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Recently, some of you have been in touch about how we report casualties in Afghanistan, some of those messages following Jon Williams' recent post here on the death of British journalist Rupert Hamer.

As a response, my colleague Caroline Wyatt, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ defence correspondent, has written a post on our reporting of Taliban casualties.

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By Caroline Wyatt

In our coverage of Afghanistan, we at ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News do not generally report the numbers of Taliban or insurgent casualties and fatalities, because there are no reliable or verifiable source figures available.

Without accurate figures, any estimates or reports would be speculative - and likely to be inaccurate.

We do, however, report the deaths of British service-people and of servicemen and women from other nations within the Nato-ISAF coalition, as well as the number of injured when those figures become available, because reliable figures are released regularly by Nato and the individual coalition members.

The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ also reports civilian casualties within the conflict in Afghanistan, while trying to make clear that it is often difficult to gauge exact numbers, and that those numbers may change with time as initial reports of civilian deaths are more closely investigated.

Within more remote provinces of Afghanistan, reliable numbers may be unclear for some time after the original reports of deaths are reported or made public.

Any apparent inconsistency in the reporting of deaths resulting from the military campaign in Afghanistan is not the effect of bias on the part of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ or its correspondents or editors.

It reflects the fact that it is Nato policy not to deal in "enemy body-count" in Afghanistan, for a variety of reasons.

Nato says that it does not "keep body-counts" of insurgents killed by coalition forces because it "does not regard 'body-count' as a metric of progress", and it believes the number of insurgent deaths or injuries "does not equal success" in a counter-insurgency campaign the main stated aim of which is now to protect the Afghan people.

Nato and its individual coalition partners do, however, release news of each ISAF nation's own military fatalities to each nation's media - hence the reporting of Nato casualties.

Nato says the Alliance does so because it believes that a free press is one of the central tenets of democracy, and that the public in every troop-contributing nation has the right to that information on its armed-forces activities.

The only exception is that Nato will, from time to time, release information on what it terms "high-value targets", when members of the insurgent leadership are targeted - information which the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ reports.

³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News endeavours to report the conflict in Afghanistan fairly and impartially. Without accurate figures on Taliban deaths being made available, we are unable to report those with any degree of certainty - and so prefer not to mislead with guess-work.

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Steve Herrmann is editor of the .

Last November, we at the PM programme felt that we needed a daily slot to reflect the progress of the recession. Step forward Nils Blythe, who appeared after the 1730 headlines to address all aspects of the economic crisis. We asked the listeners to name the slot, and David Cartwight came up with the name "Upshares, Downshares".

• Read more and comment at the PM Blog

• Audio and images at PM

³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Hausa got a telephone interview in English and Hausa today with President Yar'Adua. It generated a huge reaction in Nigeria and around the world. Here is some background from Jamilah Tangaza, Editor of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Hausa.

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By Jamilah Tangaza

Nigeria has been a whirlwind of rumour and speculation over the last week. The speculation was driven by uncertainty over the whereabouts and state of health of President Yar'Adua. He has been out of the country for more than 50 days.

The Hausa Service has an audience of 23 million people and they were contacting us, they were e-mailing us, they were texting us, they were blogging about us, and they were challenging us - "Please tell us what is happening with our President."

They were saying things like, "We rely on you to provide us with the truth - and we want the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ to tell us the truth about Yar'Adua."

Senior government officials, who said he was receiving medical treatment in Saudi Arabia, maintained he was on his way to a full recovery following heart problem.

Four weeks after his departure, rumours were rife that President Yar'Adua was in a coma, others said he was brain-damaged. One report even claimed that he had died on the 10 January.

Rumours are not new to Nigeria; but then neither is speculation that Yar'Adua had died. During his presidential campaign in 2007 the would-be President Yar'Adua collapsed and was subsequently hospitalised in Germany.

In a dramatic response to speculation that he was dead, the then President Olusegun Obasanjo made a nationally televised phone call to Germany to convince Nigerians that Yar'Adua was indeed alive.

That was three years ago and Presisdent Obasanjo's intervention happened only hours after Yar'Adua had arrived in Germany. Last night, one of my thoughts was: if after so short a time from falling ill in 2007, then such assurances were long overdue after 50 days of silence and absence.

The interview today aired across Nigeria and the World and put to rest the wilder stories. It has not put to rest complaints from the opposition about the extended absence and uncertainties it raises. And on the internet some new questions have been flying such as "Was it really Yar'Adua on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ?"

By way of an answer let me say that I and the interviewer thoroughly researched the interview before it was done. We dealt with people we know who are close to the President to set it up.

Before recording, Mansur Liman, who did the interview, had an informal chat to convince himself who we were talking to. In short days of checking on the president's whereabouts and condition culminated in the interview taking place.

One of my key concerns in broadcasting to a country as complex and sensitive as Nigeria, is making sure the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ gets it right and our editorial checks have to be rigorous. With over 20 million Nigerians listening to the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ on a regular basis, I feel pretty motivated to get the checks right.

