Questions have been asked on topics ranging from the Taliban’s negotiations with the United States to their position on educating girls.

The Taliban banned girls from schools while they were in power, although there were reports in January 2011 that they had ended their opposition to education for women.

The number of girls in school has risen to 2.5 million since the Taliban were ousted in 2001, according to the government and aid groups.

The questions on the forum are being answered by Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid, who blamed a lack of funding for girls’ schools that were run in accordance with Islamic tenets.

In response to another question, he indicated that the Taliban monitors Facebook, YouTube and media reports. 

By Nicole Hunt

US President Barack Obama hosts Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki for talks in Washington on Monday, with discussions focusing on strengthening the ‘strategic partnership’ between the two countries. The summit comes ahead of a looming 31 December deadline for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.

Following last week’s European Council meetings, the focus early this week is, predictably, still the euro zone debt crisis. Experts from the IMF, the European Central Bank and the EU begin their sixth review mission to Athens, hoping that this time around they’ll be able to stick around until the scheduled end of the visit on Friday.

The venue changes but the topic stays the same on Tuesday, with Spain, Italy and France in the limelight. Spain’s Congreso de los Diputados convenes for the first time since elections on 20 November, though new Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy won’t formally take up his post until he’s sworn in by King Carlos later this month.

In Rome, Parliament is scheduled to begin debating Prime Minister Mario Monti’s austerity measures, which he issued by decree on 4 December. MPs are expected to approve the measures well before the 60-day deadline.

Meanwhile, French unions have planned a nationwide day of protests against their government’s austerity measures. Thousands are expected to take the streets in Paris, where the largest demonstration takes place outside of the Assemblée Nationale.

Under Egypt’s complicated election laws, another parliamentary vote is held on Wednesday, with polling taking place in nine governates, including Giza and Suez. The elections on 28 November, which were held despite violent protests only days before, covered nine provinces, including Cairo and Alexandria. A third round of voting takes place on 3 January.

In New Orleans, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management holds the first oil and natural gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico since the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.

A Paris court is expected to issue its verdict on Thursday in the long-running corruption trial of former French President Jacques Chirac. Chirac is accused of misusing public funds and creating false job contracts during his time as Mayor of Paris. He settled a €2.2m civil suit with the city of Paris in August 2010.

Thursday also sees two meetings taking place which will be viewed very differently by Russia. President Dmitry Medvedev attends the EU-Russia Summit in Brussels, but the visit will be coloured by expressions of concern from the EU over allegations of unfair voting practices in Russia’s 4 December parliamentary elections, which saw Medvedev’s United Russia party win a majority despite heavy losses.

Over in Geneva, the World Trade Organisation holds its eighth Ministerial Conference, where delegates are expected to hold a long-awaited vote on Russian accession to the WTO.

TIME Magazine announces its annual Person of the Year on Friday. Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg was 2010’s winner; leaders in this year’s online poll (which don’t have any bearing on the final choice) include Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, footballer Lionel Messi, The 99%, Anonymous, Steve Jobs, and the Arab Youth.

The US army begins an Article 32 hearing for Private First Class Bradley Manning, which is expected to last just over a week. The hearing is to determine whether there is enough evidence to proceed with a court martial against Manning, who is accused to leaking a 2007 video to WikiLeaks which showed a military operation in Baghdad in which two Reuters reporters were killed.

As Saturday happens to be Manning’s 24th birthday, an international day of solidarity has been organised, with protests planned worldwide. Occupy London protesters have already pledged to take part.

Though it hardly seems possible as Egypt works through elections and protests and killings rage on in Syria, Saturday also marks the one year anniversary of the self-immolation of Tunisian fruit and vegetable seller Mohamed Bouazizi, an event that has been singled out as the catalyst for the Arab Spring movement as it kicked off Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution.

The inquiry into the media’s relationship with the public, police and politicians was announced following revelations of phone hacking at News International’s News of the World.

