Author: |Posted: 1:32 pm on 08/02/10
Category: World News Blog
Last Tuesday President Ahmadinejad said Iran would export uranium to be enriched overseas and then returned for medical use only – a concession to its diplomatic enemies.
Less than a week later he says they’ll enrich it at home and the rest of the world can go hang. Who knows what he’ll say next week? By the time any government formulates a response to Iran’s latest pronouncement on nuclear policy, it’s changed again.
Author: |Posted: 2:42 pm on 07/02/10
Category: World News Blog
Last night Channel 4 News reported the case of the three-month-old baby Landina, who was badly injured in the Haiti earthquake and is being treated by a British doctor, David Nott, in Port-au-Prince.
Nott says Landina urgently needs to be transferred to a specialist unit abroad if she is to survive, but yesterday his request was turned down. Moving children from the earthquake-stricken country is a sensitive issue: earlier this week, US missionaries were charged with kidnapping after trying to remove Haitian children from the country.
The story has attracted worldwide interest, with offers of help flooding in via the micro-blogging site Twitter. “This is clearly a tragic and upsetting case,” the Foreign Office told Channel 4 News today. “We stand prepared to help.”
Medecins Sans Frontieres Tweeted to say a Ministry of Health neuro-surgeon was evaluating Landina today for local care or medical evacuation abroad.
Update: read more about the latest developments and watch a new video report here.
Watch Inigo Gilmore’s original video report below:
The story was also covered in the Mail on Sunday today.
Author: |Posted: 9:11 pm on 04/02/10
Category: World News Blog
The Foreign Office is scrabbling to confirm reports that a 24-year-old British-Iranian woman is in jail in Tehran, facing charges of “spreading moral corruption” as well as “public order and national security offences,” linked to anti-government protests.
The reports are worrrying, confusing and intriguing in equal measure.
The charges are very serious, but no one has yet been able to establish the woman’s identity.
It seems that the mystery defendant may also be linked to other murky, reports about two German policemen, attached to the Tehran embassy, who were recently flown home in a hurry amid a flurry of allegations of espionage and love trysts with “an Iranian woman”. read more
Author: |Posted: 12:30 pm on 03/02/10
Category: World News Blog
Iran is doing its bit for space exploration. The Islamic Republic’s extra-terrestrial ambitions are carried on the shoulders of a mouse, two turtles and a handful of worms (do worms have shoulders?) launched into space this morning inside an “experimental biological capsule” in the Explorer 3 rocket. read more
Author: |Posted: 4:28 pm on 02/02/10
Category: World News Blog
I’ve been back from Haiti for over a week now, and I am still troubled by the experience. I have not been visited by nightmares, and I have not been sucked into an emotional maelstrom because of what I have witnessed. In fact, precisely the opposite. I am troubled because I feel a sense of emotional detachment from it all.
Not all reporters feel this way. The BBC’s admirable Matthew Price spoke powerfully on Radio 4’s The Media Show about what he called a “deeply distressing week”.
“The guilt started setting in early on”, he said. The guilt, that is, of being a journalist and not a doctor and therefore not being of much practical use to the injured and dying. “You can’t be emotionally detached”, Price concluded.
I’ve been trying to work out why I felt, and still feel, differently. read more
Author: |Posted: 11:33 am on 02/02/10
Category: World News Blog
Today marks the beginning of the Ten Day Dawn, the period leading up to the anniversary of the Revolution in Iran on 11 February 1979.
Last year, the 30th anniversary, we were in Tehran watching President Ahmadinejad giving an interminable speech to his bussed-in supporters.
Author: |Posted: 7:51 pm on 01/02/10
Category: World News Blog
Today we witnessed rare and official admission by Israel of potentialy lethal wrongdoing during last year’s Gaza war.
The admission comes buried 30-odd pages into a 46-page report the Israeli Foreign Ministry sent the UN.
Author: |Posted: 6:08 pm on 31/01/10
Category: World News Blog
Cameraman Stuart Webb explains how it felt to cover the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake for Channel 4 News. You may find some of his account distressing.
It’s an odd job sometimes. I’m sitting in a hotel room in Miami looking out of the window as the cruise ships glide past on an aqua marine sea past the swaying palm trees of Miami beach.
I’ve just spent the last eleven days covering the earthquake in Haiti. I’m now on my way back to Britain with a day stop in Miami to rest up, pack up and clean the dust and grime from my camera gear.
Author: |Posted: 2:24 pm on 29/01/10
Category: World News Blog
Having reported the impact of Tony Blair’s judgements rather than the making of them, watching his evidence to the Chilcot inquiry has raised more questions than it has answered.
Or as Winston Churchill said: “However beautiful the strategy, you should also occasionally look at the results.”
Mr Blair warns against reflecting with the benefit of hindsight, but from what we have heard so far, the problem was foresight. read more
