Mohammed Ghuneim, former director of the VOA Arabic Service and frontline Middle East correspondent during the last half of the 20th century, died May 16 in West Palm Beach, Florida. He had just celebrated his 90th birthday last December. A funeral service and burial were held on May 18 in West Palm Beach. Born in…
As the pandemic enters its sixth month, it has cost nearly 240 thousand lives — by far an unprecedented death toll in the 21st century. The battle to tame the deadly disease seems far from over, even as western countries are easing home confinements, and some businesses are re-opening. Coronavirus cases now exceed 3.3 million…
My esteemed colleague and friend Gene Pell was well known in his primary profession, international broadcasting, to a world often denied high quality, objective news and information. Gene died on April 7 after a three-year battle with cancer at his home near Syria, Virginia. He was 83. Gene is the only leader to have occupied…
The Voice of America is the nation’s largest publicly-funded international broadcaster, reaching 280,000,000 multimedia users in 47 languages each week, many of whom access it daily for honest, balanced and accurate world news. To most senior VOA officials, past and present, including this writer, an unsigned White House blog on April 9, 1600 Daily, omitted…
Imagine, for a moment, if you were responsible for covering a worldwide threat now regularly compared with World War II in its devastation and future deadly impact? As The Hill correspondent Reid Wilson reports: “The pandemic spreading across the globe has been slow to spread throughout Africa, a continent of 49 countries. But public health…
“CRACKS APPEARING IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY…AS CORONAVIRUS TERRORIZES THE WORLD” That grim headline is the opening of a program March 25 moderated by the Voice of America’s Greta van Susteren. That half hour weekly Wednesday panel is entitled Plugged In. Ms. van Susteren samples experts’ up-to-the minute assessments of global health crisis endangering millions of…
The death toll in the COVID-19 global outbreak has now passed 10,000. That’s even with the nonstop, heroic efforts of tens of thousands of physicians and nurses worldwide. As VOA correspondent Jamie Dettmer put it: “Parisians marked dusk on the first day of their coronavirus lockdown this week by stepping out on their balconies and…
On Leap Year Day, the United States and Taliban signed an agreement in Qatar that sought to end the nearly 19-year-old Afghan civil war. Under the agreement, Afghan parties to the conflict would: Agree on a permanent ceasefire and power-sharing in postwar Afghanistan Begin negotiations March 10 (Tuesday of this week). In the preparation for…
Syria’s nine-year-long civil war has largely disappeared from the world’s headlines, but what of the more than estimated 1,000,000 survivors still seeking to flee from Bashar al-Assad’s ruined land? Many of them have been pushed into a narrow strip of land bordering Syria’s sealed northern border with Turkey by Assad’s forces and his Russian and…
In the last decade, authoritarian regimes have increasingly used their print, broadcast, and social media to control or restrict their own citizens’ access to news and information – in order to shape or channel the opinions of their populations. The same regimes use the media to influence international opinion, often propagating outright lies and falsehoods. …