Pulitzer Center grantee Jim Wickens obtained footage proving that fishermen in South America are illegally hunting dolphins to use their meat as bait for sharks. Some environmentalists believe three thousand or more of the animals are slaughtered every year.
A woman has her hair styled in the community of Iwaya in Lagos, Nigeria, September 1, 2013. Photo by @allisonshelley. Today’s theme: #hair
Allison is guest hosting the account this week from her recent work in Nigeria and Senegal, where she has been reporting on reproductive health issues. #lagos #nigeria #pulitzercenter #africa
This Week at the Pulitzer Center
NUCLEAR MARKETING
This week Pulitzer Center grantee Eve Conant reports that Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear company, is fast turning itself into the Wal-Mart of the nuclear industry, aggressively pursuing customers around the world and offering one-stop shopping to anyone who wants to join the nuclear club.
“Many of the world’s nuclear experts are concerned that Russia is galloping ahead too fast,” Eve writes in a feature story for Scientific American. “They worry that Rosatom is willing to do business with any nation, which could lead to the proliferation of nuclear material or know-how.” She notes that Rosatom has had discussions with countries that the West does not fully trust, such as Myanmar (Burma) and Belarus. And just this past July Iran’s former president Mahmoud Ahmhadinejad visited the Kremlin to ask Vladimir Putin for more reactors beyond the one Russia already built.
Eve documents how Rosatom lures customers not only by building nuclear plants, but also by offering comprehensive package deals to operate the plants, supply them with fuel and permanently dispose of the radioactive waste. “All part of a Kremlin-backed $55 billion plan to make Russia a leading global supplier of nuclear power,” says Eve. Eve’s reporting is part of a Pulitzer Center project to examine emerging nuclear threats in the post-Cold War world.
CRUEL SEA
The story nearly had a tragic ending for Jim and his cameraman when the boat they were on was swamped by rough seas, but the pair survived and so too did the disturbing footage that they captured on this clandestine voyage. Jim’s story aired in the UK on the ITV Network and in the US on the PBS NewsHour. It also appeared online in The Ecologist and the Daily Mail Online.
A FAMILY’S STORY
The United Nations estimates that the civil war in Syria has already produced some 2 million refugees. Such numbers are hard to fathom. Often the best way to understand the depth of this kind of human catastrophe is to focus on a single individual or family.
In a remarkable piece of reporting for Guernica, Pulitzer Center grantee Alia Malek traces the plight of a Syrian Armenian family forced to flee from Aleppo and take refuge in Armenia, a “homeland” that they have never known. Digging deep into the tragic history of the region, Alia traces the family’s original flight to Syria to escape the 1915 Armenian genocide in Turkey, a tragedy that causes her protagonist to wonder “if permanence is always illusory.”
Until next week,
Tom Hundley
Senior Editor
The US Holocaust Museum is projecting Pulitzer Center grantee Greg Constantine’s photos of the Rohingya on their exterior walls November 4-8. See the invitation below:
Join us in bearing witness to the suffering of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in Burma long considered among the world’s most persecuted peoples. Denied citizenship and rendered stateless by the Burmese government, the 800,000 Rohingya lack basic rights, including the right to work, marry, and travel freely, and routinely suffer severe abuse. Following violent attacks in 2012 that destroyed numerous Rohingya communities, more than 100,000 are now confined to displacement camps and segregated areas where they continue to be subjected to violence including crimes against humanity.
Building-sized images of the Rohingya displaced in Burma and in exile taken by prize-winning photographer Greg Constantine will be projected each evening from November 4 to 8 on the Museum’s exterior walls on 15th Street SW (Raoul Wallenberg Place).
Greg Constantine, Holly Atkinson, and Maung Tun Khin will discuss the current situation of the Rohingya and increasing violence against Muslims elsewhere in Burma.
The exhibit is free and open to the public. Registration for the opening program is required.
This exhibition is produced by the Museum in association with FotoWeek DC 2013.
Generous support provided by the National Endowment for Democracy. Additional support provided by the Open Society Foundations and Physicians for Human Rights.
The opening program is made possible by the Helena Rubinstein Foundation.
For more information, email genocideprevention@ushmm.org.
To RSVP for the opening program, click here.
(And don’t forget to check out Constantine’s photos in our ebook “In Search of Home" on the iBookstore and Amazon!)
Click the play button above to see our embedded interactive map.
As any fan of Russian dash-cam videoscan attest, the quality of driving in the country leaves much to be desired. It suffers from a fatality rate twice that of the U.S. and five times greater than many European nations. Southward in China, there is low enforcement of seat-belt and helmet usage but a strong (self-reported) intolerance for drunken driving. Still, with a huge number of cars on the road and often lax attitude toward traffic laws, the republicconsistently takestop score for the number of road deaths internationally.
