Hunt The UN Human Rights Committee session opens on Monday in Geneva, with the situation in Iran on the agenda for the first two days. Meanwhile, Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator […]
ForesightNews world briefing: upcoming events 10 – 16 October
A weekly round up of world events from Monday, 10 to Sunday, 16 October from ForesightNews By Nicole Hunt The two men charged with the April 2010 murder of South African white supremacist leader Eugene Terre’Blanche go on trial in Ventersdorp on Monday. Chris Mahlangu and an unnamed teenager are accused of killing the leader […]
ForesightNews world briefing: upcoming events 3 – 9 October
A weekly round up of world events from Monday, 3 October to Sunday, 9 October from ForesightNews By Nicole Hunt Though it’s sometimes difficult to keep track of which Silvio Berlusconi trial is currently in court, Monday sees the resumption of the most infamous of his four cases, in which he faces charges for abuse […]
ForesightNews world briefing: upcoming events 12-18 September
A weekly round up of world events from Monday, 12 September to Sunday, 18 September from ForesightNews By Nicole Hunt The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors meets in Vienna on Monday, with Iran likely to be high on the agenda following last week’s report expressing increased concerns over ‘undisclosed nuclear related activities’ […]
ForesightNews world briefing: upcoming events 8-14 August
A weekly round up of world events from Monday, 8 August to Sunday, 14 August from ForesightNews Former Israeli President Moshe Katsav is back in court in Jerusalem on Monday, appealing his April conviction and seven year sentence for indecent assault and sexual harassment of two female employees. In Dharamsala, Lobsang Sangay is sworn in as the […]
Like Eating a Stone
Wojciech Tochman, a Polish journalist, chronicles the aftermath of war in Bosnia in his book “Like Eating a Stone: Surviving the Past in Bosnia†translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Matthew Price reviews the book for the New York Times, If Tochman is sympathetic to Bosnia’s Muslims as they struggle to make their way, he also takes […]
BBC turned back by militia in South Ossetia
The BBC’s Rupert Wingfield-Hayes and the TV crew he was travelling with were turned back by armed militia men as they attempted to enter South Ossetia. Click the image above to watch the footage.
Anna Politkovskaya remembered
[video:google:-1006358898865632661&ei] Investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya would have celebrated her 50th birthday today had she not been gunned down in Moscow in October 2006. Russian human rights groups intend to gather in central Moscow today to remember her, “On August 30, on the day of Anna Politkovskaya’s birthday, we want to honor her memory and again […]
Telegraph closes Berlin bureau
The Telegraph will close its Berlin bureau leaving the paper with just one foreign news desk in Europe reports The Guardian. A stringer is expected to replace Berlin correspondent Harry de Quettville who will return to London to work int he features department. The move leaves just Henry Samuel in Paris as the paper’s only […]
Russian bombs kill journalist in Gori
From AP, A Dutch television journalist was killed overnight when Russian warplanes bombed the central Georgian city of Gori. The television news station RTL reported on its Web site that its cameraman Stan Storimans, 39, was killed and correspondent Jeroen Akkermans was wounded in the leg in the attack. RTL said, in all, five people […]
Monitoring South Ossetia
Veronica Khokhlova at Global Voices does a good job rounding up and translating the word from the streets of Georgia including this comment from Russian journalist Mikhail Romanov in a hotel basement in Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, The city is under heavy howitzer and mortar fire. An endless cannonade. I’ve seen many wounded […]
Getting ready for Beirut
Ana Maria Luca, a journalist based in Bucharest working for the Antena 3 TV network, is about to become Beirut correspondent for the channel. She’s just back from her ‘war reporter training’ in Romania, Seriously speaking, it was a hell of an experience. Doing the physical exercises, and trying to finish the obstacle course, which […]
Cullen comes up a thousand deutsche marks short
Kevin Cullen, columnist on the Boston Globe, remembers an incident in Montenegro with Dave Lynch, a reporter for USA Today, and how the BBC hoodwinked them out of a seat on the plane to Serbia, We found ourselves in a seedy bar in Podgorica, the gray capital of Montenegro, asking for a gangster named Momo. […]
