Link TV editor Kyung Lee reports from the Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea.  Currently the biggest film festival in Asia, PIFF showcases new talents and films from the Asian countries.  This blog offers rare interviews with Asian directors who discuss their filmmaking experiences in their native countries.

The current situation of Afghanistan is hard for outsiders to grasp.  Almost every day we hear the news of heightened insurgency in the country, but little beyond that.  In this extremely uncertain situation, there is a filmmaker who has managed to make films that reflect the reality of Afghanistan.
 
Siddiq Barmak is currently one of only a few filmmakers in Afghanistan who is able to make feature films in his native country.  His first feature film, "Osama", portrays a young girl who is forced to don a disguise as a boy in order to support her mother in the Taliban era.  The film won a Golden Globe Award, and made a great demonstration of Afghanistan's film heritage and its possible future to the world.

Siddiq, who was born in Afghanistan and studied film in Moscow, was exiled to Pakistan during the Taliban regime from 1996 to 2002.  The current reemergence of the insurgency is a reminder for him that another dark time may be ahead.  He was at the Pusan International Film Festival this year to present his second feature film "Opium War" which is, according to the director, "an exact reflection of the situation."  I was able to catch the director and asked a few questions on the current state in Afghanistan.

Learn more at about the films Opium War and Osama.

All around the world today people are coming together to call for international action against climate change. The focus has been on the number 350, which is the parts-per-million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that scientists, including the UN's top climate scientist Rajendra Pachauri, believe we need to stay below in order to avert disaster. 350.org has organized a series of events around the world calling attention to the target, and they're giving visitors and participants alike some real time gratification through Twitter feeds and Flickr slideshows. We've blogged about Maldivian officials holding a cabinet meeting underwater to raise awareness of rising oceans, and now the Divers Association of the Maldives is hosting an underwater rally with the goal of having 350 divers stay underwater in teams for 24 hours. You can find out what's going on near you at 350.org.

At Link TV we've been exploring how climate change is already having an impact in the US and elsewhere through a series of short videos called Climate Change Hits Home.

For World Food Day 2009 (which is tomorrow, October 16th!), Link TV is helping to promote a campaign called Stand Up, Take Action, a movement now four years in the running. As part of the framework for the UN Millennium Development Goals adopted by global leaders in the year 2000, worldwide hunger and poverty must be eradicated by the year 2015. A lofty endeavor, you say? Maybe. But millions of global citizens are demanding that this promise be kept, or at the very least, kept a priority. Each year, through events organized by Stand Up, Take Action, attention is called to this ongoing issue, and the movement is growing. Last year, it broke its own Guinness World Record for the largest mobilization around a single cause in recorded history. Click here for events taking place this weekend in your area.

Watch this video and join the countdown to World Food Day!



Link TV has a lot of great food and hunger related programming, that can be found on our ISSUE: Food page, like a new Michael Pollan special called “Deep Agriculture”, and more. Also, learn about the coffee industry and Fair Trade practices that are effecting small farmers in poor countries around the world from Dean Cycon, Founder and CEO of Dean’s Beans.

Mosaic's Jalal Ghazi must be a busy guy, sifting through news broadcasts from all over the Middle East by day as Associate Producer for Link TV's Mosaic, and screening the latest in Palestinian film by night. We enjoyed Ghazi's latest contribution to New America Media, "Palestinian Films With a Woman's Touch," and think you will too.

Ghazi reports on "a new kind of Intifada" taking place among women in Palestinian cinema, where "instead of stones, bullets or bombs" they are telling the Palestinian story through film. Several of the films surveyed were screened, or will be screened, at San Francisco's Arab Film Festival, and the article includes trailers and interviews with the filmmakers. See inside the often hidden world of an ordinary Palestinian - and ordinary Palestinian women in particular - and check out these extraordinary films!

You might think that Iranians live in total information isolation, and have little idea what is being said in the U.S. and other Western countries. Watching Link TV's documentary "The Dish", about Iran's national obsession with satellite TV, will quickly disabuse you of that notion. And this week, Link TV expanded its global reach when the Tehran Times, Iran's major English-language daily newspaper, reprinted Mosaic Producer Jamal Dajani's latest article in the Huffington Post, "Iraq: Talk is Cheap, Blood is Cheaper". Though the Tehran Times is hardly a progressive, pro-Western media outlet, claiming that "it must be a loud voice of the Islamic Revolution," it does frequently include reports from international news agencies such as the Associated Press, Reuters, and now, even our own Jamal Dajani, to keep its readers informed of outside news and opinion.

If you missed Dajani's excellent Mosaic Intelligence Report from Friday, which expands upon his Huffington Post article on Iraq, we encourage you to watch it below. And to stay updated on what's really going on in the Middle East, follow Jamal Dajani on Twitter, and subscribe to his weekly Mosaic Intelligence Report enewsletter.

And a reminder: to keep Mosaic going, we rely on donations from our viewers. So if you value Mosaic, the Mosaic Intelligence Report and Link's other great programming focused on the Middle East and more, be sure to donate today, in any amount. We need to hear from you!

Three American hikers who have been detained in Iran since July 31st, including Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd, and Josh Fattal, apparently unwittingly strayed over the border from Iraqi Kurdistan, according to a fourth member of their party, Shon Meckfessel. Meckfessel, who did not join his friends on the ill-fated hike, wrote in a statement that the four were travelling in Iraqi Kurdistan on vacation, and his friends went off on a recommended hike to popular tourist destination Ahmed Awa, an area known for its lovely waterfall. Apparently unaware that Ahmed Awa was near the Iranian border, the three were detained while hiking in the area by Iranian authorities, and have yet to be released. Meckfessel writes, "I hope that people understand my friends' presence in the area for what it was: a simple and very regrettable mistake."

