Free Republic

Washington (AFP) - A US court has found the Syrian government culpable in the 2012 death of journalist Marie Colvin, ordering a $302.5 million judgment for what it called an "unconscionable" attack that targeted journalists. Colvin -- a renowned war correspondent whose harrowing career was celebrated in the recent Golden Globe-nominated film "A Private War" -- was killed in the Syrian army's deliberate shelling of the Baba Amr Media Center in Homs on February 22, 2012. According to the judgment delivered late Wednesday, Syrian military and intelligence tracked the broadcasts of Colvin and other journalists covering the siege of Homs...

LONDON (AP) — She was instantly recognizable for the eye patch that hid a shrapnel injury – a testament to Marie Colvin’s courage, which took her behind the front lines of the world’s deadliest conflicts to write about the suffering of individuals trapped in war. After more than two decades of chronicling conflict, Colvin became a victim of it Wednesday, killed by shelling in the besieged Syrian city of Homs. Colvin, 56, died alongside French photojournalist Remi Ochlik, the French government announced. Freelance photographer Paul Conroy and journalist Edith Bouvier of Le Figaro were wounded.

-excerpt- Valérie Pécresse, the French government spokeswoman, identified the dead as Marie Colvin, an American reporter working for The Sunday Times of London, and Rémi Ochlik, a French photographer. -excerpt- Video footage posted on social networking sites showed what seemed to be two bodies lying face down in rubble inside a building identified in news reports as a makeshift media center in a beleaguered neighborhood of Homs, where rebels have been under sustained fire for almost three weeks. Three other Western journalists were injured in the attack, activists said. According to his Web site, Mr. Ochlik, in his late twenties,...