A Water Crisis in Chennai, India

One of the largest cities in India is running out of water. Is this our climate future?

Monsoons typically provide the bulk of water for Chennai, which is one of the largest cities in India. It is on the south eastern coast of the country, in the Tamil Nadu province.  This is a region that relies on seasonal monsoons to supply the bulk of water.

But last year’s monsoons were exceptionally weak, causing aquifers and other water sources to run dry.

Now in some neighborhoods if taps run at all, only a trickle comes out. Many neighborhoods are reliant on water trucks — if they can afford it. Meanwhile many people are fleeing the city while this crisis persists.

The proximate cause of this crisis is poor rains. But according to my guest today, Meera Subramanian, deeper political and social factors have exacerbated this crisis. This includes poor city planning and a focus on massive infrastructure projects of limited utility.

Meera Subramanian is a freelance journalist and independent author. She is the author of a book about water issues in India titled: A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis, from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka.

In July she wrote an op-ed in the New York Times which makes the case that disaggregated water resource management could be far more effective in combating crisis like the one we are seeing in Chennai today.

If you have 20 minutes and want to learn the implications of the fact that one of the largest cities in one of the most populous countries is running out of water, have a listen.

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What’s up first?

My father is from Chennai, so I have a huge extended family there. It is a quickly growing city at about eight million currently and one of India’s largest. It is right on the beach and has a lot of issues going on with water.

Why is Chennai running out of water?

They are very dependent on monsoon rains. This is a condition across South Asia. Monsoons deliver up to half of their water in a very short amount of time. You can’t just depend on rivers to tap into anytime.

The most recent monsoon season was far weaker than historical averages.

That’s right. It came late and the numbers for the peak monsoon in autumn was 55% less than usual. When that is half of your water, you’re down to a quarter of your demand being reached. The rain stopped by early December and they went 200 days without rain.

How are your friends and family dealing with this?

They said it changes depending on where you are in the city. Their primary reservoirs are virtually dried up, though. They are getting rain as we speak, so there is hope of recharge. Piped water has been out in some parts of the city for upwards of four months. A lot of people in India do not have dependable, 24/7 piped water like we have the luxury of in the U.S. Many of my upper middle class cousins get water from a variety of sources. With the advent of the crisis of the past month, one of my cousins said the water tanker deliveries were coming in sporadically and the price had doubled. One cousin said they actually drilled a second borewell, and he had to go down 170 feet. Ten to fifteen years ago that would have been 120 feet. So, even if there is water, people are having to reach farther to get it which is not sustainable.

If you aren’t middle class, how do you deal with that?

That is the terrifying part. There are places that are dependent on water not just for daily life and sanitation, but for their livelihood. Those are the people impacted most and those are the people we often do not hear from. For example, in Chennai the places that used to be wetlands have been encroached upon by development. These are unplanned settlements so they are vulnerable in terms of access to water and vulnerable for when heavy rains do come.

In your reporting in Chennai and places where there have been water shortages, have you observed a gender dynamic?

Absolutely. Women are the ones who are responsible for water for the most part. Think about how much we need water for cooking and cleaning. Those chores are primarily done by women, and not just in India. The New York Times had a picture of a man, but it is mostly women doing this work.

Can you describe what investments are being planned in terms of giant infrastructure around water?

India is a major player in building mega dams. Throughout the country, there are areas that are more water abundant or water poor. Because the northern monsoon and the southern monsoon come at different times, there is this idea that we can just move water where we have it, to where we need it, when we need it. India has been working on these major infrastructure projects to connect rivers. Once it is done, it will be the greatest engineering feat on the face of the Earth. The tricky part is that water goes where it wants. It is fighting nature in that way. There are also huge questions around displacement of human communities and around the fracturing of ecosystems.

In Chennai, desalination plants are at the next frontier as well.

That’s right. India is working really hard to get all of its population on the grid in the first place. There are huge areas of the country that do not have dependable electricity. To their credit, the government is really pushing renewable energy. But India feels like they have every right to get power to their people in any way possible, so they are also building coal plants. Either way, desalination plants take a lot of energy. The suck up saltwater, extract drinking water, and then what goes back out is briny water along with the chemicals from the process. It is not a sustainable answer.

