Category: How It Was Done

In his final interview, Arafat cultivated the image of a survivor. An historic, tense encounter revisited.

4 May 2023 By Paul Martin

By Maria Cedrell and Paul Martin in Ramallah, 2004. When Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat gave his final interview to us, we had to supply a list of proposed questions. The first question was supposed to be: “Mr. Arafat, where were you born and where did you grow up?” “No,” his aide told us. “Not allowed.” In the life of a […]

“Ukraine: Life Under Attack” documents painful but life-affirming survival under Russian bombardment in Kharkiv.

27 June 2022 By Paul Martin

It’s been dubbed City of Heroes, the official accolade awarded by President Volodymyr Zelensky to Kharkiv — Ukraine’s battered second city. Two intrepid cameramen-producers have chronicled its trials and tribulations under Russian fire in a riveting film called “Ukraine: Life Under Attack”.  Their documentary has added poignancy as the Russian bombardment, apparently receding a month ago, […]

‘I was expecting someone more important.’ Journalistic encounters with world leaders don’t always go to plan.

21 June 2022 By Paul Martin

As I walked in to a hotel to interview Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s prime minister from 1959 to 1990), I should perhaps have read the signals.  The Singaporean leader looked at me, then at his wrist-watch, in quick succession.  He pointed to a chair I was to sit on. “I was expecting someone, er, more important,” he […]

How Ukraine’s Post Office chief stamps down on the Russian invasion of his country.

25 May 2022 By Paul Martin

Exclusive from Kyiv, Ukraine Amid the images of destruction inflicted by continued Russian attacks on a sovereign nation, Ukrainian television showed far less grim pictures this week. People were smiling again — generally very happy to be allowed to queue up in the streets. Thousands of eager locals stood since the very early hours at post […]

Forty years after Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s nuclear facility, there is still no Arab state with an atomic bomb. Does this prove the raid was justified?

7 June 2021 By Paul Martin

A sign on the desert road south of Baghdad, curiously in English not Arabic, pointed to what it described as an “Engineering Factory”. It was the only hint that there was something unusual to be found just off the beaten track. Until days before, this “Engineering factory” had been nothing less than Saddam Hussein’s project […]

Recent references to Correspondent.World appear in three articles in a major British newspaper.

23 December 2020 By Paul Martin

Paul Martin 20 Dec 2020, 6:00amRevealed: How the FBI tracked down second Lockerbie suspect nicknamed ‘The Ghost’ 05 Dec 2020, 5:00pmLockerbie bombing key witness had history of ‘making up stories’, says CIA handler 20 Jun 2020, 5:00pmMysterious Covid-linked disease ‘no longer expected to be fatal’ in children after treatment breakthrou

He used his creative imagination to bring Chopin back from beyond the grave. Pianist Alan Kogosowski completes and plays a concerto that Chopin did not finish: his Concerto Number 3.

1 October 2020 By Paul Martin

Alan Kogosowski has brought the magic of Frederic Chopin back from beyond the grave. The Australian pianist completed a unique version of the Austrian composer’s long-delayed and ultimately unfinished Third Piano Concerto in A major, Opus 46. He has now done its final revision. Correspondent.world accompanied Kogosowshi to Paris where he drew new inspiration by visiting […]

Back where it all happened. I had been the first journalist to get to the place of the Ceausescus’ deaths. It was the only execution of a European leader since the end of World War Two. But, 30 years later, questions remain about what really happened there.

25 December 2019 By Paul Martin

EXCLUSIVE: By Paul Martin in Targoviste, Romania. The bullet holes in the brown wall have only been partly patched up with white cement. I’m standing on the exact spot where the Ceausescus’s died – in the yard behind the Targoviste military barracks. It looks exactly the same thirty years later – just the trees seem […]

Thirty years ago the Velvet Revolution brought a playwright to power. Václav Havel continued (figuratively) to ‘stride the boards’ on a new stage. He was in a new real-life role: as his country’s anti-Communist pro-democracy President.

10 November 2019 By Paul Martin

By Paul Martin It was to be a strange but enlightening encounter. Our translator, our video cameraman, our producer and I had walked up a staircase to a nondescript apartment in a building close to the Vltava River in the centre of the Czech capital Prague.