Beverly Andrews has been contributing to the IPS Arts Weekly since 1996. She was born and grew up in Detroit, USA. Took a drama degree from the York University in Toronto, lived for one year in Paris before finally settling in the United Kingdom. She now works both as a playwright and a journalist. She has been arts correspondent for The Observer newswire, Reuters, Al-Hayat Arabic daily, The Middle East Magazine and New Africa.

As a playwright, she has written the musical Blues Angel, which focused on the lives of black female blues performers and toured nationally in Britain. It was short-listed for The Daily Mail’s critics' award. She is currently commissioned to write a new musical that is set in the 1920s and and is a look at the independent black film industry that existed in the United States at the time. Beverly Andrews was recently awarded The Talawa Writing Award for women playwrights and the TAPS screenwriters' award for her short script Crossroads. E-Mail: beverlyan@yahoo.com

Brian Kenety contributes to the IPS world service from Prague. He got his start in journalism in 1991 on the 24-hour cable TV channel owned by The Christian Science Monitor newspaper, working as assistant in the Washington, D.C. bureau to the producers and anchors of the two public affairs programmes. From there he moved to New York, as a news assistant in the New York/U.N. bureau of the Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading newspaper, and began freelance writing on the side. One of his duties was to attend the daily U.N. noon briefings and stake out the Security Council for breaking news.

It was during that time that he got re-acquainted with an old high school friend, Farhan Haq, then a reporter for IPS and got to know the agency. He went to a Quaker school, where community service is part of the curriculum and the IPS sense of mission appealed to him. When he set out for the Czech Republic in 1995, to work for the first private Czech news agency, IPS already had a Prague stringer. But a couple of years he started stringing for IPS from Sofia, Bulgaria (also from Macedonia and Kosovo) and in late 1999 took a staff position with IPS in Brussels. As EU correspondent, he has learnt about development issues and the workings of EU policy. He moved back to Prague in 2002. "I'm now married to a Czech and the father of a baby boy and once again please to be stringing for IPS."
E-Mail: kenety@seznam.cz

Cam McGrath joined the IPS team in 2001 after a two-year stint at a national Egyptian newspaper. His dispatches highlight the challenges of political, economic and social developments in Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country. He is also a senior staff writer at Egypt’s most popular English-language magazine, Egypt Today, and its sister publication, Travel Today.

A Canadian journalist, Cam spent six years criss-crossing Asia, filing stories for CNN, Globe & Mail and travel magazines before relocating to Cairo in 1999. Since then, he has created a web site for expatriates living in Cairo, helped produce a WAP-based city guide and covered local and regional events for The Middle East, Cairo Times, Daily Star and the Middle East Times. E-Mail: cam_mcgrath@hotmail.com

Clive Freeman became an IPS contributor at the start of 2003. Born in Portsmouth, England, he has been a freelance journalist based in Berlin for the past 30 years. A former Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail staffer in London and Liverpool, he began his career as a newspaperman on the weekly Harwich & Dovercourt Standard at the age of 20, before joining the Derby Evening Telegraph. Later, he was a law courts reporter at the High Court in London, before switching to The Daily Telegraph, and then the Daily Mail. Freeman has worked for many of Britain's daily and Sunday newspapers down the years, including The Guardian, Sunday Times, Evening Standard and Daily Mail.

He was for 15 years Time Magazine's stringer in Berlin, where he was also a regular contributor to the English Service of Radio Deutsche Welle. In 1968 Freeman reported the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia from Prague for the London Evening News. In Berlin, the night the Wall came down in 1989, he personally reported the event from the former Invaliden and Friedrichstrasse checkpoints. Clive is an active member of the Berlin-based Foreign Press Association (VAP). From 2001 to February 2003, he served as its chairman.
E-Mail: clivefreeman@compuserve.com

George Baghdadi, a 38-year-old Syrian journalist, has been contributing to IPS world service since 1998. After graduating from the Faculty of English Literature at Damascus University in 1987, he has worked for several international press agencies.

He freelances for Time Magazine, the Italian News Agency ANSA and the United Arab Emirate News Agency WAM. "Politics has been my field. The Middle East peace process has always been my special subject," says Baghdadi. "I like sport very much and I play football, table tennis and chess." E-Mail: g.baghda@scs-net.org

Nabil M. Ahmad Sultan

Stefania Bianchi has been IPS's EU correspondent in Brussels since May 2003, tasked with reporting the activities of the European institutions and their assistance for developing countries. Before joining IPS, she was a journalist in Britain for three years and worked on a range of publications. "My interest for journalism grew while I was at the University of Bath studying French, Italian and European Studies;" says Stefania. After graduating, she spent six months travelling around the world visiting South East Asia, Australia and the Pacific.

After returning to Britain, she started working at a local newspaper in the northwest of England, The St Helens Star. She then went to London to study for a Diploma in Newspaper Journalism at City University. She worked as a reporter for a fortnightly publication based in London called Africa Analysis which covers political and economic trends throughout the continent. Outside of work, Stefania jogs, plays squash, and is an avid photographer. E-Mail: editors.tve@ipsnews.be

Vesna Peric Zimonjic has been contributing to IPS since 1991 from Belgrade. She also freelances for the London-based daily The Independent. "Unwillingly, yet inevitably, my career in the 1990s was dedicated to the war-torn Yugoslavia and the events that brought an end to the decade of rule of Slobodan Milosevic," she says. "Though this entailed rather a tough time, it was the most challenging and rewarding part of my career." The in-depth writing on unprecedented events in her country enriched her professionally and widened her horizon. As a professional, she was also actively involved in matters dealing with the freedom of media and contributed to the journalist rights issues in cooperation with the Committee to Protect Journalists and International Federation of Journalists.

During 1994-1999, she was deputy editor of the first independent news agency in Serbia, FoNet. The previous 17 years of experience as a duty editor with the foreign desk of the national news agency Tanjug helped her found the central desk of the now 10-year-old agency. Her journalism career started in 1976 in Tanjug, after she graduated summa cum laude (with honours) from Belgrade University Department of World Literature. "None of this could have been achieved had I not been happily married to a supportive Vladimir and blessed with two great daughters, Ksenija (22) and Bojana (19), who shared the toughest times of crises and best times of my life with me." E-Mail: zimonjic@sezampro.yu and vperic@ipsnews.net