You identify some potentially sustainable solutions that seem to be more localized.

In my book, I focused on an area in Rajasthan. I met a fellow who was a good hearted, young activist. He wanted to be a doctor or a health care worker, but what the locals emphasized that what they really needed was water. The landscape had been left fallow because they didn’t have water to sustain it. An older man said they used to have dams and asked for help just building these small scale dams across the landscape in a cascading effect to catch the rain going downhill. It makes the water pause long enough to seep down and recharge the aquifer. Within just a couple years of him building these dams, the wells started to come back to life. They did this across the entire district and built thousands of dams.

A big argument of my book is that India is a place of small scale. The farmers are all working on two or three acres, and life in general is small scale. When we think about reviving these historical water resource methods, we still need big scale projects, but we should look at the two methods in conjunction with one another.

In a place like Chennai, is there pushback against this rapid development?

Yes, this is the part that is most frustrating. India as a democracy is vulnerable to campaign slogans. Big projects are sexier to get people voting. “We are going to fix leaky pipes” is not a good slogan. It is hard to get politicians to embrace that and to get citizens to support them if so.

If there is another monsoon season as dry as the last, do you expect a significant out migration?

I imagine that will have to happen. When I spoke to my family, some of them with kids in multiple cities had decided to leave. Those are people who have the option to leave, but people will have to face some hard questions about where they can live and survive comfortably.

Going forward, I hope that we can figure out how to tap into these natural systems instead of just pretending we can build big. That interlinking river project only works to move water from one place to another if there is water there to begin with.

Shownotes by Lydia DeFelice

How North Korea Smuggles Luxury Cars and Evades Sanctions

Mercedes-Maybach S 600 Guard

North Korea is under the world’s most stringent set of international sanctions. This includes, since 2006, a ban on exporting of luxury goods to North Korea. So how is it that Kim Jong Un has amassed fleet of high-end cars?

A new report in the New York Times offers a glimpse into the complex ways that North Korea is able to evade international sanctions to import luxury cars — and perhaps also smuggle illicit goods and materiel into the country.

Reporters from the New York Times teamed up with researchers at the non profit Center for Advanced Defense Studies to track two Mercedes Maybachs from their manufacture in Germany to the streets of Pyongyang. The route was a circuitous one, involving multiple shipping vessels docking in at least five countries over the course of several months. But using open source data and satellite imagery, the reporters and researchers were able to paint a pretty clear picture of how those cars ended up in NorthKorea. And in so doing, they reveal how the North Korean regime is able to evade some sanctions.

On the line with me to discuss his reporting is one of the journalists on the story, Christoph Koettl. He is a visual investigations journalist with the New York Times video team, specializing in geospatial and open-source research.

We discuss the step-by-step journey of these cars and in so doing, the story he tells reveals a weakness in international sanctions in general and on North Korea in particular.

If you have 20 minutes and want to learn how North Korea evades sanctions, and what the international community can do to more robustly enforce those sanctions, have a listen.

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Can you describe these automobiles?

The most important feature is that these are bulletproof cars. They are expensive for the average customer, starting at half a million dollars. They are marketed to business leaders and world leaders. I do not think Mercedes is selling a lot of these. One of the questions we had for Daimler when investigating was, how many do you sell per year? They were not forthcoming.

You were unable to determine who the purchaser from Daimler was of these two Mercedes-Maybach S 600’s, right?

I looked into how this journey began. In Germany, who is Mercedes selling these to and who is buying them? How did they get to North Korea? We contacted Mercedes and they gave us the standard, five bullet response.

What do we know about how those two cars made it to their first stop?

We got two specific container numbers, which allow you to track their journey. The numbers belonged to Cosco Shipping, the fourth largest shipping company in the world. The tracking shows that the two containers were handed to Cosco on June 14th, 2018, were transported via a truck to a shipping terminal in Rotterdam, and on June 20th were loaded onto a ship called the Cosco Spain. That ship left the terminal on June 20th around 4 p.m. There was a satellite image from 2 p.m. that day, which was a pretty powerful visual.

What is the next step of their journey?

