Neil Durkin

No, I don’t suppose you do. I’ve seen this grim question around a few times, one of those reel-in-the-curious-punter tags on the internet that get people clicking on commercial horoscope sites or whatever. Leaving aside a few specific...

"In his compound", "human shields", "mandate for attacks", "strategic assets": when the world's media is using this language it can easily feel like we're back in the early days of the Iraq invasion in March 2003. But this is Libya...

I've seen a lot of commentators in the media saying that they genuinely don't know whether a UN-authorised military intervention in Libya is a good or a bad idea. There appears to be genuine uncertainty. To use Simon Tisdall's...

It’s bad enough that the Bahraini security forces have been using shotguns, tear gas and even high-powered rifles to attack peaceful demonstrators in Manama’s Pearl Roundabout and numerous other locations in Bahrain. But to also attack...

A nudge is as good as a wink to a blind bat, as Monty Python’s Eric Idle once said . And I think I know what he means. So, when former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf pops up on TV to talk about how as a national leader you need...

Nice “lookalikey” spot in the Guardian today in their story about who might be in the film about WikiLeaks. Xan Brooks says there’s jokey stuff going around about how Javier Bardem should play Guardian journalist David Leigh . Yes, I...

The cover of a new Amnesty report (out today) on Tunisia features a photo (above) of a huge crowd in Tunis on 14 January, the day the president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali exited the country for his bolt-hole in Saudi Arabia. Apart from a...

In several speeches last year, the recently-elected coalition government announced a new “direction” to foreign policy, interpreted by many as one with a greater emphasis on trade. But William Hague was keen to stress that there would...

Back in my student days I used to read quite a bit of hack journalism. Yes, that’s right, I was poring over 17th-century newspapers with titles like “The Monethly intelligencer” (correct spelling), “Mercurius Melancholicus” and...

It’s not often you see doctors and other medical staff shouting and screaming with anger, but that’s exactly what’s been happening in Bahrain. Staff at the Salminiya hospital in Manama have been expressing absolute outrage at the...

For all I know the Trinidadian prime minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar may have a long-held personal belief in the value of capital punishment. She may even be a member of what we (rather over-quaintly) used to call the “hang ‘em and...

This tweet from The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg ( @carolrosenberg ) caught my eye recently: Deputy prison camps commander on #Guantanamo captives' reaction when Hosni Mubarak stepped down in Egypt: "It was the talk of the town." Yes...

The protests are nothing if not unpredictable, and after a media story had set in earlier this week about the Egyptian protests “running out of steam”, we’ve now had, according to most estimates, the biggest so far. With newly-released...

By degrees it’s slipping out of the headlines, but the Egypt story is still hugely important for anyone who cares about human rights in Egypt and the wider region. With “normality” breaking out in terms of some people going back to...

At the time of posting the situation in Egypt is on a knife-edge. After the peacefulness of the “million-person” protest on Tuesday, yesterday’s violence was a horrible, jolting sight. There are, of course, lots of claims that armed...

Over the weekend Sky’s Tim Marshall tweeted from Egypt with the words “Burn like a fire in Cairo”, a line - as trainspotter-ish indie music types will tell you - that comes from The Cure’s “Fire In Cairo”, a song from their 1979 debut...

“We believe the Egyptian government is stable”, said the US State Department spokesperson PJ Crowley on the World Tonight last night. Crowley was audibly uncomfortable at being pushed to repeat Hillary Clinton’s view from Tuesday that...

As a fly-by-night football fan (!) I couldn’t help but notice that there were two big football stories in the overnight news. First Eric Cantona has been appointed director of soccer at New York Cosmos. “Oh la la, it’s Cantona”, as the...

For the second day running, I’m kicking off a post with a @jrug (C4 News’ Jonathan Rugman) tweet (hey, he gives good tweet!), sent while covering the upheaval in Tunisia: “Israeli journo covering Tunis protests: ‘They shout Palestinian...

A momentous weekend, but what next in Tunisia? A weekend tweet from Channel Four News’ Jonathan Rugman ( @jrug ) from Tunis captured the sense of uncertainty very nicely. “Poster of Ben Ali being taken down to reveal a blank – who will...