One final thought: this is not the first time ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Hausa has had cause to get to the heart of the story surrounding President Yar'Adua. In 2007 ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Hausa service was the first to get an interview with Yar'Adua while he was receiving medical attention in Germany - again dispelling the rumours.

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Jerry Timmins is Head of Africa Region, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ World Service.

We're making a change to the Education page on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News website - this week, it will become .

That's because we'd like to be able to feature a wider range of stories linked to education on this page along with our general education coverage. Examples include news about parenting, about issues affecting elderly people, young people's lives, child development, social trends and family life.

Of course, these areas are already covered by ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News - the specialist news correspondents who report on education for the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ also cover family and social policy - but on the website, these stories have not, up to now, had a common home. By broadening the remit of the Education page to include them, we hope we'll make such pieces easier to find for those who are interested in them.

We'll still be covering all the education news we do now - from stories about the very young, through to college and university students and adults returning to learning. And we'll continue to look at how policy affects all these areas. We'll also continue to make it easy for you to find out about .

I hope you approve of the changes - please do let me and know what you think.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the .

Saturday was a grim day for all of us involved in reporting the war in Afghanistan. Since 2001, 246 British servicemen and women have died there. The , was the first of a British journalist.

132 journalists were killed in 35 different countries around the world in 2009 - one of the worst yearly tolls on record. Seventeen have died in Afghanistan since the start of the war in 2001.

Of course, the death of a journalist is no more significant than any other; a US marine was also killed alongside Rupert Hamer; five other marines were injured, with the .

However, the loss of Rupert Hamer serves to remind us of the dangers faced, not just by military personnel in Afghanistan, but also by those committed to telling the story of the conflict there - and the courage they display in doing so.

In Helmand, the journalists "embedded" with British and American troops share every aspect of life with those they are reporting on - the same accommodation, vehicles, food... and risk.

Rupert Hamer and the US marine were killed when a roadside bomb struck their vehicle. Two weeks ago, a Canadian reporter, Michelle Lang, was also killed with four Canadian soldiers in the neighbouring province of Kandahar - their vehicle was blown up by another "improvised explosive device".

The IED, the weapon of choice for those fighting Nato forces in Afghanistan, doesn't discriminate between soldier, civilian and journalist.

For the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ, there is no more important story than the war there - to our audiences in the UK and around the world, particularly those in Afghanistan itself. If we, and other news organisations, are to report it accurately, then doing so from the front line is vital.

We try to manage the risk to an acceptable level - but tragically, as we have witnessed this weekend, the danger is real. For reporters in Afghanistan, there are no hiding places.

Rightly, the sacrifice of the service personnel who have lost their lives in Afghanistan is well recognised and respected. But the courage and commitment of the journalists who tell their story is every bit as great as the risk they endure. Without them, readers, listeners and viewers would be the poorer.

Jon Williams is the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ World News Editor.

The latest Conspiracy Files documentary explores the many stories about Osama Bin Laden's supposed illness and even death.

What is immediately apparent is the lack of intelligence about Bin Laden. We hear from the man who was tasked by President Obama to review US policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The former CIA officer Bruce Riedel has seen the intelligence on Bin Laden and his blunt conclusion is that "there is no trail any more".

"It's not cold," he says, "it's frozen over".

Riedel, who has advised three US presidents, admits that despite the biggest manhunt in history "we haven't had eyes on target now in over eight years... and we don't have a clue where he is."

Nowadays, if there's a situation where there's no certainty, in jump the conspiracy theories.

Over the last eight years, Osama Bin Laden has become shrouded in myth and rumour.

There have been reports from some leading news organisations suggesting Bin Laden has been seriously ill with kidney disease and even some claiming that he is dead.

The leading French newspaper, Le Figaro, and Radio France International reported that Osama Bin Laden was given emergency kidney dialysis in the American Hospital in Dubai, a few months before 9/11.

CBS ran a story on their main evening news suggesting that Bin Laden was given kidney dialysis at the Pakistan Military Hospital in Rawalpindi, on the day before 9/11.

Often these reports emanate from smaller newspapers, such as one in the Pakistan Observer, which claimed that Osama Bin Laden had died of a lung complication during the battle for Tora Bora at the end of 2001 and was buried there in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. That report was then picked up around the world.

Such stories might once have slowly faded from view but now the internet stores them and endlessly recycles them. Years on, the stories are presented as fact, without any checks.

The hospitals in Dubai and Pakistan both deny the stories without reservation. Both have investigated the reports and checked their records.

Robert Baer spent 21 years working for the CIA as a case officer in the Middle East, with postings in Sudan, Lebanon and Iraq. He is surprised by how little is known about the world's most infamous terrorist but he's scathing about the reports of Bin Laden's kidney illness.