Four charged for Politkovskaya murder
“Three suspects have been charged with the murder of [Anna Politkovskaya]: Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov,” the Investigations Committee said in a statement announcing the end of the high-profile murder inquiry. A fourth man, Pavel Ryaguzov, an officer in Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the former KGB, has been charged with abuse of power […]
Reporting from Sarajevo
Vildana Selimbegovic recalls her baptism into the world of war reporting in an interview with Transitions Online today. She talks about reporting in Sarajevo, present day threats to journalists in Bosnia and the future for the country, “My university professors used to tell us, ‘Do you really think that you can easily become a war […]
Drago Hedl wins award for war crimes journalism
[video:youtube:7f6AyehCFJQ] Croatian journalist Drago Hedl has won the Outstanding Merits in Investigative Journalism Award for 2008 announced by the Central European Initiative (CEI) and the South East Europe Media Organization (SEEMO) yesterday. Hedl works as an editor and journalist with the political weekly Feral Tribune in Split, The jury said it based its decision “on […]
Colin Farrell to play war photographer
Irish actor Colin Farrell headed to Bosnia at the weekend to get a taste for how it felt to be a war reporter during the war during the early 1990s. Farrell will play a war photographer in a new film called Triage. The film is directed by the Bosnian cinematographer Danis Tanovic who won an […]
Independent Kosovo
Download this episode View in iTunes You can now watch the event here. Latest debate from the Frontline Club events room in Paddington, London on Independence in Kosovo is now online. The discussion includes contributions from journalist and former spokesman for the Kosova government Daut Dauti, Balkan specialist author/journalist Tim Judah, journalist Misha Glenny who […]
The Angel of Grozny
Simon Mayo at BBC Radio 5 Live talks to war correspondent Asne Sierstad about her work in Chechnya over the past decade and her new book The Angel of Grozny. You can listen to the interview direct here or subscribe to the Daily Mayo podcast, Norwegian journalist Asne Sierstad has covered conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan […]
Kosovo nine years on
In another superb multimedia presentation, writer Nicholas Wood and photographer Andrew Testa of the New York Times talk about the war in Kosovo that began nearly nine years ago and how the legacy continues today on the verge of the country’s independence.
Dumitru Tinu case re-opens
From the International Herald Tribune, Prosecutors on Monday exhumed the body of an influential Romanian journalist after years of speculation over his death in an auto accident in 2003. An inquest found that Dumitru Tinu, the managing director and majority owner of influential daily Adevarul, died after losing control of his car, which skidded and […]
Correspondent come novelist in Camden
When Walkley Award-winning journalist Erina Reddan embarked on a whirlwind courtship with Victor Del Rio, little did she know she was about to marry into a family of witches whose matriarch allegedly murdered five husbands and was also a drug runner who operated a brothel. The exciting tales of Victor’s Mexican family, in particular his […]
Apps back at work
Peter Apps worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters until he was paralysed 13 months ago and now he’s back, Using voice recognition software, a tape recorder for interviews and accompanied by a support worker, I went back to work and the real world in June after finally leaving hospital. At first I was thrilled […]
Targetted by the mafia
Lirio Abbate has an unwelcome distinction among Italian journalists: correspondent in Sicily for the state news agency Ansa and La Stampa newspaper, he has had his own armed police escort for the past six months. When anti-Mafia investigators using wiretaps heard mobsters discussing how to silence 37-year-old Abbate in revenge for his news reports and […]
From war correspondent to lawyer
C. Justin Brown recounts his life as a war correspondent in the Maryland Daily Record. Last year, after being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his Balkans reporting, he ditched the flak jacket for a lawyer’s wig, Looking outside, he saw a NATO Tomahawk missile slam into the upper floors of the nearby UÅ¡ce Tower, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]