News to make the rich richer

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I wrote this comment in response to the following article by the World Association of Newspapers and Newspaper Publishers. Thomson Reuters can hire all the new journalists it wants but won’t change anything fundamental about its daily news file. Sorry about that. The agency deserves its reputation as providing a service that helps rich people […]

Ireland Yes, Ireland No – is that really the only option?

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(Photo by the Blue-haired lawyer) Irish voters have a chance to vote between paying more or less for their public debt today, according to their Prime Minister Enda Kenny. Put that way, I can imagine the temptation to vote “yes”. It’s a pretty rubbish choice. That Irish citizens have a formal right to express their […]

Stirring up mainstream media and politics

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I’ve just had a piece published by the bimonthly online Stir magazine, talking about the failings of mainstream media and conventional politics and what we can all do about both. I like the look of what they’re doing a great deal at Stir – there are tonnes of long-form articles I read all the way […]

Postcard from SW France

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It’s days to go before the first round in the 2012 French presidential elections. In Montbrun Bocage, a rural backwater south of Toulouse in the Pyrenean foothills, the atmosphere is hardly crackling with excitement. People here certainly know their politics but generally fail to find much passion for politicians. Given the bluntness of occasional votes […]

No holiday in Cambodia but rather catharsis

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I watched the extraordinarily moving documentary Brother Number One last night, one I’d meant to catch when covering the recent Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London. It tells the story of a New Zealander who was captured, tortured and executed by the Khmer Rouge. The film’s great success is to use one person’s tale, […]

Industrial agriculture meets peasant farmers – who wins?

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I’m due to interview Bettina Borgfeld for visionOntv later today to talk about Raising Resistance, a film she co-directed with David Bernet about the fight of the small farmers of South America against industrial agriculture. The subject is one close to my heart, I covered a version of it over many years while working for Reuters […]

Mimi Chakarova talks about making “The Price of Sex”

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q7w4v1rheA&w=560&h=315] Documentary film-maker and photojournalist Mimi Chakarova talks about her film, the Price of Sex, which screened in London this week as part of the Human Rights Watch Festival 2012. Chakarova describes how it took her four years to persuade some of the East European women who’d been sold into sex slavery to tell […]