Author: OPC of America

Dateline report by Jacob Kushner: “For many news consumers the name Somalia has become synonymous with statelessness, violence, intractability. Each year Al-Shabab kills hundreds of civilians and terrorizes many more in Mogadishu and beyond. Yet for all the attention on Somalia’s many problems, news audiences might be surprised to learn that when it comes to ending impunity for sexual violence, some regions of Somalia have achieved remarkable progress…”

Elisabet Cantenys writes about ACOS for the Dateline magazine: “Back in September 2014, a group of editors met in New York and Chicago to grapple with the horrifying murders of James Foley and Steven Sotloff in Syria and to devise ways of promoting freelance journalists’ safety. No one could have ever imagined their talks would catch fire. During the following months, they drafted together with the Overseas Press Club and other journalism organizations the Freelance Journalist Safety Principles, a document that outlines a set of safety standards for news organizations and freelancers alike. Soon this informal movement crystallized into the ACOS Alliance…”

Robyn Dixon writes for the 2019 Dateline magazine: “The light was always on, with no sense of day or night. Two guards were always in the cell but they rarely spoke to the prisoner. The cell’s two security cameras watched constantly. To sleep, the prisoner had to lie on a narrow bed between the guards. He had to squat on the open latrine in front of them to relieve himself…”

Dateline dispatch from photographer Adriana Zehbrauskas: “Adán Abraján de la Cruz was 24 years old the night he disappeared. A first-year student at the Ayotzinapa Teacher’s Rural School in the impoverished Mexican state of Guerrero, he went missing along with 42 other students when the buses they were traveling in were attacked by a drug cartel in Iguala which handed them over to local police, who, working in complicity with city officials, later disappeared them…”

Amy Yee, in this year’s Dateline: “At a prison in Thiès, Senegal, a group of women in fine dresses cut from the same colorful fabric enact a scene before an audience. One of them breaks down sobbing and wailing; another woman comforts her. These women are not actors, but female inmates of the prison depicting why many of them are in jail: infanticide and abortion, which is effectively illegal in Senegal…”

On a sunny morning in July 2009, I got a phone call from a friend in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya: “They abducted Natasha right from the courtyard of her house.” Shortly after that, we learned that our friend and colleague, Natalya Estemirova, or Natasha as we all called her, had been murdered. I jumped on a plane and flew to Grozny.