In Southeast Asia, there’s good news and bad. The traffic in Indonesia has improved recently thanks to the government’s implementation of bus lanes, for instance. But in Vietnam, where scooters and motorcycles make up 95 percent of registered vehicles, there continues to be a major health risk in that few people wear adequate armor. More than 80 percent of helmets that bikers own fail to meet the lowest of safety standards, according to a survey.
The Atlantic Cities’ John Metcalfe dives into our Roads Kill map to examine road safety trends around the world. Keep reading here.
A female student waits to review lessons with her teacher at an informal Koranic school in the home of the local imam in the village of Mereto in eastern Senegal, September 28, 2013. Photo by @allisonshelley. Today’s theme: #alhamdulillah
Allison is guest hosting the account this week from her recent work in Nigeria and Senegal, where she has been reporting on reproductive health issues. #koran #senegal #school
"The real action, though, was at a multilevel booth for Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear company, which exuded a Steve Jobs vibe of pure whiteness and know-how. That was where “newcomers,” as the Russians fondly call them, from nations that do not have nuclear power plants heard about options and signed cooperation agreements for Rosatom to build or even operate reactors for them. At one point, photographers snapped shots of Nigerian nuclear officials as they clinked champagne flutes with Rosatom chief Sergey Kirienko, celebrating their baby steps toward joining Russia’s growing roster of clients, including Turkey and Vietnam. Rosatom has already finished reactors in China and India. In July, Finland chose the company over French and Japanese competitors for its next reactor.
The big show was all part of a Kremlin-backed $55-billion plan to make Russia a leading global supplier of nuclear power. Already the country intends to build roughly 40 new reactors at home, and it expects as many as 80 orders from other countries by 2030. Included are facilities that would generate power and desalinate water, of particular interest in the Middle East. The expansion comes as Germany is abandoning nuclear power, the U.S. industry is struggling and Japan is in the midst of soul-searching about its post-Fukushima intentions. President Vladimir Putin has called the build-out “a rebirth, a renaissance” of Russia’s nuclear technology.”
— Excerpt from Pulitzer Center grantee Eve Conant’s piece on Russia’s growing nuclear export industry in Scientific American. Keep reading here. Image by James Hill. Russia, 2013.
“Like we came from Turkey, we may also one day leave from Syria.” Don’t miss Pulitzer Center grantee Alia Malek’s poignant piece about home and exile for Guernica.
And we’re LIVE!
Join us on TONIGHT, Tuesday, October 15 for a talk with Pulitzer Center grantee Yochi Dreazen, a senior writer for Foreign Policy who has reported extensively on national security and military affairs.
The event will be livestreamed using Google Hangout on Air starting at 6pm ET. Tweet your questions to @pulitzercenter.
Against the backdrop of the recent mall siege in Kenya and Syria’s ongoing military conflicts, Dreazen will draw on his most recent reporting in Mali supported by the Pulitzer Center, the Al Qaeda control in northern Mali. The group known as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has imposed harsh Islamic law and, as Dreazen writes, is “working to turn northern Mali into the next Afghanistan.”
His other current Pulitzer Center-supported project focuses on the use of drones in Israel and Hezbollah. In addition to Mali and Israel, Dreazen’s reporting has taken him to a host of other countries where he has kept a sustained focus on national security and military affairs.
Dreazen’s most recent articles on these issues have been published in The Atlantic, The New Republic, and Smithsonian. Dreazen also is a writer-in-residence at the Center for New American Security and a former Iraq correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.
Join us on TONIGHT, Tuesday, October 15 for a talk with Pulitzer Center grantee Yochi Dreazen, a senior writer for Foreign Policy who has reported extensively on national security and military affairs.
The event will be livestreamed using Google Hangout on Air starting at 6pm ET. Tweet your questions to @pulitzercenter.
Against the backdrop of the recent mall siege in Kenya and Syria’s ongoing military conflicts, Dreazen will draw on his most recent reporting in Mali supported by the Pulitzer Center, the Al Qaeda control in northern Mali. The group known as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has imposed harsh Islamic law and, as Dreazen writes, is “working to turn northern Mali into the next Afghanistan.”
His other current Pulitzer Center-supported project focuses on the use of drones in Israel and Hezbollah. In addition to Mali and Israel, Dreazen’s reporting has taken him to a host of other countries where he has kept a sustained focus on national security and military affairs.
Dreazen’s most recent articles on these issues have been published in The Atlantic, The New Republic, and Smithsonian. Dreazen also is a writer-in-residence at the Center for New American Security and a former Iraq correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.