We have all heard of the expression “a no news day,” one of those days where not much happened news-wise. I usually enjoy those days because some news outlets will often report more quirky stories.
But what happens when there really is no news?
In 1930, the BBC was only about a decade old and had very specific goals. On April 18, 1930, the BBC announced that “there is no news” in their evening report.
The BBC’s news announcer had nothing to communicate. “There is no news,” was the script of the 20:45 news bulletin, before piano music was played for the rest of the 15-minute segment.
The wireless service then returned to broadcasting from the Queen’s Hall in Langham Place, London, where the Wagner opera Parsifal was being performed.
It was not like there wasn’t anything to report, but the BBC decided what was worth reporting on, and according to them, there was nothing newsworthy.
Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, indicates that other historical news sources tell us that at least two important things were going on. For one, the British government was apparently trying to respond to some allegations that had been printed in a newspaper the day before—and since the papers were taking the Good Friday holiday off, they might have tried to go on the radio. “It’s possible that Day of No News was a form of asserting press independence,” Zuckerman writes: “[They may have been saying] ‘We won’t be the mouthpiece for the government, and so no news for anyone.’”
For another, Surya Sen, a Bengali independence fighter, had successfully led a raid against a colonial police outpost in Chittagong. This time, technology foiled the story: Even if they had decided to report on this, “they couldn’t have gotten the news, as Sen’s forces cut the rail and telegraph lines,” Zuckerman points out.
In 1930, the BBC had only a rudimentary news service and did not yet have a separate News Department. Concerned that broadcast news would undermine their circulations, the British press worked hard to limit the news production capabilities of the new medium.
I think that it wouldn’t be bad to have “no news days” every now and again.
In the last few years, the British Broadcasting Corp (BBC) has lost some of its credibility, but during World War II, it was a vital source of information for resistance groups in the Netherlands and other occupied countries.
The caption of the picture above said “January 4, 1944. Jammers and betrayal make listening to the B.B.C. not easy. We listen at night, 11:45 p.m., B.B.C.”
An employee of an illegal newspaper listening to the BBC.
The founders of the first illegal newspapers came to their initiative out of indignation about the German invasion and annoyance about what the equalized newspapers wrote. There was also a need to warn the population against National Socialism and to call for united opposition to the German measures. In 1940 there were about 62 underground magazines and within a year this number rose to 120. Some magazines had succeeded in finding printers and were, therefore, able to abandon the time-consuming stencilling. By the end of 1942, the number of papers had dropped to 96 because many editors of smaller papers considered their activities superfluous when bigger and better editions appeared. In 1943, new illegal newspapers sprang up like mushrooms. These were mainly concerned with translating and distributing the war news received via hidden radios. In total, about 1300 different magazines existed during the occupation years, which together had a circulation of millions of copies.
Due to a lack of radio sets and power, the BBC news had to be brought to the people via the underground. This is where the messages came in.
From the beginning of her exile, Queen Wilhelmina took up her task with great willpower. Uncompromising and with unshakable confidence in the Allied victory, she was able to convey this conviction to others. She constantly advocated the interests of the Netherlands to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt. Her attitude and effort commanded the respect of the Allied leaders.
The message of thanks to BBC radio for the so-called ‘Round the World birthday celebration programme’ broadcast in honour of Wilhelmina during the BBC’s European Empire Programs on 30 August 1941. Her inaction against the treatment of the Dutch Jews before, during and after the war has tainted her legacy somewhat.
The original caption reads: ‘Recording of the B.B.C. news, via a DC receiver as Goes was also without power, for the purpose of the illegal press. Goes.’ Two employees of the illegal magazine ‘Vrije Stemmen’ in Goes are working on the BBC’s news reports.
Radio Orange; Mrs A. A. Koch – de Waard.
The original caption of this photo reads: “BBC European Service: Dutch Section. The Dutch Section’s principal woman announcer.”
One of the ways, in which Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch government maintained ties with the population in the occupied territory was Radio Oranje. The broadcasts were invariably opened with ‘Hier Radio Oranje, the Voice of the Struggling Netherlands’. In addition to news commentary and entertainment, Radio Oranje broadcasts were also used to pass on code messages to the resistance in occupied territory.
Anyone caught listening to the BBC or other anti-Nazi radio stations could face execution.
At 5.16pm on the 23rd November 1963 the BBC premiered “An Unearthly Child” and UK television viewers were introduced to the incredible world of Doctor Who for the first time.
William Hartnell was the Doctor, a strange old man who could travel through time and space in his police box. Little did anyone know that this was just the first incarnation of a character who would go on to be so iconic for well over half a century, 59 years and counting.
Doctor Who first appeared on the BBC Television Service at 17:16:20 GMT on Saturday, 23 November 1963; this was eighty seconds later than the scheduled program time, because of announcements concerning the previous day’s assassination of John F. Kennedy.It was to be a regular weekly programme, each episode 25 minutes of transmission length. Discussions and plans for the programme had been in progress for a year. The head of drama Sydney Newman was mainly responsible for developing the programme, with the first format document for the series being written by Newman along with the head of the script department (later head of serials) Donald Wilson and staff writer C. E. Webber; in a 1971 interview Wilson claimed to have named the series, and when this claim was put to Newman he did not dispute it. Writer Anthony Coburn, story editor David Whitaker and initial producer Verity Lambert also heavily contributed to the development of the series.
