Karadzic arrested in Serbia

Last Modified: 22 Jul 2008
By: Guest blogger

Inside the morning news meeting...

Today's top story dominates most of the morning news meeting. The former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, charged with genocide for the murder of thousands of Muslims at Srebrenica, has been arrested in Belgrade.

"Will the pretitles be a la Milosovic, with Karadzic being taken away?" asks one of the eds.

There's a lot to think about. How should we report the reaction? "There's a fairly large Bosnian community in Glasgow," says one of the correspondents, "It would be good to be in a community like that to see the reaction amongst the people to whom this matters most."

There's a lot of stuff coming out of Serbia and there are also decisions to be made about who we'll talk to - various political figures are discussed.

"Can it all go into the one piece?" someone asks. It looks like we'll be getting two correspondents on the case, covering different aspects of the story.

"We also need to be careful not to give an impression that all the trials have been a failure like Milosovic's - there have been some successful prosecutions."

There is so much to think about, and it's all a bit of a jumble what will go where, but before the team can rush out to untangle it all, we've got the rest of the running order to look through.

There's not much room, but one thing that will get a look in is a new treatment for prostate cancer which "promised to be a major breakthrough" - so says our science correspondent.

"Why 'promises'?" Asks the prog ed.

"Well it hasn't been fully trialled yet, so we can't say it definitely is just yet, although it really does look that way."

The treatment is for those cancer patients for whom everything else, including hormone treatment (currently the last course of action before the cancer is declared terminal), has not worked.

It could prevent a potentially terminal illness from being terminal. But it could be three years before it would be made available to patients. And in the interim, thousands of men will die from the cancer as it reaches its final stages.

"Can we find someone to say 'I don't care if it's not been trialled, I'm prepared to take it anyway'?" Asks one of the eds.

As the meeting comes to a close the foreign editor comes bearing bad news; there's a strike in Munich and all ITN's crews are stuck in the airport on their way to Belgrade. It's a signal to get planning for tonight, hopefully the crews will find a way out of Munich in time to get the story to your TVs by 7pm.