The people of South Kordofan, the Sudan province where the Nuba Mountains are located, fought alongside southern rebels during a 22-year civil war and are now, once again, battling for their survival against the regime of Sudan President Omar al-Bashir.
(Photos by Peter DiCampo/Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting)
Ivory Coast’s ethnic strife is the most recent chapter in cocoa’s troubled history. Initially migrant workers from across West Africa were invited to the country to share in its farmland, helping Ivory Coast become the world’s top producer. (Today it provides some 40 percent of the world’s crop.) But once the economy went sour in the 1980s, cocoa profits were more jealously guarded. Land disputes erupted, sparking xenophobic violence that became a 10-year civil war.
With the cessation of post-election violence last year and the ascendance of a new government, the war is supposedly over. But new attacks are still carried out between rival factions; thousands of people still live in refugee camps; and those who return to their destroyed homes swear vengeance.
Ivory Coast: The Bittersweet Origins of Chocolate | Pulitzer Center
Esteban Ruiseco is exactly the type of teenager Mexico’s ruthless drug cartels prey upon. The 15-year-old comes from a broken home and has dropped out of school twice.
He also comes from Ciudad Juarez, which at the peak of the Mexican government’s war on drugs became infamous as the most violent city in the world.
In 2010, more than 3,000 people were murdered in Juarez. The murder rate has dropped since then but the threat of violence remains constant, particularly for young people who quit school and are out of work.
But Esteban has found a way to escape.
He is learning the clarinet and has joined the Esperanza Azteca (Aztec Hope) Juarez Youth Orchestra. It is based on the Venezuelan “El Sistema” model and aims to re-connect young people with society.
As I write, soldiers of the ruling junta, the “Green Berets” of the regular army, have put down a takeover attempt from Mali’s former presidential guard, the “Red Berets,” loyal to President Amadou Toumani Toure, the democratically elected leader who was deposed in a coup on March 22. Toure was weeks away from retirement and elections that would have replaced him.
“Water! Water!” Eugene Seoh shouted from his three-story apartment building on Benson Street, a main avenue in the center of Liberia’s capital, Monrovia.
From across the road, water vendor Jerry Worlogar looked up and nodded. Seoh hurried down the stairs. He stood before Worlogar’s hand-drawn cart full of white 5-gallon containers.
“Thirty-five (Liberian) dollars for one gallon,” Worlogar told Seoh.
“Every day your price is changing,” Seoh complained.
“That’s dry season,” Worlogar said. “You know the water business is hard.”
Water business in Liberia is indeed hard. Like many in central Monrovia, Seoh has to search for water every day. He and his wife, Louise, who is seven months pregnant, get up before dawn to trudge up and down three flights of stairs to retrieve water from the building’s well. More than half of Eugene Seoh’s monthly income goes to buying water.
[T]he UAE’s commitment to renewable energy is very real. Emirati leaders accept the concept of “peak oil,” in which global petroleum output will soon begin a slow decline. They believe they have between 50 and 200 more years of oil riches beneath their sands, but they recognize the inexorable trend. Renewable energy gives the country a chance to dominate new forms of power just as it currently dominates oil exports. With prices hovering above $120 per barrel, the Emirates and other Persian Gulf nations also want to use less oil and sell more. So the Gulf nations see a huge financial incentive to launch large-scale, government-funded, solar, wind, and nuclear projects that are almost unthinkable in the U.S.
Ivory Coast: Water Brings Communities Together | Pulitzer Center
Committees set up to maintain access to water help bring together Ivory Coast communities divided along ethnic lines and plagued by the aftershocks of a civil war.
At the entrance to Stirling Castle, close to the field of Bannockburn where the Scots under Robert the Bruce crushed the English in 1314, an old man shouts at the guards about the British flag flying overhead. Anger contorts his face. He is, as we say in Britain, “effing and blinding”—using swear words beginning with “f” and “b.” They are laughing at him. “It is an English flag. It is disgusting,” he says, before storming out of the gate.
I ask the local guards if this happens often, especially as Stirling is the heartland of Scottish nationalism. One replies that it doesn’t, but that in summer American tourists ask about the flag. “We say it is the British flag, and as long as we are in Britain we will fly it.” But how long will that be? If the ruling Scottish National Party (SNP) — which leads the autonomous government here — has its way, Scotland will vote in a referendum on independence towards the end of 2014. That could lead to the dissolution of the United Kingdom in 2015.
Most of America probably now knows that Mike Daisey fabricated sections of his popular one-man play about Apple iPads and his This American Life broadcast. Take his visit to a Foxconn factory and nearby restaurant in the coastal city of Shenzhen. He says he met members of an underground union, including some exposed to n-hexane, a potent neurotoxin: “their hands shake uncontrollably,” Daisey said. “Most of them can’t even pick up a glass.”
Daisey didn’t actually meet these workers. But workers like them existed.