The show was originally designed to be an educational adventure of sorts for families, learning about history and science depending on where they travelled.
I am probably the most a-technical person on the planet. Fixing things is just something I am not equipped to do, that’s why I admire people that can repair things. I love a show on the BBC called the Repair Shop. It is a British television show that aired on BBC Two for series 1 to 3 and on BBC One for series 4 onwards, in which family heirlooms are restored for their owners by numerous experts with a broad range of specialisms.
Last night they had Gary Fisher as a guest who brought in the prayer book he inherited from his grandparents Emanuel and Gisela Fisher.
They had been unable to leave Austria after it was annexed by Germany in 1938 and were eventually sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp. They had been able to put their son, Gary’s father Harry, on the Kindertransport to England. Though many of Gary’s family didn’t survive the camps, at the end of the war Emanuel and Gisela were liberated along with the book. Signed by many of the camp’s other residents, it’s an important record of the era and a treasured family possession.
The book was in some disrepair when it was first brought to Jay Blades and his team at The Repair Shop, with the pages falling apart and faded and torn in some places. Repair Shop’s book binder Chris Shaw was tasked with fixing the item, brought in by Gary Fisher.
“My grandparents, they were in a concentration camp and they never knew when their time was going to be up, but they had their religion, they had their faith and that must have been a real comfort to them to never give up,” said Gary.
In 1942, Emanuel and Gisela Fisher and other family members were taken to Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia . Gary Fisher explained that Theresienstadt was a “show” camp, often shown to foreigners as proof of fair treatment of Jewish people. Because of this, his grandparents were allowed to keep the prayer book with them rather than have it confiscated, as would have happened in other concentration camps.
“But it was only a mile and a half up the road where people were murdered in a gas chamber, like there were in many other Nazi death camps”. Mr. Fischer was clearly very emotional and his eyes filled as he described how his great-grandparents, his grandfather’s sister and a 10-year-old nephew were all murdered in the gas chamber. “My grandparents were very lucky,” he added.
Mr. Fisher wanted to get the book fixed so it could be shared in a proper place for others to see it too. While at the camp, Mr. Fischer’s grandfather wrote a poem and drew a picture of the Jewish star hidden behind a drawing of the camp. He read the poem to the experts at The Repair Shop, stopping halfway as emotion got to him.
Below is an extract of the poem read by Mr Fischer that his grandfather wrote in his treasured prayer book, translated into English:
” Do you know we were also there,
We stood together through summer and winter,
Bind our arms and legs together and ease the pain of sleepless hours,
And soon a new day will come when we will part from one another,
But you will be prepared for when we see each other again,
And on that day we will all be free from tyranny.”
Bookbinder Shaw got to work fixing the book. He was clearly nervous because it was such an important book, Shaw said it was the most important book he ever repaired. When the final reveal was made, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Mr Fischer said, ahead of the unveiling: “I feel like my grandparents are here with me.” Once the beautiful, renewed cover was revealed, Mr. Fischer broke down in tears. “Welcome back,” he said, adding, “It’s amazing – it’s just a complete work of art.”
Uniquely, the prayer book was signed by the other survivors who were liberated at the same time, with over fifty signatures immortalised in the book’s pages,including a German phrase from one prisoner: ” So it’s finally over.”
It is stories like this that indicate that the Holocaust is still near to so many people, and will be for years to come. It is still living history for many.
Maurice is a British sculptor and a former President of the Royal British Society of Sculptors. He is known for his figurative male sculpture.
He was born in Amsterdam on April 21,1939. much of his art is influenced by his experience of his time in Bergen Belsen concentration camp as a young child. His father and his youngest sister were killed in Bergen Belsen.
In 2019 he was part of a BBC documentary titled “The Last Survivors. Where he spoke about the death of his little sister and how he had made a present for Millie for her 1st birthday. The story broke me heart. He spoke about when Millie died his older sister dropped the body of Millie on the pile of corpses outside of the barracks. Death should never be a part of life for any child.
“I’m not one of these artists dying to get into the studio and make the next thing, it’s always been a struggle in a way to get around my initial feelings about making a sculpture.
I mean I have to go back to when I was in the camp and I had my little sister was born there, and err, she was coming up for her first birthday, and um, I mean, obviously as you can imagine, it wasn’t somewhere where you could go and get presents and things and food was very tight you know, very hard to get hold of and anyhow, it was coming up for her birthday, and I’d found a carrot which was a bit bent, and I made it into a little boat, I’d put little sticks for masts in it and I was gonna give this to her for her birthday and I, you know I was what, five and a half or something, and I’d kept asking my mother, you know is it her birthday now, and it wasn’t and soon, not now, soon.
So this build up to when her birthday was when I could give her, her present. And err, she didn’t get there, she didn’t’ make it to her birthday, you know she died and I couldn’t give her this present, and years later when I had therapy you know, Jean, the therapist said well this was your first sculpture and in a way that’s stayed with you ever since you know and consequently I’ve put down the fact that, that it was always a struggle for me, although I wanted to make a sculpture you know it was never a lovely experience, it was a struggle, it was a torment.”