It then takes 41 days and the containers reached the port of Dalian in China. There was another satellite image of when the ship docked there. The containers were unloaded and stayed there for several weeks, which is a little unusual.

Why do these containers then go to Osaka, Japan?

It is not entirely clear how or why they got to Osaka, but it appears that something may have gone wrong. We talked to someone who stated they got pulled in last minute and the plan had changed to ship to Osaka and then try again to deliver in  China to Shanghai.

What is interesting is that I did some tracking of a ship that received the cargo at a later point and it was exactly at these locations. It seems to us that a few things went wrong, but it is helpful to ship through a few different countries. All you see on the shipping description is two Mercedes-Maybach S 600 Guard, which in itself is not suspicious or a crime.

Can you describe what you revealed in South Korea?

The research group we worked with figured out that the last ship that had these two containers was implicated in North Korean sanctions violations. So, why do these two guarded vehicles end up on this ship? This ship changed ownership in July, just a few days/weeks before the cars arrived in China. This ship was transferred to a new company that is registered in the Marshall Islands, which is a traditional secrecy jurisdiction. Additionally, the man behind this company is a Russian national. This company owns two ships, which both got seized by South Korean authorities for sanctions evasions. So, there is a clear connection to North Korean sanctions evasions. Furthermore, as soon as the ship picked up the cars, it turned off its transponder signal. All ships have this signal as a requirement under international law for safety reasons. However, the signal disappears and only comes back 18 days later, which is highly unusual.

And 18 days later, the signal is back on in South Korean waters full of coal, correct?

Yes. The cars are gone and it is carrying coal.

What do you think happened?

Well, we looked at the last signals the ship was transmitting and I talked to maritime experts. The last signal transmits the location and its last destination, which is a coal port in Vladivostok. It must have gone to Russia to pick up the coal and unloaded the cars on the way.

You also had evidence that Air Korea flights landed in Vladivostok and picked up these cars?

The theory is now that the container went to Vladivostok. On October 7th, several North Korean transport cargo planes made a landing in Vladivostok. Cargo planes had only flown from Pyongyang to Vladivostok once in the years before, so that is not a normal route for a cargo planes. Further, what cargo planes do very often, and we have seen this repeatedly, is when Kim Jong Un goes abroad, he brings his armoured motorcade. Four months after the cars to missing, North Korean News spotted the same model of cars in Pyongyang and Kim Jong Un was using them. The cars go missing in October and three/four months later he has one. One more thing, the Russian owner of the ship that picks up the cars in South Korea happens to be based in Vladivostok.

What has your reporting revealed about the breakdown in the ability to enforce these sanctions?

 I think there are a couple things to highlight. The UN resolutions that enact the ban on luxury goods to North Korea allow member states to define what a luxury good is, so there is no accepted definition. That means it is up to customs officials or shipping agents to figure out what qualifies as luxury. Once these cars get to South Korea and the local shippers realize these are two armoured vehicles that are going onto a ship connected to North Korean sanctions violations, that is a defining moment. My impression while interviewing people involved, was that many individuals were a bit careless. Some of them asked if this matter was North Korea related, which means they had some suspicions already. But, this is a business so they earn money from it.

Does your reporting suggest if there is South Korean corruption?

No, we don’t have information in this regard.

Is this just an opportunistic businessman?

Our reporting does not suggest that the Russian government is involved or that this Russian businessman is politically motivated. This businessman is registered as a co-owner of a car shop in Vladivostok. This is interesting because when you ship cars, you have to disconnect the batteries so you need specialists to reconnect the batteries before you can start using them. Further, there was a tax evasion case against him a couple years ago because he did not report his income or pay tax on his shop. So, it is more of a profiteering question.

The point is, it is a difficult and specialized operation to get these cars to North Korea. This requires skills, context, and a trusted network. The same techniques could be used to smuggle something else, like weapons.

Shownotes by Lydia DeFelice

A Secretly Filmed Documentary Exposes A Dystopian Nightmare for Uighur Muslims in China

Credit: Isobel Yeung

Uighur Muslims in the Xinjiang province of Northwestern China are living in a police state like no other on earth. Using counter-terrorism as a pre-text, Chinese authorities have rounded up over a million Uighur men and women, forcing them into what they call “re-education centers.”  Men and women are arrested, seemingly for minor offenses like growing a beard, or having foreign contacts, or sometimes for no reason at all. They languish in these detention centers indefinitely.

