Roula Khalaf

Roula Khalaf is the Middle East editor at the Financial Times. She has been with the newspaper since 1995, starting as a North Africa correspondent. Before joining the FT, she was a staff writer for Forbes magazine in New York.

Roula’s specialist areas are Iraq, where she has travelled extensively, the Gulf, North Africa and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Roula appears regularly on national and international TV and radio.

Andrew Alexander

Andrew is a regular columnist and former city editor at the Daily Mail. He was director of Associated Newspapers from 1992 to 2000, and worked previously at the Daily Telegraph. He has won several awards throughout his career, including specialist writer of the year, political journalist of the year, and financial journalist of the year.

Michael Binyon

Michael has been a staff member of The Times since 1972, and for 15 years was a foreign correspondent in Washington, Moscow, Germany and Brussels. In 1991 he became diplomatic editor, and since 2003 has been the chief foreign editorial writer.

A graduate of Cambridge in English and Arabic, he spent a year teaching in the USSR in 1967 and has worked for BBC Arabic. He is a frequent broadcaster, and was appointed an OBE in 2000.

Jonathan Miller

Jonathan has been foreign affairs correspondent for Channel 4 News since 2003. In February 2006, he was a two-times winner at the Royal Television Society awards. He was named Specialist Journalist of the Year, and won the International News Award for his film Congo's Heart of Darkness.

Among stories he has covered since his arrival at Channel 4 News: the Asian tsunami; war in Darfur, Sudan; insurgency in Iraq; revolution in Georgia and Ukraine; the Pakistan earthquake; and the deaths of Yasser Arafat and Pope John Paul II.

Prior to joining Channel 4 News, Jonathan spent six years reporting documentaries for C4's investigative strand Dispatches, and its foreign affairs series Unreported World. He also directed and filmed documentaries, among them an award-winning film on Northern Ireland for CNN, and an observational documentary in post-war Iraq for Channel 4.

Previously, Jonathan had been a BBC correspondent in Southeast Asia, where he spent many years as a journalist.

Trevor Phillips

In 2006, Trevor was appointed the head of a new organisation known as the Commission for Equalities and Human Rights, which promotes equality issues across the full raft of ethnic, gender, sexual-orientation, disability and other minority interests.

In 1978, he became the first black president of the National Union of Students. After university, he applied for a job as a researcher in current affairs at London Weekend Television. He then presented and produced The London Programme for 13 years, and later became head of current affairs at LWT, one of a small number of black senior executives of major British broadcasting organisations.

In 1998, his independent production company Pepper Productions produced the Windrush series, chronicling the history of black people in Britain over the last 50 years. He has been chairman of the Runnymede Trust, an independent race-relations think-tank and campaigning body.

In 2000, he ran for the position of Mayor of London. He did not win, but became a member of the Greater London Assembly. In 2003, he was appointed by the Home Secretary to be the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality. He has been awarded an OBE.

Richard Gizbert

Richard presents the Listening Post, a weekly show on Al Jazeera English which is an insight into how the news is handled by the world's media.

Prior to this, he had worked for ABC News since 1993. During this time, he covered conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Chechnya, Somalia and Rwanda. He also has experience in covering the Middle East, including Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel.

Previously, Richard worked as a correspondent-producer for CJOH-TV in Ottawa, where he produced in-depth features for Sunday Edition, the national current affairs programme. Prior to that, he was CJOH's parliamentary correspondent for five years, responsible for national political coverage. For his reporting of a bus hostage situation on Parliament Hill, he received the National Award for Breaking News Coverage.

From 1983 to 1985, Richard was a correspondent and political editor for CFTO-TV in Toronto, covering federal politics and co-anchoring special events coverage.

Alexander Siddig

Alexander was born in Sudan, and spent most of his life in England. Born to an English mother and Sudanese father, he is the nephew of English actor Malcolm McDowell, and his paternal uncle is former Sudanese Prime Minister Sadiq al Mahdi.

