The Frontline Club

With the results just in, we will be discussing the US midterms and the repercussions of the results.

Following the failed attempt this weekend to plant bombs on cargo planes destined for the US, we will be discussing Yemen, its politics and the response of the US to this latest terrorist threat.

Another opportunity to join in a lively public meeting, hosted by Paddy O’Connell of BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House, bringing together experts and commentators and mixing their views with contributions from our audience.

With:

Felicity Spector, chief writer and American politics expert for Channel 4 News;

Dr Thomas D. Grant, chair of Republicans Abroad UK;

Bill Barnard, chair of Democrats Abroad UK;

Abdallah Homouda, Journalist and Yemen specialist;

Ginny Hill, Journalist, Yemen expert and author of Chatham House briefing paper, Yemen: Fear of Failure;

James Brandon, head of research at Quilliam, former journalist who lived in Yemen in 2002 and 2004/5 and worked on both Yemen’s English language newspapers;

Tom Finn, freelance journalist, currently working as a copy editor for the Yemen Times in Sana’a (via online link up).

Gareth Peirce is an acclaimed human rights lawyer who has appeared for the Birmingham Six, the family of Jean Charles de Menezes and Moazzam Begg, amongst many others. Peirce will be at the Frontline Club in conversation with the Guardian’s legal affairs correspondent Afua Hirsch. She will be discussing her work and Dispatches from the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice, her new comprehensive set of essays which analyses the corruption of legal principles and practices in both the US and the UK.

In Dispatches from the Dark Side Peirce demonstrates how the British government has colluded with the US in a range of unlawful activities; rendition, internment without trial, torture. How it has gone to extraordinary lengths to hide its actions, its devices for maintaining secrecy being more deep-rooted than those of any other comparable democracy. She states that unless the British government can urgently put into reverse its present course, it will have destroyed much of the moral and legal fabric it claims to be protecting.

Exploring the fate of men interned without trial, the subjects of house arrest, extraditees and deportees. Peirce argues that their cases demonstrate a deeply entrenched culture of impunity among those pursuing the West’s new suspect community. She recalls Britain’s crackdown on Irish nationalism and asks if in its prosecution of the ‘War on Terror’, has the West repeated the fatal errors of the Irish conflict, with young Muslims taking the place of innocent Irish men and women?

In the first of a series of events looking at international development and the aid industry we will be examining the UK international development budget and the implications for foreign aid. What is the coalition government’s policy towards the development budget and what impact will the proposed changes have on countries around the world?

The government has signalled its intention to retarget a large proportion of the budget to achieving stability in Afghanistan, but is there a danger that the line between development aid and military intervention becomes increasingly blurred? What will be the impact of cut backs in aid to countries such as India, China and Russia?

Join us at the Frontline Club with an expert panel to discuss the coalition government’s shake up of the international development budget and if they have their priorities in the right places.

Chaired by Humphrey Hawksley, leading BBC foreign correspondent, author and commentator on world affairs.

With:

Michael Anderson, DFID director general for policy and global issues;

Dorcas Erskine, ActionAid head of public affairs;

Samir Elhawary, ODI Research Fellow, currently researching the evolving role of humanitarian action in conflict-affected emergencies, with a particular focus on the interface between humanitarianism and politics;

Paul Ackroyd, International Development Consultant.

Join us for what should prove to be a fascinating discussion between BBC Newsnight’s Paul Mason and acclaimed playwright Sir David Hare, whose recent play The Power of Yes wrestled with the causes of the 2008 financial crisis.

From his "ringside seat" as economics editor Paul Mason‘s book Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed is a blow by blow account that begins with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the bailout package of October 2008, seeking to explain how we got there.

In an updated edition Paul Mason explores the impact of this development on capitalist ideology and politics. We are delighted that Sir David Hare who carried out meticulous research for his play on the financial crisis will be with us to discuss the events of 2008 and seek to make sense of the state of capitalism today.

Following the leak by whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks of almost 400,000 secret US army field reports from the Iraq war between 2004 and 2009. Join Julian Assange at the Frontline Club this evening in conversation with one of the most famous whistle blowers in history, Daniel Ellsberg, who was responsible for the leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

Chaired by Elizabeth Palmer, CBS News correspondent.

Dutch photographer, Teun Voeten, is an award winning photojournalist and author. He has covered conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sudan, Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza. His work has been featured in publications such as Vanity Fair, Newsweek, The New Yorker, and National Geographic, among others. Voeten is also a contributing photographer for organisations such as the International Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations.