Outside the prison walls there is also a mass experiment in population control: authorities use facial recognition technologies, spyware and other high tech means to instill fear in Uighurs.

What we know about conditions in those camps and life in Xinjiang has come largely from reports of human rights organizations.

It is extremely rare for a journalist –let alone a western journalist — to access Xinjiang to report on human rights abuses on the ground. But that is exactly what my guest today, Isobel Yeung, did. Posing as a travel blogger, Isobel Yeung, surreptitiously filmed a documentary for Vice News that aired in June on HBO. The documentary provides a visceral sense of the dystopian police state that Xinjiang has become for its Uighur population. It also exposes one consequence of the mass roundups of Ughur men and women, which is the orphaning of children who Isobel Yeoung discovers are placed into their own kind of re-education centers, posing as kindergartens.

Isobel Yeung is on the line to discuss her reporting from Xinjiang, which is a feat of journalism. In our conversation she discuss how she gained access to the Xinjiang, the police state she encountered and how a pervasive sense of fear is being used to oppress a population of millions.

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Xinjiang is incredibly difficult to report on. Journalists have found that you are not able to report freely because you are either followed by government or undercover cops to ensure you do not speak to locals. You are often given access to these dog and pony shows with a curated tour, which the government wants to present. So, we decided to sneak in as tourists and pose as travel bloggers.

How did you avoid suspicion?

Nobody avoids it, but we were able to slip under the radar for a period of time. Most people mistook me for a local, which was good because white people raise more alarm bells. But, it is also a hindrance because all Uighur’s are treated as security threats. The fact that we had foreign passports affords us a degree of protection. At the same time that this massive crackdown on the Uighur community has taken place, the Chinese has been building the tourism industry. So, it is not totally abnormal that tourists would be travelling around.

Can you describe the ubiquity of security cameras and police officers?

This is the strictest and most sophisticated surveillance state in the world. It is impossible to exaggerate the dystopian nature of what it is like there. Every few meters you have a surveillance camera, voice recognition, facial recognition, and checkpoints to scan bodies and phones to ensure you don’t have anything content that would upset the communist party.

How are these measures used to oppress Uighur people?

The Chinese Communist Party would say this is about national security and that they are preventing future terrorist attacks. There have been a handful of violent riots and attacks within the region in the past decade. These measures are being used to eradicate a religion, culture, ethnicity, and really an entire population.  

For instance, it is a law that all knives and sharp objects are chained to the wall to prevent any potential violent attacks. It is laughable that these extreme measures are taken against the entire Uighur population, yet they are.

What do we know about these re-education centers?

So, the UN has estimated that a million Uighurs that have been placed across the region in these camps. They are put in there for a variety of reasons. Uighur people say they have been placed in the camps for reading the Quran, studying Arabic, speaking the Uighur language, wearing a headscarf, and just insulting the Communist Party in any way they perceive. Further, having visited any foreign countries is also seen as extremist so they can be abducted for that as well.

When people are abducted, there are a lot of kids orphaned. You tracked down some of these “kindergartens”. Can you tell the story of the woman in Istanbul?

This woman left China to give birth. She left five of her children with her parents, thinking her or her husband would be back in a couple weeks. When her husband came back, he was arrested and placed in detention. She has not seen her children or heard from them in three years. Uighur’s living abroad can’t have any contact in Xinjiang. She got one sign of her daughter’s existence via a WhatsApp video in a group chat that the Uighur diaspora have. She spotted her daughter in the back of the video where she believes is at a state-run orphanage. So, she believes her children are being brought up there. We have spoken to many Uighurs whose children have been taken away from them and are being brought up in these institutions.

How did you go about of tracking down some of these institutions?

It began with that video. We were able to track that to a social media profile within a city, and then we looked into the government records and saw the number of state kindergartens had exploded at the same time they were rounding up hundreds of thousands of Uighurs. We looked into satellite imagery that matched the descriptions of what we were reading. We were able to track several locations, so we returned to Xinjiang to see some.