The key to good comedy is timing, someone once said. If that is the case John Cleese and Connie Booth must have the best sense of timing ever.
As the title suggests I am talking about ‘Fawlty Towers’ although it may seem there were hundreds of episodes, there were in fact only 12, spread over 2 seasons.
The first episode of Fawlty Towers aired on 19 September 1975. Audiences were keen to see what John Cleese would do after Monty Python, but at first the situation comedy received some less than enthusiastic reviews. However the strength of the writing and casting – with Cleese as hotelier Basil Fawlty – ensured the series was a great success.
The series is set in Fawlty Towers, a fictional hotel in the seaside town of Torquay on the English Riviera. The plots centre on the tense, rude and put-upon owner Basil Fawlty (Cleese), his bossy wife Sybil (Prunella Scales), the sensible chambermaid Polly (Booth) who often is the peacemaker and voice of reason, and the hapless and English-challenged Spanish waiter Manuel (Andrew Sachs). They show their attempts to run the hotel amidst farcical situations and an array of demanding and eccentric guests and tradespeople.
The idea of the show came from Cleese after he stayed at the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay, Devon in 1970 (along with the rest of the Monty Python troupe), where he encountered the eccentric hotel owner Donald Sinclair.
Stuffy and snobbish, Sinclair treated guests as though they were a hindrance to his running of the hotel (a waitress who worked for him stated “it was as if he didn’t want the guests to be there”). Sinclair was the inspiration for Cleese’s character Basil Fawlty.
Fawlty Towers was written by Cleese with his wife Connie Booth. The shows were intricately plotted farces, and no dialogue was written until the plot had been finalised. The ensemble cast included Prunella Scales as Basil’s wife Sybil, and Andrew Sachs as the well-meaning but incompetent waiter Manuel. Booth provided an important element of sanity and calm as Polly the chambermaid.
Only 12 half hour episodes were ever made. The decision to stop making Fawlty Towers when it was at its creative height, leaving a distinct legacy, inspired later comedians such as Ricky Gervais. In 2000 Fawlty Towers was voted the best British television programme of all time in a BFI poll, above Cathy Come Home and Doctor Who.
There are so mamy hilarious moments I could pick, but this is my favourite. Who has never heard the expression “Don’t mention the war”
Social Media could be such a great tool to unite the world, instead it has divided it. There are now people who only believe the ‘news’ they see on Social Media and take it as gospel, no matter how manipulated it is. Then there are those who solely trust other news outlets, often referred as the Mainstream Media. Luckily there are still some who have the ability to do some critical thinking.
Regardless what you think of this so called Mainstream Media, there is one point that can not be disputed. Between 1992 and 2021,1411 reporters from the ‘Mainstream Media’ were killed. Where as no keyboard warrior Social Media reporter has ever been killed.
I am not going through all the reporters that were killed. I just focus on a few of them. However I will have the list of all killed reporters and journalists at the end of the blog.
Ulf Strömberg
Strömberg, a cameraman for the Swedish channel TV4, was murdered in the early morning during a robbery at the house in Taloqan, Afghanistan where he and several other journalists were staying.
At around 2 a.m., armed gunmen broke into the house and entered the room where two journalists from the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet were sleeping. The intruders demanded money, which they were given, and also stole equipment including cameras, computers, and a satellite phone, according to Aftonbladet.
The robbers threatened to kill the two journalists-Martin Adler, a photographer, and Bo Liden, a correspondent-but left the room after an Afghan translator intervened on their behalf, according to a Reuters report. The gunmen then proceeded to the room Strömberg was sharing with his TV4 colleague Rolf Porseryd, a correspondent. Porseryd told reporters that Strömberg went to the door and slammed it shut when he saw the gunmen, who fired several shots before fleeing.
Strömberg, 42, was apparently hit in the chest by a bullet fired through the door. Though colleagues rushed him to a local hospital, his wounds were fatal.
If you ever needed evidence that history repeats itself. Strömberg was killed in Taloqan, Afghanistan on November 26, 2001.
Veronica Guerin
Guerin, a crime reporter for the Sunday Independent, was shot dead by assailants on a motorcycle as she was stopped in her car at a traffic light in Dublin. She had been repeatedly targeted for physical attacks, a shooting, and death threats because of her incisive, continuing investigation into Ireland’s criminal underworld that had garnered her CPJ’s 1995 International Press Freedom Award.
Two men, Brian Meehan and Paul Ward, were convicted for her murder in 1999 and 1998. Ward’s conviction was overturned in 2002, but he remains in prison, where he is serving a 12-year sentence for taking part in a prison riot. John Gilligan, a known Dublin drug trafficker, was also charged but was acquitted because of lack of evidence on March 16, 2001, despite the judge’s assertion that there were “grave suspicions” of Gilligan’s complicity in the killing.
