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Tue, 08:16 22 Jul 2008 GMT17

 
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Media power and responsibility
19 Jul 2008 19:12:00 GMT
Author: Andrew Stroehlein

Gideon Rachman had a great piece in the FT on Monday. In American journalism, still a model, he contrasts US and UK media, finding that although American newspaper journalism seems self-reverential, long-winded, over-edited and stuffy, it does have an advantage over its British counterpart in that the Americans take the idea of journalism as a civic duty much more seriously.

With a foot on each side of the pond, I don't really want to get into the cross-Atlantic contrast exactly. The cited Reuters Foundation report on The Power of the Commentariat, showing that UK commentators don't regard themselves as powerful is more interesting, as it touches on something that goes beyond commentators to editors and others who decide what becomes a story and what doesn't.

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Moon G8 report on climate change, 2050
18 Jul 2008 17:26:00 GMT
Author: Jan Kellett

18 July, 2050

Wrapping up their first summit on the Moon, G8 leaders have strongly denied they failed to match the vision of a 2008 summit at which the world's eight strongest economies of the day promised to cut greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2050.

A spokesman for the G8 (which really should be called the G10, ever since China and India were allowed to join last year, a decision long delayed despite their both having stronger economies than the other G8 members combined) poured scorn on the notion that the 2008 agreement was actually a promise that G8 members committed themselves and their countries to.

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Blue buckets to fight cholera in Congo
18 Jul 2008 15:01:00 GMT
Author: Coco McCabe

"Kabimba" says the sign painted on the wall of a rural health clinic in the eastern Congolese province of South Kivu. The letters of the place name are bold - deep yellow with black shadows - and convey an orderliness and determination that defy the challenges this clinic faces.

Sometimes the water at the clinic doesn't run at all, if maintenance has been lax. That's why an enormous black cylinder is lying on its side in the clinic's front yard. It's a storage tank, waiting for installation as part of Oxfam's program to help ensure the clinic has a reliable reserve of water and decent sanitation facilities. In the back of the yard, a pair of pit latrines and two bathing stalls are under construction. And nearby, deep in the ground, lies the newly dug "placenta pit" - the local solution for disposing of hazardous medical wastes including afterbirth from the maternity ward.

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Listening out for disasters on Aceh local radio
17 Jul 2008 13:04:00 GMT
Author: Megan Rowling

On June 4 last year, people in the capital of Indonesia's Aceh province were sent into a panic by the sound of the city's tsunami warning sirens. There hadn't been an earthquake, but they weren't taking any chances after the devastation of the 2004 tsunami, which wiped out a third of the city's population. One woman handed her baby over to the driver of a passing car, begging the stranger to take her child to safety, a radio station manager told me.

Soon after the sirens went off in Banda Aceh, local commercial station Radio Djati FM started receiving calls and texts from its listeners demanding to know what was happening. The presenter called up Indonesia's meteorology and geophysics agency on air and broadcast live the embarrassing revelation that the warnings were false.

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HAVE YOUR SAY: Do neutral emblems protect aid workers?
17 Jul 2008 10:55:00 GMT
Author: AlertNet

Colombia has admitted it misused the symbol of the Red Cross in this month's military rescue of politician Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other rebel-held hostages. Dressing intelligence officers up in Red Cross t-shirts is a possible violation of the rules of war, enshrined in the Geneva Conventions to protect civilian lives.

Staff from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) go into battle zones in Colombia - and many other parts of the world - bearing that emblem as a sign they're neutral and should be granted safe passage. What will Colombian guerrillas think when they see that cross on a t-shirt now?

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