On this second visit, had security around you tightened?

Yes, we were followed from the moment we arrived, and arguably before. Most days there were plain clothed police officers following us, listening to everything, and tracking us wherever we went. In addition, uniformed policeman were looking at our phones and deleting any content they wanted. Despite that, we were able to find some of these institutions. They had security fences around them and they were all in run-down neighbourhoods. We noticed that no kids were really leaving. The locals nearby seemed to think it was common knowledge that the Uighur kids were kept there.

Do we have any sense of the number of children separated from their parents?

No. However, we could see the number of kindergartens had increased by 2.6 times the previous amount in 2016 over just one year. The Chinese justify this by saying they are increasing education.

How does the reporting in Xinjiang compare to past reporting?

There is nothing like going to Xinjiang right now. I have witnessed a lot of real danger, but I have never witnessed this palpable fear that I saw. People are terrified to do, see, or even think something wrong.

How are the Han population affected by these ordinances and state policies?

A lot of the Han people have said these policies are far reaching. One person said his business has collapsed. As a hotel owner, he had to hire extra security personnel, and further, everyone has been sent to these concentration camps so there is nobody to spend money. The economy has collapsed. Other people see these measures as necessary.

What do you want listeners to leave understanding about Xinjiang right now?

This is the greatest human rights atrocity in the world right now. There has never been an abuse of this scale since the Holocaust. This development of a surveillance state means everyone outside of these facilities is in an open prison, fearing what will happen to them and their families. The international community has been largely silent, so hopefully we can educate people about this atrocity.

Shownotes by Lydia DeFelice

What You Need to Know About Air Pollution Around the World

Air pollution results in the premature death of 7 million people around the world each year. It is a major global killer harming people in nearly every corner of the globe.

My guest today, Beth Gardiner is a journalist who traveled the world examining the impact of air pollution. Her new book is called Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution. 

In our conversation she shares stories from her reporting, which includes not only detailing the harmful impact of air pollution but also an examination of policies that are working toward cleaner air for all.

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What’s up first?

The nastiest air Gardiner has ever breathed is not in her book. Gardiner took a trip to the capital of Mongolia, where their pollution is horrendous, though very seasonal, as a result of people burning coals in winter to cope with the freezing weather. You could smell the coal smoke from indoors or out. She interviewed the UNICEF representative in Mongolia, and mentioned the term public health crisis. The representative asserted that air pollution is more than that – it is an existential crisis. The pollution that has already occurred is impacting people’s future health, which affects the future of the country and the overall human experience in Mongolia.

Air pollution may not be visible every day, but has serious long term impacts. 

In Mongolia, it is extreme, so you can see it because hospitals are overflowing with kids getting pneumonia. If you go further into other parts of Asia or Western countries it is not as bad or visible, however it is still severe. You will often hear about this notion of invisibility. That could mean the pollution itself is invisible or it could be the connection between cause and effect is invisible. There is strong evidence supporting the connection between air pollution to heart attacks, strokes, cancer, Parkinson’s disease, and the biggest being premature death ultimately. Nonetheless, it is difficult to link air pollution to individual cases.

You have written about the mother of Ella Kissi-Debrah. Can you tell this story?

Ella Kissi-Debrah, based in London, died in 2013 at nine years old. She was healthy until she was six, when she developed a severe case of asthma. Europe has a real issue with air quality because they use more diesel rather than gas, which is more common in the US. Debrah was hospitalized about thirty times during her last three years. Now her mother, Ms. Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, wants to put air pollution on Ella’s death certificate, which is really important. One human face can be more powerful than a million statistics. With that being said, global air pollution cuts short seven million lives annually.

Your book takes readers to Poland whose causes of air pollution are different.

The Poland chapter is about coal, thought the issue of coal is not unique to there, it is one place to expand a larger story. They get almost all of their electricity from coal and further, many people burn coal for heat in their homes. If you are in a power plant, burning coal is done under a regulatory regime and there is filtering equipment. However, if you are in a home, people use low-tech stoves and cheap coal. This is absolutely choking.

Indoor air pollution is not something that may be typically associated with industrial Europe.