"He's probably in the same bed next to Elvis Presley. You can't hide something like that in Dubai," says Baer.

"It's the crap you read on the internet that people believe in," adds the experienced former CIA officer.

The editor of the Arabic newspaper Al Quds, Abdel Bari Atwan, interviewed Bin Laden in Tora Bora back in the 90s. He is critical of those who stay in their office and don't get out to research stories about Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

But there's an immediate rejoinder from the sceptics. David Ray Griffin, a retired philosophy professor in California, has written a book suggesting there is good evidence that Bin Laden is dead. He questions the motives of officials and former officials who contradict his theory:

"We do know historically that people have lied under pressure or promise of money or whatever. I'm not making any accusation. I'm saying I don't know these people. I don't know their motivations, but I'm saying that the very fact that people say these things don't necessarily mean they're true."

Griffin's previous book suggested the American government could be responsible for 9/11.

Now he speculates that US military intelligence could be faking Bin Laden's recent video statements to keep an evil bogeyman alive and to help justify the so-called war on terror in Afghanistan, Iraq and back at home.

He thinks the "military-industrial complex" has ample motive for this grand conspiracy in the huge sums that have been spent. Afghanistan alone has cost the US $240bn.

The CIA case officer, Robert Baer, dismisses those suggestions of conspiracy theories involving the US intelligence, but he does question whether Bin Laden is still alive: "The problem is nobody's convinced me he's alive."

Baer questions the veracity of some of the recent Bin Laden videos. Instead though, he thinks it is in the interests of al-Qaeda to fake the tapes to pretend their icon is still alive.

But perhaps the last word should go to the last journalist to interview Osama Bin Laden, back in November 2001.

Hamid Mir, now the executive editor of Geo TV in Islamabad, says Bin Laden is still alive and the secret of his survival is that he is "much cleverer and wiser than the American intelligence". And he warns: "we should not underestimate him. All these conspiracy theories are actually helping him."

Mike Rudin is series producer of The Conspiracy Files. The Conspiracy Files: Osama Bin Laden - Dead or Alive? is on Sunday 10 January at 9.30pm on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Two.

A brief update on the publishing problems we've been experiencing on the News website, which I mentioned in my post yesterday. The problems with publishing have continued and are resulting in some delays to story updates, and some broken links and images. We're sorry that the problems persist - our technical team is working hard to resolve them. I'll let you know more when I can.

UPDATE, 14:33: A bit more background on the site problems from our technical team:

The problems have been affecting the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News and Sport websites intermittently, and relate to the systems which replicate and deliver stories and images to both websites. The main symptoms have been delays to story updates, some broken links and images. The problems mainly affect core news and sport stories including the live text for the South Africa England test match. Other parts of the website such as blogs, sports scores and stock market updates are unaffected. We're sorry and we're working hard to resolve the issues.

UPDATE, 18:10: We've made a few changes now, which should have improved matters.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the .

For the past few years, the entertainment team on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News website has been giving us a glimpse of the future (and allowing some of us to appear cool when talking to our children) by showcasing the next generation of music stars.

It's based on a list of the best up-and-coming artists, which is compiled by asking key music critics, broadcasters and bloggers to name their favourite new acts.

Their choices are meant to be based on one thing - quality. Not hype or size of record deal or what Simon Cowell might think.

The project has grown in scale over time. First was the , won by the rapper 50 Cent and with around 40 pundits taking part. This year, 165 arbiters of taste contributed tips to the .

A , the top five acts are being revealed all this week and it has become a much bigger project that stretches far beyond its home on the website.

One of the advantages that has come from bringing TV, radio and online together with multimedia planning and reporting has been our ability on the website to reflect the very best of the journalism from right across the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's broadcast outlets.

It is great to see it working the other way around too - when an idea that starts as an online project grows into something bigger.

As well as the interviews and music videos from the artists which we are running on the website, digital radio station 6 Music is on board with many of the artists in session on Lauren Laverne's mid-morning show all week, podcasts profiling each act and a show dedicated to the list on New Year's Day.

E24, the entertainment bulletin on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News Channel, is running video interviews every day this week, while the winner will be on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ One Breakfast sofa on Friday.

The top five artists are also being interviewed by Victoria Derbyshire on 5 live, while on Radio 1 Annie Mac focused much of her Sunday night Switch show on the list, and Zane Lowe and Nihal are joining in by picking over the top five.

It all adds up to lots of exposure (and indeed expectation) for some of the most interesting emerging artists.

This kind of prediction is an inexact science, but Entertainment reporter Ian Youngs, who thought up the idea in the first place and has developed it each year, says the lesson from previous years is that this is a popular way to find out about some of the best new talent, and that if the acts are any good, they will thrive.

Over the course of this week, and then the rest of the year, you'll be able to make up your own minds about whether you like them or not.

PS If you've spotted some broken links on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News website today please accept our apologies - we've been having publishing problems and we're working to fix them.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the .