The discovery of a novel mosquito on Guantanamo Bay reveals how globalization is threatening to unleash the next pandemic. Part of our BBC Future series, Stopping The Next One, with Harriet Constable and The Pulitzer Center.
READ: BBC
Author: Jacob Kushner
A U.S. State Department Travel Warning for Visitors to the United States [Satire]
Vocativ
Vigilantes go on patrol in September near the U.S.-Mexico border outside Brownsville, Texas.
Reuters/Rick Wilking
“Visitors belonging to a minority race should use particular caution when traveling to areas of the United States where police officers may be present.”
“LGBTQ travelers should instead consider going to Uganda, where only one targeted murder of an LGBT individual occurred in 2011, compared with 30 that year in the United States.”
“Muslims traveling to America should be aware that federal operatives routinely attempt to entrap Muslims into terrorist plots.”
“Violent and sometimes fatal attacks, including armed carjackings, drive-by shootings, burglaries, and kidnappings can occur at any time and in any location, particularly in cities. Travelers to big cities should therefore avoid crowds.”
Read the full satire – originally published by Vocativ.
‘They paid a guy to kill me’
The Guardian
Jake Naughton
In Uganda, a lesbian activist helps straight people fight stigma of a disease once thought of as ‘gay.’
Read: The Guardian
The New Vaccine you Haven’t Heard Of
New Scientist
Eight-year-old Trizah Makungu sits on the bed she shares with her parents, protected by a mosquito net. These nets, which cost about $5 in the local market, have helped save millions of lives. / Lena Mucha
While most of the world is focusing on new vaccines for the coronavirus, thousands of Kenyan children are finally receiving a longed-for malaria vaccine, 37 years after development on it started.
Read: New Scientist
May 1, 2021 edition
With Support from the European Journalism Centre
Trouble at the Lake
National Geographic
Human-hippo conflict is exploding in this pristine patch of Kenya
Floods and the economic fallout from COVID-19 are pitting hungry fishermen against hungry hippos—with deadly results.
Read: English | Spanish | Portuguese
Photos by Brian Otieno.
Haiti’s Gold Rush
Guernica
A woman holds the gold she found this week. Image by Ben Depp. Haiti, 2012.
Riches beckon from beneath Haiti’s hills. Mining companies are hoping to lock in huge tax breaks to get at them.
Read the full story at Guernica
Support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and Haiti Grassroots Watch.
The deadliest flower in the world is a lifeline to farmers—and the planet.
National Geographic
Pyrethrum contains a potent chemical that is made into an environmentally friendly insecticide. Photos by Vito Fusco
GILGIL, KENYA–The deadliest flower in the insect world is soft to the touch. Each morning in the hills above Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, the white petals of the pyrethrum plant become laden with dew. To the people who pick them, the flower is utterly harmless. But bugs beware: Its yellow center contains a natural toxin that can kill them in seconds.
Read: National Geographic
Beside a Vast Graveyard, a New City Rises in Haiti
Pacific Standard
Allison Shelley
Haiti’s earthquake shattered several cities, but it also birthed another. A place with space for the dead is a place with space for the living. And in post-earthquake Haiti, space was in short supply. Called Canaan, after the biblical holy land, a place defined by death has come alive.
Read: Pacific Standard
A Factory of Clouds
BBC
In Africa’s Great Rift Valley, tectonic shifts are underway. Kenya is harvesting them to power its future.
Drive along the dusty dirt road that winds through Kenya’s Hell’s Gate National park, past the zebra, gazelles and giraffes, and you’ll see a plume of steam shooting skyward in the distance. Vehicles must sometimes swerve to avoid running over warthogs as they enter a vast valley dotted with dozens of steam vents – a factory of clouds.
Blasts of steam billow loudly, releasing heat from deep within the Earth. But even more powerful is the steam you don’t see: that which twists through miles of tubes to push past turbines, generating a type of clean energy that won’t run out for millions of years.
Read: BBC Full Steam Ahead
A Coronavirus from Camels
BBC
Photography for BBC, The Coronavirus 10 Times Deadlier than Covid-19. Part of the Pulitzer Center-supported series, Stopping The Next One.
Waiting to Walk … Out.
HUCK Magazine
Photos by Jake Naughton
Kenya has become a safe haven for scores of refugees fleeing war and famine in neighboring countries. But that sense of sanctuary doesn’t always stand true if you’re young, vulnerable and gay. In secret hideaways and temporary homes, LGBT refugees are being forced yet again to hide their true selves.
On the run from the armed cattle rustlers of rural Kenya
The Guardian
Photograph: Will Swanson
In Kenya’s Baringo County, police reservists are tasked with carrying out the work that Kenya’s real police and armed forces have been unable or unwilling to do: fighting off armed bandits who are terrorizing parts of central Kenya as they steal livestock and shoot anyone who gets in their way.
Read: The Guardian
The End of an Epidemic
The Guardian
Allison Shelley
Ten years after UN Peacekeepers introduced cholera to Haiti, against all odds, Haiti’s cholera crisis now appears to be over.
Read: How Haiti Curbed Cholera
Supported by the Pulitzer Center.
The British Empire’s Homophobia Lives On
The Atlantic
Khalil Senosi
The first anti-gay laws on the African continent have become the target African LGBTQ-rights activists, who argue that homophobia, not homosexuality, was an import from the West.
Read: The Atlantic
Haiti farmers eager to receive compensation after ‘groundbreaking’ land deal
Reuters PLACE
Farmer Remy Augustin, 54, prepares the ground to plant maize on a plot owned by his niece near Caracol, Haiti, December 10, 2019. Handout by Allison Shelley
A decade after an earthquake killed more than 200,000 people, farmers in Haiti are waiting to receive compensation for their land used to build an industrial park. Located in Haiti’s northern region, the $300 million Caracol Industrial Park opened in 2012 and now employs approximately 15,000 people, most of whom work in clothing factories there.
In 2018, farmers who had been evicted from their land in 2011 struck a rare deal with the IDB to provide Caracol’s 100 most vulnerable families with new, titled land.
Read the full story at the Thompson Reuters Foundation (PLACE). Reporting supported by The Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.