In the mid-nineties however, he took a break from war reporting. For five months he lived, slept and worked in a tunnel underneath Manhattan’s well-heeled Upper West Side. He lived alongside an eclectic mix of outsiders: Vietnam veterans, hippies, crack addicts, Cuban refugees, convicted killers, computer programmers, philosophical recluses and criminal runaways. His book on this community, Tunnel People was originally published in the Netherlands in 1996 and widely acclaimed for its anthropological and journalistic merits.

Recently Voeten went back to find his former co-inhabitants of New York’s Tunnels. In this updated version of Tunnel People, Voeten describes what has happened in the thirteen years since they were evicted from the tunnels and offered alternative housing by Amtrak. Hot on the heals of his New York book launch, Voeten will be at the Frontline Club to discuss his career and his experience of living underground in Manhattan.

The KGB, Russia’s notorious intelligence service, was dissolved in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The void it left was soon filled by a new security service, the FSB, which has accumulated powerful backers and increasing authority ever since. This agency has become, in the words of former FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev, Russia’s “new nobility.” Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, co-founders of the secret services watchdog website Agentura.ru, will be speaking at the Frontline Club about their book The New Nobility which investigates Russia’s powerful and shadowy security and intelligence services.

Soldatov and Borogan worked for Novaya Gazeta from January 2006 to November 2008. Agentura.ru has been reported on and featured in the New York Times, the Moscow Times, the Washington Post, Online Journalism Review, Le Monde, the Christian Science Monitor, CNN, the Federation of American Scientists, and the BBC.

This event will be moderated by Susan Richards, a non-executive director and founder of Open Democracy. She is the author of two books on Russia and a specialist on Russian affairs.

This special event has been made possible through the Frontline Russia project.

Featuring:

— Peter Horrocks, BBC director of global news

— Ben Cohen, Channel 4 News technology correspondent

— Greg Beitchman, global editor of the Reuters news agency

— Simon Bucks, associate editor at Sky News.

Chaired by Matt Wells, head of audio at the Guardian, and presenter of the Media Talk podcast.

There is much talk of Old Media platforms of news print and TV being wiped out by digital platforms. But TV is still world’s most dominant communication medium and is growing year on year – TV journalism now reaches more millions of people around the world than ever before.

The BBC sells its news channels across the world to more clients than ever before; new broadcasters like al Jazeera and France 24 have set up operations across the globe and in multiple languages and the internet offers new ways for video journalism to be produced quickly and cheaply.

So with TV entering its own digitally-connected, multi-platform future, this Frontline panel asks: is this the real golden age of TV news?

This event is part of our monthly On the Media series, produced in association with the BBC College of Journalism.

Adam Ferguson, an up and coming star in the world of photojournalism, will be speaking at the Frontline Club about his work in Afghanistan, his successes to date and his plans for the future. His photograph of the aftermath of a suicide bombing in Kabul won him first prize in the Spot News category at the World Press Photo Awards this year.

Ferguson’s success in 2010 has not stopped there: he received three Pictures of the Year International awards and was selected to participate in the 17th World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass.

His work has been published internationally by Time Magazine, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Financial Times Magazine, UNICEF and Human Rights Watch, among others. His coverage of the Afghan elections and troops in Korengal valley has won him critical acclaim and by joining the VII Mentor Program, Ferguson has had a chance to learn from those at the pinnacle of their careers in photojournalism, before being accepted into the VII Network.

The event will be moderated by Simon Robinson, Thomson Reuters’ Enterprise Editor for Europe the Middle East and Africa. Before joining Reuters earlier this year, Robinson worked for Time magazine, first as a correspondent reporting from over 50 countries and later as editor of the Atlantic edition of Time magazine and the London based editor for Time.com.

John G. Morris was LIFE’s London Picture Editor on D-Day, and famously saved Robert Capa’s pictures of the landing on Omaha Beach, prints of which now line the stairs up to Frontline’s Forum. He will reflect on his unique career in picture editing and on why Getty Images only recently released the photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Long-suppressed LIFE magazine pictures of the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will be the focus of John G. Morris’ discussion at the Frontline Club about what, if anything, we have learned from images of war.

Alexander Lindsay, a one-time student of Morris, now a successful filmmaker, will moderate the event. Lindsay made the film Afgan during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which is believed to be the only film by a Western crew with the Soviet forces in combat, and covered both Gulf wars from Iraq. He has since spent five years filming the wreck of the Titanic, creating the largest images of the shipwreck ever made.