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Dispatches
Editors' Notes
Pakistan Blog
iWitness
Reflections: The End of a Divided Germany
Cambodia: Confronting Its Past
At Siemens, Bribery Was Just a Line Item
Mumbai's Days of Terror
Zimbabwe: The Deal that Never Was
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November 11, 2009
Reflections: The End of a Divided Germany BY Siri Schubert
| German Chancellor Angela Merkel, former Polish leader Lech Walesa (center) and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Berlin for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. PHOTO: EPA. |
Some dates are so significant that they define the identity of whole nations. For Germans, November 9, 1989, is such a date. It was the day the heavily mined border known as "the death-strip" between East and West Germany was opened or, as popular shorthand would have it, the day the Berlin Wall came down. It was a day of celebration, hope, incredulity, and exhilaration.
As the German magazine Der Spiegel wrote from Berlin this week: That night, the whole city celebrated a new Day of German Unity.
The fall of the wall changed the lives of millions of people so profoundly that even after 20 years, some are still struggling to make sense of the day that united a nation but divided their lives into two chapters: before and after the wall.
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February 20, 2009
Cambodia: Confronting Its Past BY FRONTLINE/World Editors
Editor's Note: This week, and 30 years in the waiting, an international tribunal was convened in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to try leaders of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime responsible for the death of an estimated 2 million Cambodians in the late 1970s. In 2002, reporter Amanda Pike traveled to Cambodia in search of the infamous leaders and to find out what happens to a country where perpetrators of a genocide still live side by side with the families of their victims. She found the second most powerful man in the former regime, Nuon Chea, known to some as "Pol Pot's Shadow," living deep in the country and showing little remorse. In the dispatch below, Pike explains why she doubted that he and others would ever be brought to trial in a country where the prime minister once urged everyone to simply "dig a hole and bury the past."
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December 20, 2008
At Siemens, Bribery Was Just a Line Item BY Siri Schubert
| Siemens headquarters in Munich, Germany. Photo: EPA |
Editor's Note: This reporting is the result of a joint investigation of international bribery by PBS FRONTLINE, ProPublica and the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley. A documentary will air on FRONTLINE on April 7, 2009 at 9 P.M. ET on PBS. Check back on this website beginning January 2009 for a series of investigative reports and in-depth features on international corruption.
This story was published by The New York Times on Sunday, Dec. 21, 2008.
MUNICH - Reinhard Siekaczek was half asleep in bed when his doorbell rang here early one morning two years ago.
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December 04, 2008
Mumbai's Days of Terror BY Dev Chatterjee
| Mumbai police patrol in front of the Mumbai CST railway station, a day after terrorists stormed the station. |
Editor's Note: As U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made diplomatic stops in India and Pakistan on Wednesday and thousands took to Mumbai's streets blaming their own government's handling of the crisis, we asked Mumbai-based reporter Dev Chatterjee, who works in the Times of India building in the heart of the city, to recall how last week's reign of terror unfolded for him. Included are cellphone images he took as he crisscrossed the city reporting the attacks.
It was a late-night dinner party that may have saved my life. At around 9:50 in the evening on November 26, 2008, I walked out of my office at the Times of India Building opposite the 150-year-old British-built Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) Railway station and boarded a commuter train to my house, 5 kilometers away in Central Mumbai.
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November 20, 2008
Zimbabwe: The Deal that Never Was BY A FRONTLINE/World Correspondent
| A young girl scavenges for food in the town of Chitungwiza, east of Harare. Photo: EPA. |
On September 15, 2008, the cellphone networks were so jammed, I couldn't reach any of my friends in Zimbabwe or abroad to share the news that I was covering first hand. What a day in the history of our country! After months of anticipation, the political deal was signed.
Almost everyone I spoke to was joyous and expectant. President Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party, in power since Zimbabwe's Independence in 1980, had at last agreed to share power with the opposition MDC and its leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
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November 17, 2008
Afghanistan: Women and the Silent Addiction to Opium BY Nadene Ghouri
| One of three young siblings addicted to opium at a treatment center in Kabul. |
Freshta stared blankly at her children as they lay listlessly on the bed. She picked one of them up, a scrawny shaven-haired boy who is 4 but looks more like 18 months.
"I had five boys," she explained. "I only have three left."
Freshta and her surviving children are all opium addicts -- just one family among tens of thousands of women and children addicted in Afghanistan.
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October 24, 2008
Mexico: Fugitive Border Agents Apprehended BY FRONTLINE/World Editors
| Former U.S. Border Patrol agent Raul Villareal is suspected of assisting human smuggling operations. |
Two former U.S. Border Patrol agents suspected of accepting bribes to help smuggle Mexicans and Brazilians into the U.S. now sit in a Mexican prison awaiting possible extradition following their arrest Saturday in Tijuana -- two years after fleeing the United States just as an investigation was closing in on them.
But it could take months or even years before brothers Raul and Fidel Villarreal return to the United States to face charges, a law enforcement official in the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City told FRONTLINE/WORLD.
The brothers were featured in the May 2008 FRONTLINE/World story "Mexico: Crimes at the Border," as part of a feature profiling corrupt border agents.They fled the U.S. more than two years ago after apparently learning of the investigation.
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September 25, 2008
Burma: The Resource Curse BY Howard Hsu
As part of a class at the UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, I traveled to Burma last spring to report on China's growing trade with Burma, which is rapidly depleting forests and has created a thriving trade in exotic animals.
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August 21, 2008
China: Beijing's Vanishing Hutong BY Dan Eckstein
| Some of Beijing's historic hutong neighborhoods date back to the 13th Century. |
Since 2004, photographer Dan Eckstein has traveled to Beijing four times, chronicling the city's massive renovations in preparation for the 2008 Olympic Games. "I keep coming back to Beijing because you never know what is going to be here next time you come," he says.
Almost by chance, he found himself staying in a hotel in one of Beijing's historic hutong neighborhoods, some of which date back to the 13th Century. Their narrow, jam-packed alleyways and streets are filled with traditional courtyard homes.
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August 05, 2008
Obama: Awakening the African Vote BY Edwin Okong'o
ELECTION 2008
| Al Constantino displays Obama T-shirts for sale outside the African International Mall in the Cedar-Riverside area of Minneapolis, a neighborhood predominantly inhabited by African immigrants. |
The candidacy of Barack Obama has galvanized a small but rapidly growing group that had previously avoided any involvement in American politics: African-born immigrants to the United States.
There are now at least 1.3 million African immigrants living in the United States, and Obama's rise has reminded some that as they settle in America and raise their children here, they have a civic duty to participate in politics. Since I moved to Minneapolis a year ago to take a job editing and writing for a paper aimed at the African diaspora in America, I have had a front-row seat for watching the entry of Africans into American politics.
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