On October 23, 2020 Spanish police arrested Gilligan at his villa in Alicante in southeastern Spain as part of an investigation into suspected trafficking of marijuana and prescription drugs from Spain to Ireland and the U.K., the BBC reported. During the raid, police recovered a Colt Python revolver which was buried in the garden of the villa — the same model that was used in the journalist’s murder, The Guardian reported. According to that report, Spanish and Irish police were examining the weapon to determine whether it was used in the assassination.
Veronica Guerin worked for the Sunday Independent. She was killed in Dublin, Ireland June 26, 1996.
Daniel Pearl
U.S. government officials confirmed on February 21, 2002, that Pearl, kidnapped South Asia correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, had been killed by his captors.
The exact date of his murder was uncertain, but authorities announced his death after receiving a graphic, three-and-a-half minute digital videotape containing scenes in which one of the killers slits Pearl’s throat, and then someone holds his severed head. The faces of the assailants are not visible on the video. This, and other details below, are documented in an extensive report on Pearl’s murder, entitled The Truth Left Behind: Inside the Kidnapping and Murder of Daniel Pearl, published in 2011 by The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and The Center for Public Integrity.
Pearl, 38, went missing on January 23, 2002, in the port city of Karachi, Pakistan, and was last seen on his way to an interview at the Village Restaurant, downtown near the Metropole Hotel. According to The Wall Street Journal, Pearl had been reporting on Richard Reid, a suspected terrorist who allegedly tried to blow up an airplane during a transatlantic flight with a bomb in his shoe.
Four days after his disappearance, a group calling itself “The National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty” sent an e-mail to several U.S.- and Pakistan-based news organizations claiming responsibility for kidnapping Pearl and accusing him of being an American spy. The e-mail also contained four photographs of the journalist, including one in which he is held at gunpoint and another in which he is holding a copy of the January 24 issue of Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper.
The e-mail contained a series of demands, including the repatriation of Pakistani detainees held by the U.S. Army in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The sender or senders, who used a Hotmail e-mail account under the name “Kidnapper guy,” said Pearl was “at present being kept in very inhuman circumstances quite similar in fact to the way that Pakistanis and nationals of other sovereign countries are being kept in Cuba by the American Army.”
Another e-mail was sent on January 30, also including photographs of Pearl held captive. This e-mail accused him of being an agent of Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, and said he would be killed within 24 hours unless the group’s demands were met.
After scrutinizing the videotape that officials received weeks later, authorities believe that Pearl may have been murdered before the second e-mail was sent. During that footage, Pearl is forced to identify himself as Jewish and to deliver scripted lines reiterating some of the demands made in the e-mails, according to an FBI analysis of the tape that was provided to the Journal.
On February 12, 2002, before Pearl’s murder was discovered, Pakistani police announced the arrest of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, whom they identified as the prime suspect behind the journalist’s kidnapping.
On March 14, a U.S. grand jury indicted Saeed, charging him with hostage-taking and conspiracy to commit hostage-taking resulting in Pearl’s murder. U.S. prosecutors also unsealed a secret indictment filed against Saeed in November 2001 accusing him of participating in the 1994 kidnapping of U.S. tourist Bela Nuss in India. Pakistan refused to extradite Saeed, possibly to avoid damaging disclosures of links between the country’s intelligence agencies and militant Islamist groups that the United States wants to see eliminated.
In April, Saeed and three accomplices–Salman Saqib, Fahad Naseem, and Shaikh Adil–were charged with Pearl’s kidnapping and murder before Pakistan’s special anti-terrorism court. The trial, initially convened at Karachi’s Central Jail and later moved to a heavily guarded prison in Hyderabad due to security concerns, was closed to journalists and the public.
In mid-May, as the trial was under way, police found a dismembered body believed to be Pearl’s buried in the outskirts of Karachi on property owned by the Al-Rashid Trust, an Islamic charity that the United States has accused of funneling money to al-Qaeda. Police were reportedly led to the shallow grave by Fazal Karim, a member of the banned militant Sunni Muslim group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. At year’s end, Karim had not been charged, and though it has been widely reported that he was detained, authorities have never officially acknowledged his arrest.
On July 15, 2002, the anti-terrorism court announced that Saeed and his accomplices were guilty of Pearl’s kidnapping and murder. Saeed, who was accused of masterminding the crime, was sentenced to death by hanging; Saqib, Naseem, and Adil each received 25-year prison sentences. They appealed the ruling.
Shortly after the ruling, U.S. officials announced DNA test results confirming that the body found in May was indeed Pearl’s.
In mid-August, 2002, The Associated Press published a detailed account of Pearl’s kidnapping, citing two investigators who spoke on condition of anonymity. The officials said that, according to Karim (who had led police to the journalist’s body in May) and two others held in unofficial custody, Pearl was shot and wounded on the sixth day of his capture when he tried to escape and was murdered on the ninth day. The AP identified the two other detainees as Zubair Chishti and Naeem Bukhari, who is also known as Attaur Rehman and is a leader of the sectarian group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. The men also said that three Arabs, possibly from Yemen, were brought to the hideout on the ninth day, and that they were involved in filming and carrying out the execution.
