Free Republic

Secret journalists report on North November 21, 2007 The grainy video featured old women in clothes that hung from their thin frames scrounging for bottles in a market in Pyongyang that they planned to sell to recyclers. Images like these have been seen before but this footage shown at a press conference in Seoul yesterday is different, according to a Tokyo-based journalist, because it was shot by the first independent reporters to ever work inside North Korea. Ishimaru Jiru, of the Japan-based Asia Press International, said his group is also launching the first-ever magazine to print independent journalism by North...

RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, Germany - Smiling broadly, journalist Jill Carroll arrived Saturday under U.S. military protection in Germany, the first stop on her return to the United States after 82 days in captivity in Iraq. 28-year-old U.S. journalist Jill Carroll, left, is welcomed by Base Commander, Col. Kurt Lohide after she landed at the U.S. Airbase in Ramstein, southwestern Germany, Saturday, April 1, 2006. Carroll was a hostage in Iraq for 82 days and was released last Thursday. (AP Photo/Michael Probst) Gone was the Islamic headscarf and dress robe she had worn as a hostage. Instead she was wearing jeans,...

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Kidnapped U.S. journalist Jill Carroll has appeared in a new video on Al-Jazeera. In it, she's weeping and appealing for the release of women Iraqi prisoners. Last week, five Iraqi women were freed from U.S. custody. U.S. officials said the release had nothing to do with the demands by Carroll's kidnappers that the U.S. release Iraqi women. No sound was aired with the video. But Al-Jazeera said she appealed for the release of women Iraqi prisoners. She's visibly crying in the video, and is wearing a conservative Islamic veil.