Author: |Posted: 6:27 pm on 06/10/09
Category: World News Blog
Can you believe it was almost a year ago that “President Elect” Barak Obama told an ecstatic crowd in Chicago that “Change had come to America”?
With less than a month to go before the first anniversary of that speech a lot of people in America are asking themselves whether much of that change has yet been delivered? read more
Author: |Posted: 2:57 pm on 30/06/09
Category: Snowblog
Iraq is a country I have visited many times since I was first there to report from the front line of the harrowing Iran/iraq war in 1980. Foreign intervention and interference has dogged it for more than a century. No wonder Baghdad is seized with parties and celebration.
For the promised American pull-out from Iraq starts today. US forces start pulling out of urban areas in the country on what the Iraqi government has declared to be National Sovereignty Day.
Author: |Posted: 11:32 am on 17/04/09
Category: World News Blog
Memos which shed light on the “extreme interrogation” of terror suspects at detention centres like Guantanamo Bay have been released by White House officials.
The four documents, sent to the CIA between 2002 and 2005 by officials in the Bush administration, approve waterboarding – making the suspect feel like they are drowning – sleep deprivation, nudity and putting insects in with a tightly confined prisoner, as well as slapping and shoving suspects against a wall.
Copies of the previously top secret memos are on the Channel 4 News website here.
Author: |Posted: 12:21 pm on 01/04/09
Category: Snowblog
This G20 exists at so many levels. Take Brazil’s President Lula. Fearless campaigner against the carbon footprint. But having flown from Brazil to Doha and Doha to Paris, today he abandoned his plane, sending it empty to London while he took the train.
But the high spot thus far has been the Obama-Brown press conference. Brown, nervous and reading tightly from a script, Obama relaxed. The “One” has a cold. read more
Author: |Posted: 10:53 am on 19/02/09
Category: Snowblog
The Iraqi shoe thrower appeared before a Baghdad court today. A short appearance, as it turned out – the case was quickly adjourned.
Muntazer al-Zaidi, the 27 year-old journalist who threw both his shoes at George Bush on the US president’s final visit to Baghdad in December, has not been seen since allegations that he had been beaten up in jail.
Author: |Posted: 1:13 pm on 23/01/09
Category: Snowblog
Let me explain my ‘nightmare’ comment during Wednesday night’s programme. I’m aware it has been picked up by Daniel Finklestein on the Times website, among others.
I’d actually had a conversation with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd just before we went on air in which she used a pithy phrase about the ‘end of the nightmare of the Bush Presidency, the beginning of a new nightmare reporting Mr Perfection’. read more
Author: |Posted: 5:19 pm on 21/01/09
Category: Snowblog
The euphoria of the Obama swearing-in has very quickly been replaced here in Washington by the sober dawning of new morning. And a gloomy, overshadowed thing it feels to be.
The speech he made at the podium beneath the Capitol was less rhetorical and more content-strewn than most had expected, and much of the content related to the mountain to climb: debt, joblessness and the overall economic crisis.
Author: |Posted: 3:13 pm on 21/01/09
Category: Snowblog
Perusing the Washington Post this morning, I find a little something that seems to me to be somewhat prescient. From the heading Read and Weep.
There’s always a conflict between end of an era and beginning of an era…
(You may have to register – for free – to read the Washington Post link)
