Welcome.

Let's start, fittingly, with a scoop.

Congratulations to Amy Goodman, the Democracy Now! Internet activist, for her interview with Adrienne Kinne, a retired army sergeant who has blown the whistle on United States targeting of journalists during the first days of the Iraq war.

She tells how the US army were tapping the telephones of journalists and that the Palestine Hotel, the media centre fired on by a US tank killing two journalists, was on a list of possible military targets.

Five years after the attacks by the US on media in Baghdad on April 8^th 2003 (including the killing of Al Jazeera reporter Tareq Ayyoub in an air strike on the network's offices which the US army never dignified with a formal inquiry) the truth is emerging.

The case for a full inquiry into the US army's treatment of reporters (the unembedded type) is unanswerable. The families and colleagues of the victims, Jose Cuoso of Telecinco, and Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk, and of Terry Lloyd of ITN who died at the hands of US troops in the early days of the conflict, deserve justice after years of official spin and deception. And so do the living. Following the latest developments closely will be Eason Jordan, the former head of CNN and Linda Foley, the President of The Newspaper Guild. Jordan was hounded out of his job and Foley was subject to a nasty campaign of abuse because they hinted that the US was indeed targeting media during the Iraq campaign.

The question that nags away over this long-running controversy is why would the US do such a thing? There could be a simple answer. The US made it clear from the outset that it was unhappy with hundreds of non-embedded journalists (so-called media "unilaterals") who were roaming the region as they went to war. With no guarantee that Baghdad and Saddam would fall quickly, did they want to send a strong message to media people beyond their control not to step out of line? Until we have proper investigations and find out why media were targeted we will never know.

It's not just the IFJ which has had a facelift. The global trade union movement has also had an internet makeover. The new-look pages of international unionism are found at http://www.global-unions.org/ , which features the latest news and campaigns of the ten international global union federations (of which the IFJ is one) as well as the International Trade Union Confederation and the Trade Union Advisory Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Pluralism was the talk of the town in Chisenau (the capital of Moldova) this week when government policymakers, human rights activists and media activists took part in a two-day European Union discussion on Freedom of Expression in the Black Sea area.

The hosts were put on the spot by criticism of Moldova's Broadcasting Coordination Council which earlier this month distributed licenses for 16 radio frequencies and 60 television frequencies. Although licenses are supposed to be issued according to principles of pluralism, none were offered to stations that provide access to the opposition parties or that broadcast opinions critical of the government.

The indefatigable radio station Vocea Basarabiei, for instance, was granted none of the eight FM frequencies for which it applied and was turned down for the 26^th time (not a misprint) in its application for a frequency in the capital city. On the other hand, stations linked to political parties allied with the ruling party, PRCM and PPCD, obtained more than 20 frequencies.

Is media pluralism safe in Moldova? This was the question posed by the IFJ at the meeting. The chair asked Moldovan officials if they wanted to respond. They wisely kept silent.

This column of comment and news briefs will be a regular feature of our new web-site. If you have comments, critical or otherwise, about this or other aspects of our new look, let me have them. I can't promise guaranteed satisfaction, but all sensible suggestions will be read and acted upon.

Aidan White

General Secretary