🗺️ Picks of the Week — October 9
🗺️ Picks of the Week — October 9
Azerbaijan Armenia At War, Big Ozone Layer Hole, Hopewell Chin'ono Speaks Out, Instagram 10th Birthday, Church of England Child Sex Abuse, Nobel Prize 2020
Hello! Happy Friday and welcome to another Picks of the Week. Today also sees the return of Amy Sokolow, who'll be writing PoW moving forward! Check out her recent piece on how World War 2 still influences global politics after 75 years. And make sure you check out our new feature, Inside The Middle East, written by Aina de Lapparent who'll be writing every Wednesday.
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Job Corner
Gain access to 750+ journalism jobs and internships all over the U.S., UK and Canada by subscribing below. New jobs posted this week from the likes of The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Independent, The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Washington Post, USA Today and Vice.
Data Corner
Links to datasets used to put together this edition of Inside The Newsroom…
Jailed Journalists: Historical database on all journalists imprisoned and killed from CPJ
Nobel Prize: API for all prizes and laureates since 1901 from Nobel
Armenia and Azerbaijan War Worsens
We start off in Eurasia where, as we covered in August, tensions between Azerbaijan and Armenia have escalated into full blown war, which has already resulted in the deaths of at least 250 people, and thousands more across the two countries have been forced to flee their homes. The conflict centers around the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which is regognized internationally as being part of Azerbaijan, but has a population that is majority Armenian who have resisted Azerbaijani rule for more than a century. In 1991, the region of around 150,000 people declared independence as the unrecognised Republic of Artsakh, and has since ruled itself with Armenian support.
Several other countries are already involved in the conflict, which threatens to rope in even more nations in the future. Turkey has declared its support for Azerbaijan, whose people are ethnically Turkish, while Russia has close ties with Armenia. Reports of Turkey helping to deploy Syrians to fight in the region have also surfaced. Meanwhile Iran, who shares borders with Turkey, Azerbaijan and Armenia, has warned against further stray shells from landing in Iranian villages, and the country’s Border Guards Commander said his forces were placed “in necessary formation” across from the fighting.
Credit: The BBC
Fears of wider war as Azerbaijan-Armenia fighting escalates
Ozone Hole Breaks Record
We travel to space next where the World Meteorological Organization reported the annually occurring hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica has grown to its “maximum size.” The hole, which reached its smallest size last year, now stretches across more than 14 million square miles, covering most of the continent. The size of the hole varies wildly depending on previous weather, and this year’s size has been caused by:
A strong, stable and cold polar vortex, which kept the temperature of the ozone layer over Antarctica consistently cold.
Ozone depletion is directly related to the temperature in the stratosphere, which is the layer of the atmosphere between around 10 km and round 50 km altitude. This is because polar stratospheric clouds, which have an important role in the chemical destruction of ozone, only form at temperatures below -78°C.
These polar stratospheric clouds contain ice crystals that can turn non-reactive compounds into reactive ones, which can then rapidly destroy ozone as soon as light from the sun becomes available to start the chemical reactions. This dependency on polar stratospheric clouds and solar radiation is the main reason the ozone hole is only seen in late winter/early spring.
The ozone layer is critical in protecting the Earth and its inhabitants from harmful ultraviolet rays, and the Montreal Protocol banned chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which deplete the ozone layer, in 1987. Since then, the ozone layer has slowly recovered, and scientists estimate that it may return to pre-1980 levels by 2060. Meanwhile, Mario Molina, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist whose work was crucial to enacting the Montreal Protocol, has died at the age of 77.
Climate 101: Ozone Depletion
Zimbabwean Journalist Details “Appalling” Prison Conditions
We move to Zimbabwe next where journalist Hopewell Chin’ono, who was held in a maximum security prison for almost six weeks, has spoken out about the brutal conditions he experienced after being released on bail last month. As we also covered in August, Chin’ono was charged with “inciting violence,” but his lawyer maintains that he was abducted from his home for his track record of anti-corruption reporting, which he attempted to livestream before police broke into his apartment and thwarted his efforts. Jacob Ngarivhume, the leader of an opposition party in the country, was also arrested at the same time and released on bail last month. Human rights groups, including the United Nations, have condemned the arrest as a threat to free expression.
“Some of the prison officers are very rude, they treat prisoners badly. Prisoners are beaten up for any small misdemeanour. I saw it and it was really bad. Some are beaten up to a point that they cannot even walk,” Chin’ono told The Guardian. He said the courtyard where prisoners eat is flooded with sewage and inmates lacked masks and adequate personal space to prevent an outbreak of Covid-19. Chin’ono was also forced to attend court while experiencing symptoms of the disease himself, as the country experienced its worst spate of cases during July and August.
Instagram Celebrates 10th Birthday
Instagram celebrated its 10th anniversary since being launched and it’s hard to imagine life before the most popular image sharing platform. Whether it’s Instagram Face, the influencer economy, FaceTune, influencer aesthetic, the meme economy or foodie culture, IG has had a profound affect on society and the way we see ourselves. Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers released a report detailing monopolistic behavior by the largest tech companies following a 16-month investigation. Part of the report accused Mark Zuckerberg of buying Instagram for $1 billion/£629 million in 2012 with the intention of purposely weakening it in order to strengthen Facebook. During the investigation, a high-level Instagram employee told the House committee, “It was collusion, but within an internal monopoly... If you own two social media utilities, they should not be allowed to shore each other up. It’s unclear to me why this should not be illegal.”
Church of England Sex Abuse
A “decades-long culture of secrecy and silence” is to blame for the child abuse and rape rampant among clergy in the Church of England, Al Jazeera reports. A government-commissioned report released by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse showed how abusers were shielded from blame, and how victims were discouraged from coming forward with allegations. The report revealed that from the 1940s to 2018, 390 clergy or others in positions of power within the Church were convicted of sexual offenses against children.
In response, the Church acknowledged its wrongdoing and said it was committed to reversing the pattern. It has already committed to multimillion compensation for some victims, according to The Guardian. This is not the first sex abuse scandal to plague churches, after similar patterns were revealed in the network of Catholic churches including in Boston (the inspiration for the movie “Spotlight”), Philadelphia, Louisville and San Diego.
Women Make Nobel Prize History
We finish with the latest Nobel Prize winners being announced this week. Perhaps most notably, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, who reside from France and the U.S., respectively, became the first women in the organization’s history to share the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and will split the prize money of 10 million krona (£861,200/ $1,110,400). Charpentier and Doudna are now just the sixth and seventh women to win the award from a total of 186 laureates. Their work focused on Crispr-Cas9, a gene editing technique that’s been likened to a pair of ‘genetic scissors’, which allows scientists to use molecules made by microbes to cut DNA in plants, animals and even humans wherever they want. Elsewhere, Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first American woman since Toni Morrison took the prize in 1993. Glück is known for “her poetry’s technical precision, sensitivity, and insight into loneliness, family relationships, divorce, and death,” according to the Poetry Foundation, and became just the 16th women to win from a total of 117 laureates.
That’s it for this week. We’ll see you next week for a podcast with Michael Hudson, a senior editor at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, to talk about ICIJ’s latest FinCEN files investigation that uncovered how governments and banks allowed trillions of dirty dollars through the financial system. 👋