Karim later identified one of the Yemenis among those arrested in a September 11, 2002, raid in Karachi, during which U.S. and Pakistani authorities detained several suspected al-Qaeda members, including Ramzi Binalshibh, allegedly a senior al-Qaeda leader who has claimed a central role in coordinating the September 11 attacks.
In 2007, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, suspected of masterminding the 9/11 attacks in the U.S., was reported to have confessed to a U.S. military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to personally having slit Pearl’s throat, according to news reports. A trial date for Mohammed’s role in the 9/11 attack has been set for January 11, 2021, although it’s not certain if the trial will proceed, according to news reports.
A former U.S. intelligence officer, Robert Baer, told the United Press International (UPI) news agency in 2002 that he had given Pearl information about Mohammed, and that he believes it was the journalist’s investigations of Mohammed that may have cost him his life. Baer, who worked for the Central Intelligence Agency for more than 20 years in Asia and the Middle East and wrote the book See No Evil, which criticizes the CIA, told UPI, “I have heard from [intelligence] people who follow this closely that it was people close to Mohammed that killed him, if it wasn’t Mohammed himself.”
UPI quoted a Wall Street Journal spokesperson as saying that, “Everything we know from before and after Danny’s murder indicates his reporting effort focused on [alleged shoe bomber] Richard Reid.”
On April 2, 2020, the Sindh High Court overturned the murder convictions of the four men accused in Pearl’s killing, according to news reports. The decision found Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who had previously been sentenced to death, guilty only of kidnapping Pearl and reduced his sentence to seven years, which he has already served. The Pearl family and the Sindh provincial government appealed, and the four men remained imprisoned as of October 2020, awaiting further action by the Supreme Court, according to news reports.
Daniel Pearl worked for The Wall Street Journal. He was killed in Karachi, Pakistan, between January 23 and February 21, 2002.
Ahmad Omaid Khpalwak
Khpalwak, 25, a BBC and Pajhwok Afghan News reporter, was among at least 22 people killed after gunmen and suicide bombers launched a combined attack on government buildings including the governor’s office and police headquarters in Tarin Kot, capital of Uruzgan province, local and international news reports said.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the series of explosions and subsequent gun battle with Afghan and NATO security forces, the reports said. News reports said Khpalwak was killed in crossfire after the initial bomb blasts.
Khpalwak was in the local branch office of state broadcaster Radio and Television of Afghanistan when the attack began, according to Danish Karokhel, the director of Pajhwok. Khpalwak, who had office space in the building, was filing his morning report at the time.
In a statement released on September 8, 2011, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan said one of its soldiers had shot Khpalwak because he thought he was an armed insurgent reaching for a bomb under his vest. “He was unarmed; no weapon was found nearby. It appears all the rounds perceived as coming from him were instead fired by U.S. soldiers,” the ISAF statement said. Investigators concluded troops may have mistaken a press card Khpalwak was holding up as identification for a bomb trigger.
The BBC reported that Khpalwak sent his brother two text messages shortly before his death. The first read: “I am hiding. Death has come.” In the second, he wrote: “Pray for me if I die.”
Ahmad Omaid Khpalwak worked for Pajhwok Afghan News, BBC .He was killed in Tarin Kot, Afghanistan on July 28, 2011
Danish Siddiqui
Danish Siddiqui was killed on July 16, 2021, while covering a clash between Afghan security forces and Taliban fighters in the town of Spin Boldak, near the border with Pakistan, according to news reports and Reuters, citing Afghan military officials.
Siddiqui, 38, was embedded with Afghan special forces at the time of his death, according to those reports. He told his employer that he had been wounded in the arm by shrapnel earlier that day while reporting and had resumed work after receiving medical treatment.
Siddiqui was talking to shopkeepers when the Taliban attacked, and was killed in a subsequent crossfire, an Afghan commander told Reuters.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Reuters that the militant group had not been aware there was a journalist on the scene, and said it was unclear how Siddiqui was killed.
Siddiqui was a member of the Reuters photography team that won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for “shocking photographs that exposed the world to violence Rohingya refugees faced in fleeing Myanmar.”
A Reuters spokesperson told CPJ via email that the outlet is working to verify the facts surrounding Siddiqui’s death and has engaged outside experts to conduct an independent review of the circumstances leading up to, around, and after his death. Reuters is also conducting an internal review, the spokesperson said.
CPJ emailed Afghanistan’s Ministry of Interior for comment, but did not receive any response.
Danish Siddiqui worked for Reuter. He was killed in Spin Boldak, Afghanistan on July 16, 2021.
So the next time you complain about or even ridicule the so called ‘Mainstream Media’ just remember the sacrifices they have made. Sacrifices which will never be made by these ‘experts’ on social media.
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It absolutely amazes me that in this day and age there are still people who deny that the Holocaust ever happened. In fact there appears to be an increase of Holocaust deniers.
Some use the picture above, of liberated women in Bergen Belsen as their ‘evidence’ that the Holocaust was a myth. They say of you look at the picture you can see that the women are healthy and seem to be happy. Well of course they were happy, they had just been liberated and they may appear to be healthy, but they are fully covered up and you can’t see the scars and bruises. Additionally some were ‘healthy’ because the human soul and mind is a powerful thing, they just kept going no matter what.
