“Whatever the truth behind the accusations and denials, almost everyone agrees that moving Roma families next to a toxic slagheap, onto land highly contaminated with lead, zinc, arsenic, and other metals, has caused dozens of families to suffer severe health problems and spawned a generation of brain-damaged children.”
-J. Malcolm Garcia, reporting on Kosovo’s resettlement camps
“Desertification is one of the most serious threats facing humanity.”
-Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary General
In China, nearly 20% of land area is desert. As a result of a combination of poor farming practices, drought and increased demand for groundwater, desertification has become arguably China’s most important environmental challenge.
Alisa Miller : The Bad News About The News
Please watch this.
Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, talks about why — though we want to know more about the world than ever — the US news media is actually showing less. Eye-opening stats and graphs. (Recorded March 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 4:29.)
Great video, especially when paired with Ethan Zuckerman’s (of Global Voices - yes, they have a Tumblr) more recent TED Talk, “Listening to Global Voices”
wnyc:
kapi:
The Sagan Series — The Frontier Is Everywhere
This gives me chills.
Carl Sagan is full of stars. -A.P.
“I arrived in a short dress and sandals—I had no idea what I was going in for,”
Natalia Manzurova was a 35-year-old nuclear engineer in Russia when she was assigned to be part of the clean-up crew at the Chernobyl power plant in northern Ukraine, the site of the worst nuclear accident in history. On the 25th anniversary of the disaster, Manzurova reflects on broken state promises, a lifetime of illness and the future of nuclear power.
The citizen media video that inspired an Indian village to come out in support for gay rights.
Read more about the challenges gay people face around the world:
In Haiti, Jamaica, Istanbul, Nepal and many others members of the LGBTQI community face widespread discrimination, risk of violence and even death. As the global voices article linked above demonstrates, slow progress is being made but a lot of work remains.
The Caucasus is a place where easy definitions of victim and persecutor break down almost immediately.
It is clear, however, that people here have a catastrophic lack of trust in the Russian state — and that to a large extent, Russia has earned that mistrust through neglect and bad policy, helping to create a pool of disaffected young people who see little chance to control their futures…
But the key challenges remain unaddressed: Elections are still rigged, bureaucrats still steal on a mind-boggling scale, and jobs are scarce. Add to this the ongoing savagery of the FSB and other security forces, and it is little surprise that young people are seduced by Islamists who promise a world of purity and brotherhood…
”Our culture is different. If we are slighted or wronged we don’t go and get drunk on vodka. We pick up a gun and go out to murder the one who wronged us.”
-excerpted from The Deadliest Village in Russia part of a series on conflict and human rights in the North Caucasus by Tom Parfitt
Pulitzer Center Special Projects Coordinator @summermarion’s media diet. Eat your heart out Bret Stephens.
Hi NF - thanks for following us! (Here and on Twitter!)
Depends on what you mean by official - we’re the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. We are a non-profit, international journalism organization based in DC. Our mission is to raise awareness of under-covered international news stories. We give grants to journalists to report on those under-covered, systemic crises around the world, and push their work into high-end U.S. based news media outlets.
Much of our funding and our name comes from the same family as the Pulitzer Prizes are named for, but we are a separate organization.
:) Hope this helps!
Very best,
Maura and Jake
Incredible reporting by SkyNet Correspondent Alex Crawford from the front lines of Misurata, Libya
