Belfast Blogs.com

Everyone over a certain age (let's say 30) can recall the harrowing impact of Michael Buerk's first reports of a famine in Ethiopia in 1984.The sheer biblical images of starving black children - their hollow eyes pleading for food to placate their empty, distended bellies, their ribs stretching their thin skins, their limbs shrivelled to mere bones and skin - shocked the West in our relative affluence.What followed was Band Aid, Live Aid, and the growth of global consciousness in relation to the appalling poverty suffered on the African continent.Since then, charities have reported 'donation fatigue' and the diminishing returns of shock footage of African carnage or disaster. Mass rape and child slavery in Darfur barely stirs us now. Burma is flooded, and we can barely bother to put a...

As Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, comes under increasing Chinese terror, murder and genocide, it is always useful to suspend thoughts like 'It couldn't happen here' and question the nature of the freedoms we hold dear.One of the problems in Tibet, as in Burma, is that when the ruling junta own the media, there is little possibility of the truth of their appalling atrocities reaching the outside world. And without media coverage to remind us, the rest of us, cosy in our Western democracies, go back to sleep or turn on some more enlightening reality shows instead.After all, who's in uproar about Burma now? Nobody is who. And without support in the West, Tibetans will be equally crushed. They will be crushed because they can be crushed and no one will know because no one will hear about it.The...

Please click on the link below for up-to-date information on kidnapped BBC journalist Alan Johnston's current condition, and sign the petition calling for his immediate release unharmed.Don't let Alan join the hundreds of journalists murdered every year while going about their job of reporting the truth to......