CATEGORY: Comment

Who killed Mohammed al Dura?

Who killed Mohammed al Dura?

It was the most iconic image of the second intifada: the killing, on camera, of a Palestinian child caught up in the violence of September 2000. But a French libel case has raised questions about what happened that day in Gaza. Natasha Lehrer...

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Georgia: media under pressure after protests

Georgia: media under pressure after protests

Journalists in Georgia have felt the heat during recent upheaval in the former soviet state. Here, Winston Bean tells of the conditions he and his colleagues have faced in recent days Earlier this week, Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili...

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Tunisia: twenty years of suffering

Tunisia: twenty years of suffering

Tunisian dissident lawyer and writer Mohamed Abbou was arrested in March 2005 and jailed for three and a half years for his internet expose of torture in Tunisian prisons. This is his first major published commentary on the state of Tunisian human...

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Burma: joined-up reporting

Burma: joined-up reporting

Recently returned from Rangoon, Fergal Keane reflects on how new and old media worked together, allowing brave dissidents to break the Burmese junta's censorship This is the story of how new and old media combined to beat the censors in Burma, a...

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Is libel law offside?

It hasn’t been a good few days for ‘halfpint’, ‘ian’ and ‘vaughan’, three Sheffield Wednesday supporters who took advantage of the apparent anonymity provided by their usernames to post seriously nasty comments about the club’s directors on the...

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Wrestling with genocide

Truth, notoriously, is the first casualty of war. The truth about the fate of Armenians living under Ottoman rule in 1915 may not be dead yet, but it has certainly wilted in the glare of Washington lobby politics. What should be the subject of...

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Whistleblower faces official secrets charges

Foreign Office civil servant Derek Pasquill has begun the long trial process after being charged under the Official Secrets Act. He is accused of making six damaging disclosures of documents that came into his possession as a civil servant. These...

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Britain: Censors overstep the mark

I don’t play video games myself. A combination of poor hand-eye coordination and absolutely zero patience put paid to my ambition of being king of the arcade back in the days of Wonder Boy. In subsequent years I would, of course, attempt to portray...

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Egypt: September of discontent

September is a resonant time in Egyptian politics. It was then, 26 years ago, that an angry Anwar al Sadat - Egypt’s then president - sent over 1,500 journalists, intellectuals and politicians from across the political spectrum to jail without...

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