From late 1944, food rations throughout Bergen-Belsen continued to shrink. By early 1945, prisoners would sometimes go without food for days; fresh water was also in short supply.
Sanitation was totally inadequate, with few toilets and water outlets for the tens of thousands of prisoners imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen at this time. Overcrowding, poor sanitary conditions, and the lack of adequate food, water, and shelter led to an outbreak of diseases such as typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and dysentery, causing an ever increasing number of deaths. In the first few months of 1945, tens of thousands of prisoners died.
Despite all of this being well documented there are still some who deny the Holocaust.
The Holocaust did happen, but don’t take my word for it but take the words of 2 neutral and very reputable and trustworthy men, English broadcaster and Journalist Richard Dimbleby, and British actor Dirk Bogarde. Both men had been present at the liberation of Bergen Belsen, These are the accounts of what they saw that day.
Richard Dimbleby
“I have just returned from the Belsen concentration camp where I drove slowly about the place in a Jeep with the chief doctor of the Second Army. I had waited a day before going to the camp so that I could be absolutely sure of the facts now available.
I find it hard to describe adequately the horrible things that I’ve seen and heard but here unadorned are the facts.
There are 40,000 men, women and children in the camp, German and half a dozen other nationalities and thousands of them Jews. Of this total of forty thousand, four thousand two hundred and fifty are acutely ill or dying of virulent disease. Typhus, typhoid, diphtheria, dysentery, pneumonia and childbirth fever are rife.
25,600, three quarters of them women, are either ill from lack of food or are actually dying of starvation.
In the last few months alone thirty thousand prisoners have been killed off or allowed to die. Those are the simple horrible facts of Belsen.
But horrible as they are they can convey little or nothing in themselves.
I wish with all my heart that everyone fighting in this war – and above all those whose duty it is to direct the war from Britain and America – could have come with me through the barbed-wire fence that leads to the inner compound of the camp.
Outside it had been the lucky prisoners – the men and women who had only just arrived at Belsen before we captured it.
But beyond the barrier was a whirling cloud of dust, the dust of thousands of slowly moving people, laden in itself with the deadly typhus germ. And with the dust was a smell, sickly and thick, the smell of death and decay of corruption and filth.
I passed through the barrier and found myself in the world of a nightmare.
Dead bodies, some of them in decay lay strewn about the road.
And along the rutted tracks on each side of the road were brown wooden huts. There were faces at the windows. The bony emaciated faces of starving women too weak to come outside – propping themselves against the glass to see the daylight before they died.
And they were dying, every hour and every minute.
I saw a man wandering dazedly along the road then stagger and fall. Someone else looked down at him, took him by the heels and dragged him to the side of the road to join the other bodies lying unburied there. No one else took the slightest notice, they didn’t even trouble to turn their heads
Behind the huts two youths and two girls who’d found a morsel of food were sitting together on the grass in picnic fashion sharing it. They were not six feet from a pile of decomposing bodies
Inside the huts it was even worse.
I’ve seen many terrible sights in the last five years but nothing, nothing approaching the dreadful interior of this hut at Belsen0
The dead and the dying lay close together
I picked my way over corpse after corpse in the gloom until I heard one voice that rose above the gentle undulating moaning.
I found a girl, she was a living skeleton impossible to gauge her age for she had practically no hair left on her head and her face was only a yellow parchment sheet with two holes in it for eyes. She was stretching out her stick of an arm and gasping something. It was ‘English, English. Medicine, medicine’ And she was trying to cry but had not enough strength.
And beyond her down the passage and in the hut there were the convulsive movements of dying people too weak to raise themselves from the floor. They were crawling with lice and smeared with filth. They had no food for days. For the Germans sent it down into the camp en bloc and only those strong enough to come out of the huts could get it. The rest of them lay there in the shadows growing weaker and weaker
There was no one to take the bodies away when they died. And I had to look hard to see who was alive and who was dead
It was the same outside in the compounds. Men and women lying about the ground and the rest of the procession of ghosts wandering aimlessly about them.
In the shade of some trees lay a great collection of bodies. I walked round them trying to count. There were perhaps a hundred and fifty flung down on each other – all naked, all so thin that their yellow skins glistened like stretched rubber on their bones.
Some of the poor starved creatures whose bodies were there looked so utterly unreal and inhuman that I could have imagined that they had never lived at all. They were like polished skeletons, the skeletons that medical students like to play practical jokes with.
At one end of the pile a cluster of men and women were gathered around a fire. They were using rags and old shoes taken from the bodies to keep it alight and they were heating soup on it.
And close by was the enclosure where 500 children between the ages of five and twelve had been kept. They were not so hungry as the rest for the women had sacrificed themselves to keep them alive.
Babies were born at Belsen, some of them shrunken wizened little things that could not live because their mothers could not feed them.
One woman distraught to the point of madness flung herself at a British soldier who was on guard in the camp on the night that it was reached by the 11th Armoured Division. She begged him to give her some milk for the tiny baby she held in her arms. She laid the mite on the ground, threw herself at the sentry’s feet and kissed his boots. And when in his distress he asked her to get up, she put the baby in his arms and ran off crying that she would find milk for it because there was no milk in her breast. And when the soldier opened the bundle of rags to look at the child he found it had been dead for days.
