Here’s an African love story.

Adebe married her childhood sweetheart, Daniel, in Addis Ababa when she was 22. The trouble was, although Daniel was born in Ethiopia, he was of Eritrean stock, and when the two countries went to war, he was deported to Asmara, the Eritrean capital, where he was forced to join the army.

Adebe couldn’t bear the separation and fled to Sudan. When Daniel heard she was there, he deserted and escaped and joined his wife in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. It was hard there so after a few months, they decided to try to make it to Europe. It took them two weeks to cross the Sahara desert to Libya, the launchpad for boats to Italy.

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It’s been one of those days that feels like a month. I can hardly remember this morning. This afternoon will stay with me though.

At 4.30pm I met the Lockerbie bomber.

It looked to me as though Abdel Basset al-Megrahi wasn’t long for this world. If he was going to face sentencing “by a higher power,” I wanted to get in there first and fast. 

His release on compassionate grounds denied him his chance to clear his name in court.  He maintained his innocence, but he’d go down in history as the man who killed 270 people on a Pan Am Jumbo. 

If he really was dying, this might be his very last chance to speak to the world.

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On 3 June 2005 I sat in the Channel 4 newsroom watching a video of six young Bosnian Muslim men being taunted and then murdered in cold blood by members of a Serb militia called the Scorpions in a village near Srebrenica ten years earlier.

Their paramilitary tormentors sneered at their captives; they smoked cigarettes and cracked jokes; the cameraman complaining that his handycam battery was dying, urging the others to “get on with it.” 

The men and boys were forced to lie down with their hands tied before they were shot in the back. After watching the video, I put together this report:

This video contains images that some may find distressing.

Last night I watched another video in our newsroom, this time from Sri Lanka.

It was sent to us by a group of exiled journalists. It was chillingly reminiscent of the Bosnia video. 

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This is the way the Brit mission ends.

No bang; just the whimper of a procedural delay in the Iraqi parliament. After six years, the number of British troops in Iraq has gone from 46,000 to zero. (Well zero-ish, as there are some still based in Baghdad.)

A photograph in The Times said it all. read more

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Eyewitnesses interviewed during a week-long undercover investigation for Channel 4 News told of thousands of civilian deaths as government forces advanced on the Tigers’ final stronghold.

The deaths, they said, were the result of government shelling. The Sri Lankan president and senior government ministers have repeatedly denied causing a single civilian death in what the government had desginated a “no-fire zone.”

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Sinhalese Sri Lankans are so relieved their war is over that most appear blinded by patriotism, drunk on victory and deaf to the clamour from outside their island for investigations into possible war crimes.

The country’s pliant media speak with one voice, exhorting their loyal compatriots to celebrate this great triumph over terror.

But the only terror I saw there was in the eyes of vanquished Tamils. Those I met were terrified in case they were caught talking to us, constantly looking over their shoulders. A Tamil journalist pulled out of a meeting claiming he’d be killed were he caught. read more

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The military alert level has been raised a notch by South Korea and the US, signifying what’s deemed a “grave threat” posed by the North’s nuclear sabre-rattling.

Its state-controlled news agency, KCNA, said today that “even a minor accidental clash could lead to nuclear war.” I do wish they wouldn’t keep saying this sort of thing.

After our programme last night, I had a chance to discuss matters with two former British ambassadors to Pyongyang – John Everard and Dr J E Hoare – and ask them how alarmed they really were. read more

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Okay, so how scared should we be by North Korea’s nuclear brinksmanship?

On the face of it, it’s not looking good. First, there’s the (still unconfirmed) nuclear test detonation on Sunday, followed by five short-range missile launches on Monday and Tuesday. And today, reports that North Korea may have restarted its Yongbyon plant which makes weapons-grade plutonium.

Then there’s the shrill rhetoric: the headlines of the party paper screaming that “We are fully ready for battle,” the announcement that Pyongyang’s abandoning it’s 56-year truce with the South – and also this morning, the threat of “a powerful military strike” if its ships are stopped and searched. read more

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The story of the unwanted visitor to the world’s only Nobel laureate-political prisoner makes truly bizarre reading.

It’s so weird, in fact, that it could really only happen in a country whose political manoeuvrings are stage-managed by a military junta.

Burma’s “ministry of truth” appears to have fooled only the generals into thinking that everything’s normal. read more

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