FIELD PRODUCER, ASSOCIATED PRESS TELEVISION NEWS // 8.4.2013

British Prime Minister David Cameron paid tribute to Margaret Thatcher, a fellow member of Britain’s Conservative Party, saying in London on Monday that the country had “lost a great leader”.

For admirers such as Cameron, Thatcher was a saviour who rescued Britain from ruin and laid the groundwork for an extraordinary economic renaissance. For critics, she was a heartless tyrant who ushered in an era of greed that kicked the weak out onto the streets and let the rich become filthy rich.

The so-called “Iron Lady”, who was the British prime minister for 11 years, imposed her will on a fractious, rundown nation – breaking the unions, triumphing in a far-off war, and selling off state industries at a record pace.

She left behind a leaner government and more prosperous nation by the time a political mutiny ousted her from No. 10 Downing Street.

One of her cabinet ministers then, who remains a cabinet minister in Cameron’s government, also paid tribute to her on Monday.

“If you look at in the global scale she and Ronald Reagan were the key figures, together with Gorbachev at the end, in bringing the end of the Soviet Union, a system of tyranny and repression which kept people, millions of people, hundreds of millions of people under the heal of communism,” Francis Maude said.

Thatcher’s spokesman, Tim Bell, said the former prime minister died from a stroke on Monday morning at the Ritz Hotel in London.

FIELD & OUTPUT PRODUCER, ASSOCIATED PRESS TELEVISION NEWS // 03.03.2013

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II was hospitalized on Sunday over an apparent stomach infection that had ailed her for days, a rare instance of ill health sidelining the long-reigning monarch.

Buckingham Palace said the 86-year-old monarch had experienced symptoms of gastroenteritis and was being examined at London’s King Edward VII Hospital – the first time in a decade that she has been hospitalized.

Tourists outside the palace, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Queen, expressed their upset at the news that she was receiving hospital treatment.

“We just came here now and I said, ‘Oh, she could be in there now looking out,’ and then we were just told that she’s been taken into hospital so we’re pretty shocked at the news,” said Caoimhe McCabe, who had been showing her sister London’s tourist attractions.

One tourist from Australia empathized with the Queen over her illness.

“I’ve had suffered from gastroenteritis myself so I really hope that the queen has a speedy recovery and is not nearly as ill I was and can get back to her normal duties as quickly as possible,” said Simone Yee.

According to palace officials, the monarch will have to cancel a visit to Rome and other engagements as she recovers.

OUTPUT PRODUCER, ASSOCIATED PRESS TELEVISION NEWS // 22.2.2013

Around one thousand protesters took to the streets of Jordan’s capital Amman on Friday, chanting anti-government slogans and calling on it to step down.

Zaki Ben-Rshaid, the Deputy General Secretary of the Muslim Brotherhood which organised the protests, said the government must respond to demands for political reforms.

“This protest is to confirm the continuity of our Jordanian public reform demands, which is the only safe path to reform the regime, and end the crisis,” he said.

The protest is the first to take place after parliamentary elections on January 23rd, which was boycotted by the Muslim Brotherhood. Although small and peaceful compared to others in the region, recent protests are the opposition movement’s strongest show of force in Jordan in decades.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II inaugurated the country’s newly elected parliament with a pledge to press ahead with democratisation, but said he will help pick the next prime minister even though that job is now officially in the hands of the lawmakers. He recently suggested that the new legislature will have more powers to run the daily affairs of the state and monitor the Cabinet in the future as the monarchy takes a step back, giving Jordanians a wider say in politics.

The Brotherhood says that the election law in its current form favours locally based independents over ideological blocs.

Hundreds of Syrian refugees and expatriates also protested outside the Syrian embassy in the capital during Friday prayers, holding revolution flags and chanting slogans against President Bashar Assad’s regime. They condemned recent bomb attacks in Damascus which they attributed to the government.

“We are here to protest against the Israeli Syrian embassy,” said Fawaz Yousef, Syrian expatriate from Hama. “It’s not the Syrian embassy, because it’s worse than the Israelis, and we want to tell Bashar al-Assad that he is leaving soon, leaving soon.”

Mohammad Kassim, a Syrian refugee from Deraa said that the “explosions carry the regime’s finger prints.”

Recent rebel advances in the Damascus suburbs, combined with the bombings and three straight days of mortar attacks, mark the most sustained challenge of the civil war for control of Assad’s seat of power.

The violence in Damascus follows a string of tactical victories in recent weeks for the rebels. They have captured the nation’s largest hydroelectric dam and have overtaken airbases in the northeast that have contributed to the sense that the opposition may be gaining momentum.

The conflict has killed nearly 70,000 people, according to U.N. estimates.

A short film profiling experimental breakdancer and Got to Dance Series 4 semi-finalist, Shun, who believes in originality over tradition. His style is an artistic fusion of contemporary, contortion and circus.

This film was screened at British Film Institute on 8th December 2012.

DIRECTOR-PRODUCER // Mari Shibata
DANCER // Shun ‘Ame’ Sugimoto
DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY // Viv Chan, Sam Rockman
SOUND RECORDIST // Jesse Tadini-Rybolt
MUSIC PRODUCER // Rob Meyer
EDITOR // Michael Pike