I have never seen British soldiers so moved to cold fury as the men who opened the Belsen camp this week and those of the police and the RAMC who are now on duty there, trying to save the prisoners who are not too far gone in starvation.
The SS guards who shot several of the prisoners after we’d arrived in the camp when they thought no one was looking are now gathering up all the bodies and carting them away for burial. German prisoners are being sent up for the same sort of work.
Kramer, the SS major who was Commandant of the camp and who had been second-in-command of one of the mass murder camps in Poland lies today in a British prison cage.
As we went deeper into the camp and further from the main gate we saw more and more of the horrors of the place and I realised that what is so ghastly is not so much the individual acts of barbarism that take place in SS camps but the gradual breakdown of civilisation that happens when human beings are herded like animals behind barbed wire. Here in Belsen we were seeing people, many of them lawyers and doctors and chemists, musicians, authors, who’d long since ceased to care about the conventions and the customs of normal life.
There had been no privacy there of any kind. Women stood naked at the side of the track washing in cupfuls of water taken from British Army water trucks. Others squatted while they searched themselves for lice and examined each other’s hair. Sufferers from dysentery leaned against the huts straining helplessly. And all around and about them was this awful drifting tide of exhausted people neither caring nor waiting – just a few held out their withered hands to us as we passed by and blessed the doctor whom they knew had become the camp commander in the place of the brutal Kramer.
We were on our way down to the crematorium where the Germans had burned alive thousands of men and women in a single fire. The furnace was in a hut about the size of a single garage – and the hut was surrounded by a small stockade.
A little Pole whose prison number was tattooed on the inside of his forearm, as it was on all the others, told me how they burned the people. They brought them into the stockade, walked them in and then an SS guard hit them on the back of the neck with a club and stunned them and then they were fed straight into the fire, three at a time, two men, one woman. The opening was not big enough for three men and that I verified by measuring it. They burned 10,000 people in this fire in reprisal for the murder of two SS guards.
And back in the hut by the main gate of the camp I questioned the sergeant who’d been in charge of one of the SS squads. He was a fair-haired gangling creature with tiny crooked ears rather like gerbils and big hands. His SS uniform was undone and dirty; he was writing out his confession while a young North Country anti-tank gunner of the 11th Armored Division kept watch on him with a tommy gun that never moved. I asked him how many people he had killed. He looked vacant for a moment and then he replied ‘oh I don’t remember’.
I have set down these facts of length because in common with all of us who’ve been to the camp I feel that you should be told without reserve exactly what has been happening there.
Every fact I’ve so far given you has been verified but there is one more awful than all the others that I’ve kept to the end.
Far away in a corner of Belsen camp there is a pit the size of a tennis court. It’s 15 feet deep and at one end it’s piled to the very top with naked bodies that have been tumbled in one on top of the other. Like this must have been the Plague pits in England 300 years ago, only nowadays we can help by digging them quicker with bulldozers, and already there’s a bulldozer at work in Belsen.
Our army doctors on examining some of these bodies found in their sides a long slit apparently made by someone with surgical knowledge. They made enquiries and they established beyond doubt that in the frenzy of their starvation some of the people of Belsen had taken the wasted bodies of their fellow prisoners and had removed from them the only remaining flesh, the liver and the kidneys to eat.
May I add to this story only the assurance that everything that an army can do to save these men and women and children is being done and that those officers and men who’ve seen these things have gone back to the Second Army moved to an anger such as I have never seen in them before.
Richard Dimbleby, BBC, broadcast April 19th 1945.
Dirk Bogarde wasn’t sure about the date, he thought it was the 13th of April but the camp was liberated on the 15th of April 1945.
“I think it was on the 13th of April—I’m not quite sure what the date was when we opened up Belsen Camp, which was the first concentration camp any of us had seen, we didn’t even know what they were, we’d heard vague rumours that they were. I mean nothing could be worse than that. The gates were opened and then I realised that I was looking at Dante’s Inferno, I mean … I … I still haven’t seen anything as dreadful. And never will. And a girl came up who spoke English, because she recognised one of the badges, and she … her breasts were like, sort of, empty purses, she had no top on, and a pair of man’s pyjamas, you know, the prison pyjamas, and no hair. But I knew she was girl because of her breasts, which were empty. She was I suppose, oh I don’t know, twenty four, twenty five, and we talked, and she was, you know, so excited and thrilled, and all around us there were mountains of dead people, I mean mountains of them, and they were slushy, and they were slimy, so when you walked through them … or walked—you tried not to, but it was like …. well you just walked through them, and she … there was a very nice British MP [Royal Military Police], and he said ‘Don’t have any more, come away, come away sir, if you don’t mind, because they’ve all got typhoid and you’ll get it, you shouldn’t be here swanning-around’ and she saw in the back of the jeep, the unexpired portion of the daily ration, wrapped in a piece of the Daily Mirror, and she said could she have it, and he” [the Military Police] “said ‘Don’t give her food, because they eat it immediately and they die, within ten minutes’, but she didn’t want the food, she wanted the piece of Daily Mirror—she hadn’t seen newsprint for about eight years or five years, whatever it was she had been in the camp for. … she was Estonian. … that’s all she wanted. She gave me a big kiss, which was very moving. The corporal” [Military Police] “was out of his mind and I was just dragged off. I never saw her again, of course she died. I mean, I gather they all did. But, I can’t really describe it very well, I don’t really want to. I went through some of the huts and there were tiers and tiers of rotting people, but some of them who were alive underneath the rot, and were lifting their heads and trying …. trying to do the victory thing. That was the worst.”
