One of the topics that the spokesman talked about in the press conference on Monday was the case of the two missing researchers who went missing in DR Congo about two weeks ago. The UN launched an investigation and, the day that we went to the press release their bodieshad been found but were not confirmed to be the two missing experts. It was latter confirmed that they were in fact Michael Sharp and Zaida Catalan.
It seems that the two researchers had gone into a central area of the Congo to investigate the fighting between the army and the rebels there. This kind of strategy had been done before by both of the researchers, Sharp being the one with more experience in the area and the investigation. However, it seems that the reason for their death is the fact that their jobs did consist on finding criminal and reporting them to the UN.
The New York Times made a kind of obituary and news piece of the finding of their bodies. The Al Jazeera piece is more like hard news and explains a little about previous conflict in the area, and then Bloomberg seems to have just used an algorhythm to make a very short very to the fact news piece.
In general I did not think that the spokesperson said anything newsworthy to quote, in fact, I would actually mention the fact that he didn’t comment on some questions or just restated what he had previously said. I was suprised at how good he was at avoiding questions.