Lord Justice Brian Leveson has been given scope by Prime Minister David Cameron to look at all media.

"It may be tempting for a number of people to close ranks and suggest that the problem is or was local to a small group of journalists then operating at the News of the World," Leveson said at a news conference.

"But I would encourage all to take a wider picture of the public good and help me grapple with the length, width and depth of the problem.

"I would rather invite editors, proprietors of magazines and journalists to assist me by providing a wide range of examples of what is contended to be appropriate for one reason or another across the fullest range of titles," Leveson added.

Reuters says the judge did not specify whom he might call, but said he would use his powers to call for witness statements and any relevant documents as soon as possible.

Andrew Stroehlein, Communications Director for the International Crisis Group, wrote a great piece on his Covering Crisis blog on the Reuters AlertNet site. He has very kindly agreed to let us post it on the Frontline blog. He raises a lot of points about under-reported stories, things we regularly cover here and discuss at length at the Frontline Club,

We’ve all watched the cutting of foreign news budgets for so long that we’ve become almost numb to it. Another bureau cut here, another three correspondent posts dropped there — drip, drip, drip — the dwindling capacity of overseas news gathering is constant background noise. Or ever-increasing silence, perhaps. But now we’ve come to two situations that show us what the world will be like when there are no foreign correspondents left.

The first is Somalia, where the utter inanity of foreign news coverage in the West, particularly in the US, knows no bounds. Amid deafening hero-worship and chest-thumping, the US media machine was so proud that a new president with the world’s largest military at his disposal can kill a couple lightly armed thugs that few seemed even able to grasp the most basic fact of the situation: piracy is symptom, not the disease, and lawlessness off the coast of Somalia will continue as long as anarchy is allowed to continue on land. If only a tiny fraction of the Western media ruckus of recent weeks could be dedicated to Somalia itself, then international political attention might start focusing on the roots of the problem.

But the danger on the ground makes Somalia extremely difficult to cover for foreign journalists, so we’re stuck with stories of tangential importance, written like Hollywood film scripts from editorial offices thousands of kilometres away. Some outlets, like the Independent in the UK, are sending reporters to the refugee camps in Kenya so at least the story of the enormous human cost of the Somali conflict is known. Most others are at best tagging on a sentence or two at the end of their stories, pointing out that Somalia is a failed state. However, discussion of the international community’s political options is pretty rare, leaving an endless loop of despair: Somalia’s been a failed state for so long, the world cannot imagine it any other way — even if it results in piracy and growing extremism that threaten us, not to mention great human suffering among the inhabitants

The other example of a crisis unfolding mostly not before our eyes is Sri Lanka, where over the past few months the situation in the north east has become incredibly desperate for some 150,000 civilians trapped in an ever-shrinking "safe zone" between their government that is shelling them and the cult-like LTTE rebels who shoot them if they try to escape. Today, as my colleague writes, "A mass slaughter of civilians will take place Tuesday at noon. And everyone knows it." Once again, foreign correspondents are unable to cover the story, this time because the government is not allowing them in to the region.

Some Western media are trying to cover this deteriorating situation, and in particular, the UK and other European countries have been running some shocking new video of the victims. BBC World Service radio has been keeping it generally high in the news order. But try to find this enormous catastrophe on American TV… Good luck.

Instead of any of these issues of political relevance and deep humanitarian concern, Americans get coverage of would-have-been obscure UN conferences, which are supposed to seem interesting because they are boycotted. Or, more likely, they get ratings-hungry hate-rants against creeping socialism and indignation at blatantly astroturfed "tea party" tax protests.

Too bad Al Jazeera English is not available on most living room screens in the US, and people there have to choke down the endless rotting fish heads of celebrity news or the same tiresome group of ignoramuses shouting at each other in a studio — both the cheapest forms of filling air time after a test card.