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The best known music show is without a doubt Top of the Pops, and even though the show was cancelled in 2006, there are still weekly reruns on BBC 4.Most people were surprised that the BBC cancelled the show because i was and still is very popular, there have been speculations though that it may return again.
However this blog is about another iconic and legendary BBC music show,’ The Old Grey whistle test’ It was commissioned by none other then David Attenborough and aired on BBC2 from 1971 to 1988. Unlike Top of the Pops, the whistle test had some more edgier music and catered more for rock fans and focused more on albums then hit singles.
The show hosted many seminal acts of the era, including the first British TV performance of Bob Marley and the Wailers as well as then little-known acts of whom any early footage is now considered precious, such as Billy Joel, Judas Priest (with a long haired Rob Halford), Wishbone Ash, Judee Sill, Heart, and Lynyrd Skynyrd.
The series was cancelled in the spring of 1987 by Janet Street-Porter, who had been appointed head of Youth Programmes at the BBC.[7] The series ended with a live New Year’s Eve special broadcast through to the early hours of New Year’s Day 1988; material included “Hotel California” by The Eagles, live from 1977, and “Bat Out of Hell” by Meat Loaf.
Many viewers think that the performances were always live but that was always the case, although for the vast majority they were.
On 23 February 2018, the BBC broadcast a special show, hosted by Bob Harris, to mark the 30 years since the legendary series was last broadcast. This live studio show featured music, special guests and rare archive footage. It featured performances from Peter Frampton, Richard Thompson, Albert Lee and others. Bob Harris chatted to Whistle Test alumni, including Dave Stewart, Joan Armatrading, Ian Anderson, Chris Difford and Kiki Dee, as well as fan Danny Baker.
BBC 4 regularly plays old episodes from the show and I am always amazed about the new things I learn. For example I never knew that Elkie Brooks and Robert Palmer were in a band together. The band was called ‘Vinegar Joe’
Whistle Test was also the British television debut of the American glam punk band New York Dolls. Their performance influenced the following punk rock scene such as the Sex Pistols and The Clash as well as alternative bands like R.E.M. and The Smiths and the glam metal scene of the 1980s.
David Johansen was the front man of this line up of the New York Dolls, David had some solo success later on under the name of Buster Pointdexter.
Brinsley Schwarz were a 1970s English pub rock band, named after their guitarist Brinsley Schwarz. They made an appearance on the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1973.
In case you are wondering who the singer and bass player is, it is Nick Lowe from such hits as “I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass” and “Cruel to be Kind”
By 1988 it was considered well past it’s sell by date however it was an influence on many music shows that came after such as Later With Jools Holland.
As mentioned earlier Bob Marley had his first appearance on the BBC on the Old Grey Whistle test. This was another thing I hadn’t realized, Peter Tosh was also a member of the Wailers.
It would be great to see a show like the Old Grey whistle Test again on TV, but I don’t think that the same caliber of performers are available nowadays
Robert William Gary Moore was born in Belfast on 4 April 1952,the son of Winnie, a housewife, and Robert Moore, a promoter who ran the Queen’s Hall ballroom in Hollywood. He grew up near Belfast’s Stormont Estate with four siblings.
He credited his father for getting him started in music. When Moore was six years old, his father invited him onstage to sing “Sugartime” with a showband at an event he had organised, which first sparked his interest in music. His father bought him his first guitar, a second-hand Framus acoustic, when Moore was 10 years old. Though left-handed, he learned to play the instrument right-handed. Not long after, he formed his first band, The Beat Boys, who mainly performed Beatles songs. He later joined Platform Three and The Method, amongst others. Around this time, he befriended guitarist Rory Gallagher, who often performed at the same venues as him. He left Belfast for Dublin in 1968 just as The Troubles were starting in Northern Ireland. A year later, his parents separated.
After moving to Dublin, Moore joined Irish blues rock band Skid Row. At the time, the group were fronted by vocalist Phil Lynott. He and Moore soon became friends, and they shared a bedsit in Ballsbridge.
After leaving Skid Row, Phil Lynott formed the hard rock group Thin Lizzy. After the departure of guitarist Eric Bell, Moore was recruited to help finish the band’s ongoing tour in early 1974. During his time with the group, Moore recorded three songs with them, including “Still in Love with You”
After Thin Lizzy, Gary Moore had a successful solo career. He is one of my all time guitar heroes. Unfortunately I never got to see him live, he died on 6 February 2011. I did get to see his brother Cliff Moore perform live in our local pub. In 1994.
History of Sorts 
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