Christine Gorman blogs from Malawi

Christine Gorman has just posted a series of entries on her blog about her global health reporting project on nursing in Malawi. (She was off-line in the rural north for awhile but now she’s back in range and has back-posted a whole bunch of stuff.) If you haven’t been following her, you should really start from the beginning with the description of her reporting project and then read through all the entries since her arrival in Malawi mid-June. There’s a nice combo of seriousness but also lightness of tone on the blog. The posts are worth reading not just for what she’s focusing on in her research (the state of health care and the nursing profession in Malawi) but for her observations on her own journalistic process including her transition from veteran print reporter to multimedia freelancer now recording audio and shooting pictures as well as taking notes. Her self-deprecating anecdotes are both funny and instructive. And it’s lovely to have the feeling of perching on a fellow journalist’s shoulder as she goes about her work, taking stock of what she’s finding, saving up questions she still wants to ask, thinking out loud about what’s important in the interviews and scenes she’s scooping up to help her tell her tale.  Check it out.

War Crimes Suspects

Today’s show opened with a parade of war crimes suspects of one sort or another: a report from the Hamdan proceedings in Guantanamo Bay, an update on Karadzic’s trail in Belgrade and a snapshot of at Al Bashir on tour in Darfur.

I also meant to post this piece from Monday just setting up the broad issues in the Hamdan trial.

Sexual Violence and Global Health

Another riveting, troubling, call-to-action speech by Stephen Lewis of AIDS-Free World.

Perceptions of Strength

Read Samantha Power on “The Democrats and National Security” in  The New York Review of Books.

More on Karadzic

A few more details came out today as well as lots more reaction to the news of Radovan Karadzic’s arrest. Here’s the piece I did for PRI’s The World.

Karadzic Arrested

NYT 

BBC

Reuters

Nobel Women’s Initiative

Mia Farrow writes on her blog today how excited she is to be joining the Nobel Women’s Initiative on a trip to the Thai/Burmese border, South Sudan and Chad. Her fellow travelers include Jody Williams, Wangari Maathai, Sima Simar, Leymah Gwobee, Qing Zhang and Gloria White-Hammond. Would love to be a fly on the wall at dinner time!

A Thousand Hills

I’ve just finished Stephen Kinzer’s new book A Thousand Hills: Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It. I recommend it to anyone who wants an introduction to the country’s recent past and the dilemmas it faces today. I was skeptical at first; there are many good books on Rwanda already and I had heard Kinzer discussing the book on the NPR show On Point and he seemed so enthralled with Kagame I feared his portrait of the Rwandan leader would be overly glossy. But in fact Kinzer lays out all the questions and criticisms even if he himself comes down on the side of being a Kagame fan. Mostly I was impressed by Kinzer’s ability to synthesize all the complicated layers of the story in such an accessible and emotionally honest way. I was in Rwanda twice last year and still have a head full of questions about so many aspects of the genocide and its aftermath. Kinzer’s contribution and especially the fuller portrait of Paul Kagame is really helpful.

Rami Khouri on Sudan and the ICC in the International Herald Tribune.

And Eric Reeves in The Guardian (on-line).

And Alex de Waal on his blog.

Priscilla Hayner on Sudan and the ICC in the Chicago Tribune:

The request by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for an arrest warrant against the president of Sudan focuses attention on one of the greatest challenges of international relations: whether and how to seek justice during an ongoing conflict, when the worst of the accused perpetrators still hold great power.

Read the full piece here.