What ties all this together is ignorance of foreign affairs in news media due to a lack of correspondents on the ground. In the current cases of Somalia and Sri Lanka, mind you, the obstacles to reporters covering the stories are larger than normal budgetary issues of staffing cuts abroad. But the point is these situations show us what it’s like when Western news organisations — for whatever reason — do not have long-serving correspondents on the ground: when they have no eyes and ears following the situation directly, understanding the complexities and able to report more deeply than "hero saved" or simply ignore it all together.

A respected staffer in a field bureau is able to call the editor back home and say, "there’s something big going down here", "in all my years here, I’ve never seen anything like this before", and "this is news; we need to cover this". Without anyone making that pitch internally, the chance of missing out is always going to be greater.

And so with these two crises, we now understand what it will be like when the last foreign correspondent collects her last month’s salary and turns out the lights in the last overseas news bureau. We’ll get superficial coverage of issues that are actually hugely important, we’ll miss real threats to our own security, and we’ll miss mass murders in progress. link

Head over to Andrew’s original post to read the comments too

Notable among the winners were Goran Tomasevic’s image of a US soldier in action against the Taleban in Afghanistan, named as Photograph of the Year.

Belgrade-born Tomasevic began working for Reuters during the Bosnian conflict in the 1990s the agency says.

Ukrainian Gleb Garanich took the Reuters prize for Photojournalist of the Year, awarded for his series of images from the Russia-Georgia conflict.

And veteran Africa hand Emmanuel Braun was an interesting winner – he was named Video Journalist of the Year but, according to his citation on the Reuters website, he is held in high regard for the strength of his still photography and text reporting as well. Impressive stuff, even if he did have the backing of a large and wealthy organisation.

Reuters photographer Finbarr O’Reilly has been travelling through the Democratic Republic of Congo taking some incredible photographs along the way. The Boston Herald showcases 38 images as a part of their excellent Big Picture series. Reuters recently held a live chat with Finbarr in Liberia which we hosted on this blog.

Photo by Finbarr O’Reilly – A Congolese fighter from the pro-government Mai-Mai militia looks through a window in the village of Kalenge near the front line in eastern Congo, February 4, 2009. Rwandan and Congolese forces are hunting down thousands of Hutu extremist rebels in the wilds of eastern Congo in an operation intended to address the root cause of 15 years of conflict in Congo.

A camera in the office that had provided non-stop live images of the Gaza cityscape throughout the war briefly continued to function, but later ceased transmission — possibly because of a fire that other cameras in the area showed pouring smoke from the upper floors of the 16-storey building…
…Reuters journalists on the spot said they had not been aware of the presence of any armed men in the building beforehand.
An Israeli army spokesman had spoken with Reuters staff in Jerusalem shortly before the explosion to check the location of the Reuters bureau in Gaza. Reuters had provided the coordinates of its office to the army at the start of the war and was assured on several occasions it was not a target. link

Talk about “surgical strikes”… The Israeli military killed a Reuters journalists in 2008. An Israeli investigation in August 2008 into the killing of Reuters cameraman Fadel Shana in April 2008 resulted in no charges being brought.

Reuters snapper Finbarr O’ Reilly will be discussing his experience in the Democratic Republic of Congo and what first took him to Africa live online today, Wednesday, Jan. 14. Finbarr will use the excellent mobile phone video broadcast tool Qik to broadcast live at 17.00 GMT / 1200 ET. You can follow Finbarr on Twitter and ask him a question. Click the image above to go direct to the broadcast channel or follow the talk on the Reuters blog,

Amid the chaos of fighting, people fleeing their homes and the demand for quick news pictures, I tried to slow things down by taking intimate portraits.

By shooting with a very low depth of field, I hoped to extract my subjects from their surroundings and portray them as individuals with names and stories that matter.

More than five million people have died, most from lack of access to food or basic health, during a decade of fighting in Congo. This makes Congo ‘s enduring conflict the deadliest since World War Two. link

You can see the first part of the chat in the video above. The chat continues in the video below – after the connection has been cut.