IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT in the Maltese search-and-rescue zone of the Mediterranean when a rubber boat originating from Libya carrying dozens of migrants encountered a hulking cargo ship from Madeira and a European military aircraft. The ship’s captain stopped the engines, and the aircraft flashed its lights at the rubber boat. But neither the ship nor the aircraft came to the rescue. Instead, Maltese authorities told the ship’s captain to wait for vessels from Malta to pick up the migrants. By the time those boats arrived, three migrants had drowned trying to swim to the idle ship.
Read the rest of this feature at IEEE Spectrum: [html] [pdf].
Tag Archives: Featured
¡Aguas, CDMX!
This is my first piece of data visualization journalism in a long time. It was fun to work with the editors and illustrator to bring it together. It’s also great to cover a topic near to my heart and the part of my family that live in Mexico City. Someday I’d like to report more on the social side of Mexico’s water situation.
Meantime, I recommend checking out the print edition of Technology Review [pdf] to see the spread but there is also an online version for subscribers.
Franco’s Disappeared
People are just now, in 2018, recovering the remains of family members lost after the Spanish Civil War, almost eighty years ago…
This 28-minute radio documentary, produced by Overtone Productions, and which I reported and presented, first aired on BBC Radio 4 on March 18th, 2019: [streaming link].
It is the first of a two-part documentary called Spain’s Lost Generations. The second part, airing March 25th, focuses on Spain’s stolen babies.
See also my related 2016 feature for SAPIENS: [html].
Saving Mexico’s most totemic chilli
A plague of whiteflies descended on the Martínez family’s fields of yellow, red, and deep purple chilhuacle in southern Mexico two decades ago. Chilhuacle is the star chilli in several versions of Oaxaca’s signature dish – mole – and cooks had long paid a premium for the chilli’s unique smoke and citrus flavours. But its cost was about to climb higher.
The Martínez family and the few other growers lost much of their chilhuacle crops in 1997. That year marked the start of a slow decline in chilhuacle production. Despite the chilli’s high market price, many growers stopped planting it. Continue reading Saving Mexico’s most totemic chilli