Paper tigers
Myanmar may be opening to democracy, but just how free is the country’s notoriously closed media?
SOPA Awards 2011
My former paper, The Phnom Penh Post, has taken out three awards at this year’s Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) Awards, which covered stories published during 2010. The Post won an award for Excellence in Multimedia News Presentation for our online coverage of the Duch trial, and one for Excellence in Reporting Breaking News...
Pyongyang Spring
Could Kim Jong Il’s regime be the next autocratic government to fall? Don’t bet on it.
Bangladesh bans Facebook
This seems to be becoming something of a trend. Unhappy with depictions of the Prophet Mohammad posted on Facebook, Bangladesh has followed Pakistan in banning access to the site and protesters have taken to the street with flags and Zippo lighters. The target of ire? International Draw Mohammad Day (May 20), which encouraged web denizens...
War correspondents reminisce
Today marks 40 years since the Vietnamese communists rolled into Saigon, forcing the US to beat a hasy retreat from their embattled South Vietnamese client state. The occasion threw up its fair share of iconic images (see right), including the extraordinary sight of a North Vietnamese T-54 tank smashing open the gates of the city’s...
Armed Forces Day
Occasionally, a copy of the New Light of Myanmar — the Burmese government’s official mouthpiece — winds up in our office and gets passed around for laughs. The paper on March 25, commemorating Armed Forces Day, which marks the start of the Burmese army’s resistance to the Japanese occupation in 1945, was particularly amusing. In...
Censorship of Farrago
‘A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged . . . [it is] the skin of a living thought that may vary in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.’ — US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. I’ve been dismayed to hear, even amongst the distractions...
The Pakistani Spectator
It seems that my humble blog has acquired some new fans in Pakistan. Against all expectations, I was recently interviewed by Ghazala Khan of The Pakistani Spectator, an online magazine covering ‘views, news and opinions on Pakistani Politics in specific and world politics in general with respect to Pakistan’. I fielded questions about my blog,...