With the recent release of journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee from North Korean custody, thanks to a deus ex machina intervention from former U.S. President Bill Clinton, the question being asked in the Iran case is where diplomacy goes next. Have Clinton's actions in North Korea piqued the interest of the Ahmadinejad regime, perhaps empowering them to turn these hikers into pawns in a greater diplomatic game with the United States? Iran has detained many Americans over the years, most recently arresting Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, charged with instigating post-election violence.

The story of one of these hikers, freelance journalist and documentary photographer Shane Bauer, was featured in today's episode of Democracy Now below, which airs on Link TV. Bauer, an Arabic speaker and graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, delivered a report for Democracy Now in February 2009 on U.S. military alliances with Iraq's Sunni militias.

Jamal Dajani's latest Mosaic Intelligence Report on Link TV looks at Palestine, and the upcoming congress of the Fateh (or Fatah) political party, a faction of the PLO that is facing its own internal squabbles and charges of corruption. As the video makes clear, there is no love lost between rival factions Fateh and Hamas, and the divide between the Fateh base in the West Bank and Hamas-controlled Gaza seems far wider than the mere 25 geographic miles would indicate. And for most Palestinians, neither Fateh nor Hamas provide effective governance, or any real hope for a unified Palestinian state.

Read Dajani's article on the Huffington Post for more, including a very lively discussion. And check out daily episodes of Mosaic: World News from the Middle East and Dajani's Twitter feed for updates.

In the meantime, don't forget that right now Mosaic, the Mosaic Intelligence Report and Link's Global News Hour with Al Jazeera English need your support! Keep this unique and unparalleled news resource alive by making a donation to Link TV today.

Link is proud to be home to two programs, both from Qatar-based channel Al Jazeera English, that have been nominated for International Emmy Awards this year! An Al Jazeera English News Hour segment on the Russia-Georgia war picked up a nomination in the News category for superb on-the-ground journalistic coverage. And Al Jazeera English's Witness documentary series, airing weekly on Link TV, was nominated in the Current Affairs category for the special Return to Nablus. Part of that special, Two Schools in Nablus, aired on Link, and is available to watch online now. International Emmy Award winners will be announced on September 21, 2009, and we'll keep you updated on the results.

If you haven't already, be sure to catch these fantastic, internationally-recognized programs on Link! The Al Jazeera English News Hour has been airing every weekday on Link since June, part of Link's Global News Hour with Mosaic: World News From the Middle East. Daily online news bulletins from AJE are also available online. Al Jazeera English - Witness airs Mondays at 8pm Pacific and Wednesdays at 7pm Eastern, and most episodes are available to watch online.

Congratulations to our partners at Al Jazeera English for their second consecutive International Emmy Award nomination in a row! We'll have our fingers crossed for an AJE awards sweep in September.

Written by John Hamilton

These are dangerous times to be a journalist. According to Reporters Without Borders, 60 journalists were killed in the line of duty last year. 673 others were arrested, more than 900 were assaulted and 29 journalists were kidnapped. Unfortunately, this year isn’t shaping up to be any better.

In the past few weeks, Link TV has highlighted several incidents in which reporters have faced censorship, imprisonment, and even death—all for doing their jobs.

Link TV’s original series Latin Pulse presented the special program, Stories that Kill, looking at the dangers faced by investigative journalists caught in the crossfire of a long-simmering civil war between leftist guerillas and government forces.

The award-winning Democracy Now! covered the case of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, two American reporters sentenced by North Korean authorities to twelve years of hard labor after inadvertently crossing into the country from China.

Mosaic: World News from the Middle East brought news that Al Jazeera has been banned from the occupied West Bank by the Palestinian Authority.

Our newest addition to Link’s news lineup, Al Jazeera English World News, reported on the execution-style killing of Natalya Estemirova, a human rights campaigner and independent journalist critical of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Despite the mortal danger that comes with reporting from some of the world’s most dangerous places, Link TV consistently brings you some of the most comprehensive and wide-ranging international news on American television.

So as the brave men and women of the international press corps put their lives on the line to get the story, it’s more important than ever to support the channel that brings their work to a national audience, Link TV, television without borders.

Iran is slipping off the media radar, finding itself replaced by the global mourning rituals for Michael Jackson, Wall Street's continued decline, and the latest Republican career-ending train wreck. But there is still a story in Tehran, and it's not a happy one.
 
As Nobel laureates call for the release of prisoners and a full investigation into Iran's human rights violations, the Guardian UK has developed an amazing interactive tool to track those killed or arrested in the unrest. And our own Michal Shapiro's World Music blog has unearthed a music video dedicated to Neda Agha Soltan, whose disturbing killing, broadcast on YouTube, made her an unwitting symbol of the crisis.

Iran's youth are at the center of this stalled revolution, and their discontent was apparent well before the first protests began in Tehran. Six months ago, this prescient video was posted to YouTube, proclaiming Iran as a "nation of bloggers":


Of course, technology - and the micro-blogging service Twitter in particular - played a critical role in organizing June's mass street demonstrations. An op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor has even nominated Twitter for a Nobel Peace Prize, as the "megaphone" of Iran's new youth movement. While Mosaic's own Jalal Ghazi is skeptical, arguing well that Iran "cannot be explained in a Twitter feed", Twitter is proving its mettle in the crowded world of news distribution, and is a service that Link TV is using more and more. It remains to be seen whether Twitter can successfully foment true revolution, but we'll continue to keep an eye on Iran's young twittering generation.