The Oslo Freedom Forum is alternative human rights conference that highlights causes too often ignored or forgotten There are not many occasions in life when you feel honoured to be in the same room as someone. However, it happened to me several times during the three days of the Oslo Freedom Forum (OFF). The first was [Read more…]
British servicemen seriously wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq are on the mend in a pioneering underwater healing programme in Florida Twelve divers are suspended in a semi-circle over pale sand, a few yards from the ribs of a wrecked sailing ship. Six of them are younger than the others. The one next to me is the [Read more…]
Regular readers of Theodore Dalrymple will not have been surprised by the looting that spread through London and then to other English cities in early August. Indeed, one of the fascinating and appalling aspects of these disturbances, beyond the gleeful contempt for the law shown by the looters, and the complacency of the police who allowed [Read more…]
Edie Falco was plodding along a well-trodden route to film stardom: drama school and waitressing. Then ‘The Sopranos’ came along, changed her life and made her a must-have for the high priest of Indie movies. Overnight success took Edie Falco a hard decade and a half. Much of it was spent waiting on tables and looking [Read more…]
It is no small undertaking to attempt a ‘portrait’ of contemporary India in all its dazzling complexity. Still more a book that is simultaneously ‘an intimate biography’ of its vast population. To achieve either of these grand, not easily combined tasks in a single readable volume would require an author to provide representative accounts of the [Read more…]
A Lottery-funded film on the Indian Mutiny shows the rebels as heroes – and (surprise, surprise) the British as sadists. In fact, the mutineers were ruthless butchers… TO THE steady beat of drums, the captured mutineers were first stripped of their uniforms and then tied to cannons, their bellies pushed hard against the gaping mouths of [Read more…]
The indefinable international organization known as WikiLeaks was relatively unknown between its setting up in 2006 and the April 2010 premiere it staged at the National Press Club in Washington of the “Collateral Murder” video—a selection of stolen and decrypted gun-camera footage that purportedly shows the unlawful killing of Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists by [Read more…]
Whether photographing the victims of flood-ravaged Pakistan or Somalis risking their lives to flee their country, Alixandra Fazzina focuses on the human consequences of crisis. It is the middle of the night and less than 48 hours until her book launch in London, but the photographer Alixandra Fazzina is in a 4 x 4 vehicle, bumping, lurching and [Read more…]
Any celebrity flying the green flag needs glittering eco-credentials. But how do they justify the fleet of customised planes, the luxury homes and the posse of servants Hypocrisy is the vice we find hardest to forgive, but it’s also the one we most enjoy discovering in others. And nothing piques our interest more than eco-hypocrisy as [Read more…]
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France's Grudge Match with Qaddafi (FrumForum March 2011)
Many commentators seem surprised by France’s enthusiastic leadership of the intervention in Libya. They should not be. It arguably makes perfect sense that the French, so rigidly opposed to the overthrow of Saddam, and so reluctant to do any real fighting in Afghanistan, should be champing at the bit to send bombers to Benghazi and Qaddafi [Read more…]