Neil Durkin

If youre a US talk radio host and youve got the vice-president on your station, youre going to put a few listeners questions to him, right? Right. Well thats what Scott Hennen did on station WDAY in Fargo, North Dakota, back in October...

Phew, thats ok then! Death penalty states in American can now go back to executing people with lethal injections. The Supreme Court has ruled that there is nothing unconstitutional about these killings and that the state of Kentucky...

Do you remember the scene in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly* when Clint Eastwood shoots down his Mexican partner just at the moment the hangmans noose tightens around his neck? Clints the sharpshooter, and the two are working a scheme...

Is it NIger (stress on the beginning)? Or is it NigER (long stress on the end)? A whole country and I’m not sure how to pronounce it. And neither, I’ve noticed, do British news-readers when (rarely) they have a news report from there...

The sickening death of Banaz Mahmod is widely covered today. This, you’ll remember, is the case of the young Kurdish woman who was killed by members of her family in London for the “crime” of having a lover her family didn’t approve of...

"Shameful”, “inhumane”, “oppressive”, “indefensible”, “adversarial”, “wholly unjustified”, a “blemish” on Britain’s reputation, and treatment that falls "seriously below the standards to be expected of a humane and civilised society”...

It’s an old media trick (and Rageh Omaar’s already done it on ITV earlier this week ), but it works – so today I’m starting off with ‘Iraq In Numbers’. To quote Amnesty’s (well-titled) ‘Carnage and despair’ report, the figures tell a...

I was thinking about this the other day – surely Iraq has been the most reported-on war in the entire history of the world. Well, ok, the Second World War got a lot of coverage (books, television programmes) but my theory is that it...

Waterboarding and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques have been saved! On Saturday – in a move anticipated and feared by many observers – outgoing US President George W Bush bravely stepped in to preserve the CIA’s right to use...

Wheres the biggest prison in the world? China? The USA? Russia? No? Any other thoughts? Okay, its a trick question (of a kind), because effectively the worlds biggest prison is the entire Gaza Strip, the Palestinian territory occupied...

This blog is from our very own Bibi, who asked me to post it, so... ...another week in the media, and another week with China under the international spotlight in the lead-up to the Games. Now China has reportedly increased its...

We dont always say enough about photos in journalism in this blog - so today I will! First of all, the Guardians got an appalling one on its front page . Its of a massive crowd in Gaza carrying the dead body of a 21-month-old girl...

Hes a judo black belt and likes to be photographed doing manly things like shooting and fishing, but has outgoing Russian president Vladimir Putin been a force for good? In a big BBC World Service opinion poll out today opinions are...

Whatever you think of Steven Spielberg - and I think some of his films are great! - you certainly cant keep China, the Olympics and human rights out of the news now. The latest case to come under the spotlight is Yang Chunlin, a former...

After the flare-up over Sharia law in the UK, the Church of Englands back in the news after a Synod debate yesterday on terrorism, security and human rights. Passing a motion by a whopping majority of 235 votes to two, the churchmen...

So the director of Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark (and my personal favourite) Duel, has made headlines by saying he would not take up his role as the Beijing Olympics artistic director . Steven Spielbergs decision, backed by another...

Just how far does the United States think it can go with its sham justice process at Guantánamo? After six years and massive criticism for holding hundreds of prisoners in illegal detention, the US is now compounding its mistakes by...

With Super Tuesday mania spilling into Wednesday a big US story has snuck out over CIA chief Michael Hayden admitting for the first time that Americas intelligence officials have been waterboarding prisoners held in the war on terror...

The police are definitely in the news today! I dont know about more bobbies on the beat, but theres definitely quite a lot of the boys and girls in blue on their give us more pay demo: over 18,000 theyre saying . Cant resist repeating...

Stop the violence, cure the sick. Well its an aspiration. Tragically, for the last 24 hours theres been media report after media report of terrible violence in several spots around the globe - from Sri Lanka (mentioned in yesterdays...