Author: |Posted: 2:03 pm on 19/11/09
Category: World News Blog
Kabul was the emptiest of cities this morning.
The only way to move around – given the universal ban on private vehicles that has successfully staved off the predictable attack by the Taliban – was on foot. The traffic that usually blocks the city vanished.
We found ourselves learning that routes between places we normally travel actually take 20 minutes on foot, rather than an hour by car in the gridlocked streets.
The emptiness just added to the surreality of the occasion. Behind high walls, with foreign dignitaries, an almost virtual president of a virtual government was taking office for another five years. read more
Author: |Posted: 6:45 pm on 18/11/09
Category: World News Blog
The latest healthcare debate in America isn’t about the “public option” or when the senate will vote on healthcare reform – instead this week everyone is up in arms about new advice over breast cancer screening. read more
Author: |Posted: 6:20 pm on 17/11/09
Category: World News Blog
President Obama’s joint press appearance with President Hu of China today seemed to involve the American trying to say very little that might cause offence, and the Chinese leader trying to say almost nothing at all.
Neither took questions from reporters at the end of this stage-managed tour, which has been likened by some to an embarrassed debtor visiting his bank manager: China is the largest foreign holder of US government bonds and enjoys a trade surplus with the US.
Author: |Posted: 6:20 pm on 16/11/09
Category: World News Blog
It seemed unlikely that it could be happening again. But it was.
After Iraq, where months of pressure from the media and serving soldiers meant that translators working for the British army – and facing regular threats from the Iraqi insurgency – were eventually offered the chance of asylum in the UK, it seemed impossible a similar situation could be recurring here in Afghanistan.
Author: |Posted: 10:38 am on 12/11/09
Category: World News Blog
It is all about perceptions.
Today’s leaking of a memo from the US Ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, to Washington about his concerns over sending more than 10 to 15,000 reinforcements here, is not the first leak this week.
There’s been a flurry of backhanded information coming out of Washington in the past few months.
Author: |Posted: 7:19 pm on 10/11/09
Category: World News Blog
We all know that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. But do we know how to recognise an act of terrorism when we see it?
The massacre at Fort Hood is definitely not being treated as terrorist attack in the US. Investigators have concluded that there were no co conspirators either inside or outside the US military and so they are content to treat this as the act of a crazed lone gunman.
Author: |Posted: 5:59 pm on 10/11/09
Category: World News Blog
I have just had my version of a “senior moment”. Reporting yesterday on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, I discovered that the lovely producer working alongside me was just six years old back in 1989.
Aside from feeling rather old, I also seem to have reached an age when I am telling stories which, however familiar they may be to me, need re-telling for a new generation. read more
Author: |Posted: 6:10 pm on 09/11/09
Category: World News Blog
I was standing outside the front gate of Fort Hood in Texas when we heard that one of the victims shot dead on Thursday had been pregnant.
“Do we add that to the total dead?” asked an American producer. read more
Author: |Posted: 5:08 pm on 09/11/09
Category: World News Blog
It is the anniversary of the most important political event in most of our lifetimes, and yet so accustomed have we become to budget airline flights connecting us with central and eastern Europe in an hour or two, for a matter of a few quid, that the tumult of 1989 seems rather more than a lifetime ago.
The fall of the Berlin wall heralded Communism’s collapse in eastern Europe and, indeed, the collapse of the Soviet Union itself two years later.
Author: |Posted: 10:35 am on 06/11/09
Category: World News Blog
Samira Ahmed won the Stonewall award for broadcast of the year last night, for her report from South Africa on “corrective rape” following the murder of female football star Eudy Simelane.
She described her experience of making the award-winning report on the World News Blog earlier this year.
Also shortlisted for the award were Channel 4’s Find me a Family, and Economy Gastronomy (BBC 2), FYI Radio (lesbian and gay youth radio station) and Pobol y Cwm (BBC Cymru).
Watch the report below:
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