“More than seven decades after the war, 100.000 bodies waiting to be found” (Headline in Spanish digital outlet 20 minutos). 

Every other day there is news of another mass grave found in Spain. These findings coincide with a resurgence of the divisions that lead to the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the following for decades of dictatorship under general Franco. As families exhume the bodies of those killed during and after the conflict, and the grandchildren of the victims push for justice, Spaniards have started asking themselves if they made the right decision when they decided to impose forgiveness from the past, instead of confronting it. Explaining what has gone wrong with Spain could help other countries in their transitions and/or dealing with the aftermath of civil conflicts:  Continue reading →

The US has gone to war 14 times since the end of the II Word War, combating from Korea to Afghanistan. But there is one war that historians usually fail to add to the list, and it is the one Washington has been fighting – and losing – for the longest period of time.

The war on drugs, launched in its modern version by Richard Nixon in 1971, and still presented as a success by it supporters, has failed to reduce consumption in the US or diminish the business of the drug cartels. It has increased drug related crime, provoked an explosion of incarcerations in the developed world and aggravated conflicts in different parts of the world, as the example of Mexico clearly shows. Aren’t we repeating the mistakes of the years of alcohol prohibition, in a much bigger scale?

Five charts suggests that a new approach is needed and could have a bigger chance to work. It would have to include the legalization and regulation of drugs and the allocation of the billions spent today in “warcotics” in addiction treatment, crop alternatives in countries were drugs are produced and tobacco like health campaigns to educate people on the dangers of drug consumption.

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Vladimir Radomirovic (Belgrade, 1973) is editor-in-chief of Pistaljka or “whistleblower”, an online outlet that he founded with his wife Dragana in 2010 to denounce corruption in Serbia.

Vladimir, a Nieman fellow at Harvard, was impacted as a person, and shaped as a journalist, by his experience of the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 90´s. He grew up living the disintegration of his country, the NATO bombing of his hometown and the stigma associated with a nation that has always been blamed in the West for causing the conflict, and its worst abuses.

I was curious to know more about Vladimir´s experience on those days, and how it influenced the journalist he is now. But instead of asking him directly, I decided to present to him images of what took place two decades earlier and have him react to them. The pictures are the questions. This is how he responded:  Continue reading →

Hi,

A not very scientific (or sophisticated) comparison of what a week of news consumption looked for me last week, a week in 2008 and a week in 2000.  MediaDiary

Best,

David