Scientists have stopped using the terms “indoor and outdoor pollution” because they are totally intertwined. Now it is referred to as ambient and household. In India for example, indoor pollution lends itself more to cooking than heating. People burn wood and cow dung for heat because they don’t have gas or electricity. This is now thought to account for 25% overall outdoor ambient air quality problem. Wood burning is still a major contributor to air pollution in developed countries including the US and Europe. Log burning stoves are really trendy and people buy them thinking they are more eco-friendly. This is a catastrophic mistake as the health effects are terrible. A wood fire seems cozy and safe to people, unlike coal, but it is really full of harmful toxins. 

@TedxLondon asks – what is the most surprising approach to dealing with pollution you came across while doing your research? 

The answers to air pollution are more boring as they are more technical, but they are non-boring in the sense that they are at the crux of our biggest political debates. This is referring to regulation. People discuss personal choice when it comes to air pollution, but learning from experience between China, Washington, and London – it is our governments who have the power to restrain polluting companies. It comes down to corporate power, money, and regulation.

Where are there interesting government regulations happening?

The US is a type of success story, specifically in Los Angeles, though it still has America’s worst air. It shows slow progress over several years of systematic, scientific regulation that cracks down on cars, trucks, and ships. Ships run on dirty fuel, and then trucks come in to collect the goods, which provides the backbone of our consumer economy. There are new innovations like plug in power at the dockside so ships do not need to run their engines when being loaded or un-loaded. These things make a difference, but fundamentally we need government power.

This brings us to the Clean Air Act. Can you discuss its impact?

The act is one of the most consequential laws in modern American history, though it may be under-celebrated. Trillions of dollars and millions of lives have been saved as a result of this act. The monetary benefits have been thirty or forty times the costs. The health benefits outweigh the costs by a great deal. When the EPA sets its standards, there is only one consideration – public health. It does not consider cost, but rather prioritizes public health over money and corporate profit.

How much of China’s activity affects global statistics around air pollution? 

It matters a lot. They serve as a poster example of air pollution, though there is a positive story here too. China has sent people over to LA to see how they achieved their clean up, and are now experiencing double digit declines in pollution levels which has immediate health benefits. They are rolling out the world’s largest investment in solar power, putting more money towards electric vehicles, and they are decreasing their coal consumption. China is so huge that they have these economies of scale that can move global markets. When China started manufacturing solar panels, this brought the cost down by 90%, meaning it is competitive with coal now. Very soon, we may see the cost of electric vehicles go down as well and move the technology forward faster.

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Shownotes by Lydia DeFelice

How Fear Distorts US Foreign Policy

The world has never been safer, wealthier or healthier. So why is it that our foreign policy is dominated by fear and inflated perceptions of threats that can harm us?

My guest today, Michael Cohen, and co-author Micah Zenko seek to answer that question in their new book Clear and Present Safety: The World Has Never Been Better and Why That Matters to Americans.  The book makes the convincing argument that fear mongering has distorted US foreign policy and distracted us from recognizing impressive gains in human development.

This is a very refreshing conversation. One trend that Cohen and Zenko identify an define is something they call the Threat-Industrial-Complex and we spend a good deal of time discussing how that serves to shape US foreign policy priorities.

If you have 20 minutes and want a good corrective on US foreign policy, have a listen.

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UN Correspondent Chat, With Carole Landry of AFP

Today’s episode is the second installment of the new series “UN Correspondent Chat.” As the name suggests, this series includes wide ranging conversations with in-house reporters at the United Nations who discuss what is driving the agenda at Turtle Bay.

On the line today is Carole Landry, a veteran UN Correspondent with Agence France Presse (AFP.)

We float between topics that have been buzzing around UN in recent weeks including: how Brexit will impact diplomacy at the UN; some of the latest geopolitical intrigue at the Security Council; the ongoing Commission on the Status of Women conference; how the Secretary General has lived up to his pledge to have greater gender parity among senior staff at the UN; the latest on North Korea and more!

