This week Tripping the Wire
La Esteliana/lastenia.accioninformativa@yahoo.es
Por: Tom Hundley
Senior Editor
Until next week,
Tom Hundley
Senior Editor
Por: Tom Hundley
Senior Editor
THE MOST DANGEROUS BORDER
North Korea’s recent saber rattling and its alarmingly explicit threat
to strike U.S. forces in the region with “cutting-edge smaller, lighter
and diversified nuclear strike means,” has focused new attention on one
of the world’s most dangerous borders—the DMZ that divides the two
Koreas. Pulitzer Center grantee Tomas van Houtryve has spent months
looking into North Korea from its tightly sealed borders. His images
along the 154-mile DMZ are stark and compelling.
"I encountered every range of fortification imaginable: triple
razor-wire fences, concrete walls, land mines, anti-tank columns,
trenches, road blocks, tunnels, bunkers, watch towers, and, of course,
South Korean and American military bases," he told Foreign Policy.
"There is even an immense dam with an empty reservoir built at a cost
of $429 million on the South Korean side of the DMZ—a preventative
measure just in case North Korea unleashes a flood from their reservoir
on the other side."
GUNS IN THE AMERICAS
In the wake of the last December’s shootings at the Sandy Hook
Elementary School in Newtown, the Pulitzer Center put out a call for
reporting projects that would look at the implications of gun violence
in America from an international perspective. We decided to focus on
Chicago—where more than 100 children and young adults were killed by
guns last year—and selected a proposal from Carlos Javier Ortiz, a
gifted photojournalist who has been documenting gun violence in Chicago
for more than six years. Carlos, who discussed his reporting project with Dean Reynolds on the CBS Evening News this week, plans to explore how the gun and gang culture of urban America
has spread to the streets of Latin America. In both settings, poverty,
lack of education, poor employment prospects, and easy access to guns
fuel the violence, says Carlos.
OUT OF AFRICA
The Ituri rainforest in the beleaguered Democratic Republic of Congo
has become an unlikely battleground. In what is supposed to be a
wildlife reserve, a heavily armed militia backed by powerful figures in
the Congolese army has set up a protection racket to profit from illegal
gold mining and the lucrative ivory trade.
But as Pete Jones reports in
The Guardian, the so-called Mai Mai Morgan militia is being met head-on
by armed park rangers who are financially backed by conservation
groups. In many cases, villagers living in the rainforest tacitly
support the Mai Mai Morgans—either out of fear, or because they too
profit from the illegal activity. Pete writes that the
“[conservationists’] support for the park rangers has led to accusations
that they are partly responsible for the militarization of the
conflict.”
POLIO HELP
Esha Chhabra, writing in The Guardian, reports on India’s remarkably successful
polio eradication efforts. She says that UNICEF health workers received
help in their latest vaccination campaign in the city of Aligarh from
an unexpected quarter: the local Muslim religious establishment. The key
to their success? Persuading clerics to have their own children
vaccinated.
Until next week,
Tom Hundley
Senior Editor
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