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Between 1915 and 1923, 1.5 million Armenians living in Ottoman Turkey were killed. To this day, discussion of the massacres, or use of the word "genocide" in relation to them, carries grave consequences in Turkey. Last year, Canadian-Armenian filmmaker Araz Artinian took up the horrifying events in a documentary. The film's online companion, a stirring and sophisticated example of oral history, shares the stories of 20 survivors, all of whom were young children at the time. One survivor describes the problems of being born blond. Another tells of being bundled off in a caravan of oxcarts. All relate the violent destruction of their worlds: Vahe Tchorbadjian lost his parents and three sisters. Arika Dishchekenian, both her parents. Kevork Balian, both his parents. And Hagop Asadourian, whose mother died in the deportation, says that no matter how young you were when this happened, you were "not a child anymore" after it.

Many believe that the only information they can really trust is what they see with their own eyes. In 2003, Dahr Jamail decided that he was tired of just listening to news reports on Iraq and packed his bag to see exactly what was going on. As he's one of the few independent U.S. journalists in Iraq, his published reports have been picked up by a variety of news outlets, such as the Guardian, the Independent, The Nation, and The Sunday Herald. Video and photos from Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon show yet another facet of the complicated events of war. And his blog is a window into one person's opinions and commentary on the experience of being in the middle of the conflict. We're all bound to have differing views on any political situation, but the broad vantage of independent reporting can only add to our opportunities for getting to the heart of the matter.