This new series is a great way to take the pulse of the UN and learn what is driving the diplomatic agenda at United Nations Headquarters in New York.  If you have twenty minutes and want to learn what is buzzing in Turtle Bay, have a listen

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CNN’s Clarissa Ward Spent 36 Hours With the Taliban. This is What She Learned

I caught up with CNN’s Chief International Correspondent Clarissa Ward not long after she returned from reporting inside Taliban controlled territory in Afghanistan. She is one of the only western journalists to access Taliban territory to see what life is like under their control. She interviewed both civilians and Taliban officials and is on the Global Dispatches podcast to discuss her reporting.

We kick off discussing the story behind her story: that is, how an unprecedented reporting project like this can be carried out in a volatile security environment?  We also discuss how she and her team navigated gender dynamics inherent in a female journalist interviewing Taliban officials. We then talk through some of her key findings about how the Taliban have evolved over the last 17 years.

Her report comes at a vital time as the US and Taliban officials are negotiating face to face, and as Clarissa Ward explains, the fact of those ongoing negotiations helps provide some context for her reporting.

CNN aired her report in late February, titled 36 Hours With The Taliban. Listen to our conversation about her reporting from behind Taliban Lines.

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Follow Clarissa Ward on Twitter

Listen back to our 2016 conversation about life in Aleppo, Syria during the height of the siege.

Massive Protests in Haiti Spark a New Kind of Political Crisis

Thousands of Haitians have taken to the streets in anti-government protests that quickly turned violent. Several people have been killed and a great amount of property has been damaged in these protests.

Haiti, of course, is no stranger to political crisis. But this crisis feels different, according to veteran reporter Jacqueline Charles.

Jacqueline Charles is the Haiti Caribbean reporter for the Miami Herald and in this conversation she explains the origins of this new protest movement and how it may play out over the coming weeks.

As she explains, these protests began, in part, over allegations of corruption surrounding a Hugo Chavez-era Venezuelan oil subsidy program, known as Petro Carbibe. But what began as an anti-corruption protest movement has morphed into something much broader that now threatens to bring down the government of President Jovenel Moise.

This crisis in Haiti has potential to unleash great instability in a very fragile country, which could have big international implications. This conversation does a very good job of giving you the background and context you need to understand events as they unfold. If you have 25 minutes and want to learn what caused this crisis and how it may impact peace and stability in the region, have a listen.

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Zimbabwe is in the Midst of its Worst Crisis Since the Fall of Robert Mugabe

Zimbabwe was rocked by protests in mid-January in the most significant public display of dissatisfaction with the government of Emerson Mnangagwa.

Mnangagwa deposed longtime Zimbabwe ruler Robert Mugabe in a coup in November 2017. This past summer he further ensconced himself in power through an election in which he was declared the winner.

The proximate cause of these protests were a sudden increase in the price of fuel. The government’s response was exceedingly violent and repressive. Thousands of people are now languishing in jail.

On the line with me to explain what caused these protests and why the once promising rule of Emerson Mnangagwa is now looking more and more like a facsimile of the Mugabe era is Mako Muzenda.

Mako Muzenda is a freelance journalist from Zimbabwe who contributes to UN Dispatch. She is currently finishing her post graduate work at university in South Africa, which is where I caught up with her for this episode.

We kick off discussing the fuel tax hike that lead to these protests before having a longer conversation about the ups and downs of the Mnangagwa era in Zimbabwe.

If you have twenty minutes and want to learn the impact of these mass protests in Zimbabwe, have a listen

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United Nations Correspondent Chat: Margaret Besheer of Voice of America

Today’s episode is the launch of a new series: UN Correspondent Chatter.

From time to time I’ll check in with an in-house reporter at the United Nations headquarters in New York to discuss the latest news, buzz, and intrigues around Turtle Bay.

I’m pleased to launch this new series with Margaret Besheer of the Voice of America. She has covered the UN since 2008 and has a been a great source of news and insight to me over the years.

We cover a lot of ground in this conversation, including how the UN is responding to the situation in Venezuela; the significance of a breakthrough on Yemen in the Security Council; the implications of Palestine taking over as the chair of a key group of countries; what to expect from the US at the UN in the coming months; and whether or not other diplomatic breakthroughs may be possible on the horizon.

This is a lively conversation with a veteran UN correspondent who has her finger on the pulse of UN headquarters in New York. If you have 20 minutes and want to learn what will drive the agenda at the United Nations at the start of 2019, have a listen.

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