Alexander has made prominent appearances in the films Reign of Fire and Kingdom of Heaven. In 2003, he guest-starred as an Algerian secret agent on the trail of Islamic extremists in a controversial episode of British TV show Spooks. In 2005, he gave a critically-lauded performance as Prince Nasir in Syriana, alongside George Clooney and Matt Damon. His latest role is that of former terrorist Hamri Al-Assad in the 6th season of 24.

Alan Johnston

Alan joined the BBC in 1991 and has spent eight years as a correspondent. He was supposed to be the BBC's full-time correspondent in Gaza until 1 April 2007, having started there three years earlier. He was the only foreign reporter with a major Western media organisation to still be based in the city at the time of his kidnap in March 2007.

Alan has covered many major stories in Gaza for the BBC, including Israel's unilateral disengagement plan in 2005, Hamas winning the 2006 legislative elections, last year's Israeli invasion of Gaza, and the Palestinian factional violence of late 2006 to 2007.

Alan is regarded as a respected, experienced journalist, and due to his local knowledge, he was someone other journalists would turn to for information when in Gaza. His BBC colleague Paul Adams noted: "It is his job to bring us day after day reports of the Palestinian predicament in the Gaza Strip."

Palestinian Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti has described Alan as a "friend of our people," and said he "has done a lot for our cause." Imprisoned Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti has also called Alan a "friend of the Palestinian people," as has Alan's father.

Ian Stone

Ian was born in North West London, the firstborn son of an average Jewish family. Luckily, the Pharaohs' reign was over so he survived. From an early age, he was torn between pleasing his parents and having fun. Finally in 1991, fun won. He took his girlfriend's advice and stepped onto a stage.

Today, Ian is one of the most sought-after comedians on the scene, not because of the amount of money he owes but because, in the words of Time Out: "He looks and sounds very good indeed." He has performed worldwide, including Germany – not many Jewish comedians have performed there in the last 50 years! In 1998, he performed to 55,000 people in 40 days (more than Wimbledon).

That year, TV and radio beckoned. Since then, he has appeared on The Stand-Up Show (BBC 1), Saturday Live (ITV), The Comedy Store (Channel 5), Live at Jongleurs (ITV), Good Stuff (ITV), The 11 O'clock Show (Channel 4) and BBC Radio 1 Live. He is also a regular panelist on BBC Radio 5's The Treatment.

He joined BBC Greater London Radio in 1998 to host his own chat show The Big Schmooze, where he has interviewed the likes of Jeremy Issacs, Terry Hall, Anthony Sher and Esther Rantzen who, live on air, proposed marriage to his long-term girlfriend on his behalf. An answer has not as yet been forthcoming.

He has presented most of the regular daytime and evening shows, as well as their 1999 Notting Hill Carnival coverage and a one-off special celebrating 20 years of The Comedy Store. He can also be seen bickering with Alan Davies in a major BBC 1 documentary series about stand-up comedy.

Ian's Edinburgh Festival show A Little Piece of Kike caused offence to the festival organisers last year, to the extent that they banned the word Kike from the official programme. Ian did not realise that by using the word, he would be treading on the toes of political correctness: "I saw a description of it. It said a low-class, ill-mannered Jew and I thought, that's me!"

Ian now lives in North London with his partner, child and two cats, and would like to state publicly that Arsenal's poor disciplinary record is a direct result of pro-Manchester United bias in the media.

"...funnier than a shopful of remaindered David Baddiel novels." - The Independent

Mohammed Ali

Mohammed (aka Aerosol Arabic) fuses urban graffiti with Arabic calligraphy. Based in Birmingham, his work has been exhibited around the world, including Britain, the US, the United Arab Emirates and Denmark. Mohammed has been featured on the BBC, CNN, MSNBC and Time Out, among others.

He was commissioned to do the artwork for the launch of Sony's Playstation Portable, as well as the Amanah Eid greeting card for HSBC. He also runs workshops for children throughout Britain.

"Beautiful work." - BBC

He issued a statement last summer, the first time he had done so, expressing his "deep frustration at the continuing terrorism and aggression of Israel on Lebanon…I have been following closely as we see the death of so many innocent people on our screens. I see the destruction of a whole nation…I refuse to accept that this attack on Lebanon is justified…"

His website is www.aerosolarabic.com