Pulitzer Center Updates

KIRA ZALAN The chatter of 16 women rang through a typical hotel conference room, almost drowning out Mekka Abdelgabar’s call to end the ongoing exercise. For the past hour, using a speed-dating...

Nikita Sampath In Koyra number 6, a coastal hamlet bordering the Sundarbans in southwestern Bangladesh, a group of men unload barrels of water from their trawlers—50 drums holding 30 liters each...

CASSANDRA VINOGRAD BENTIU, South Sudan — For five months, Nyabany and her five children had avoided the gunfire. But they were dying all the same. Read more on Pulitzer Center

MARTIN FLETCHER Stripped of their land and forced to watch their house torched, Kent-born Ben Freeth and his family have seen first-hand the violence and unpredictability of Zimbabwe’s authoritarian...

EMILY BAUMGAERTNER KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of the Congo—In the doorway of a one-room yellow fever ward in downtown Kinshasa, a toddler named Julia is slung over her mother’s shoulder. Moments...

EMILY BAUMGAERTNER In January 2016, I spent four hours on a Wednesday afternoon wondering if maybe I had Ebola. I was a week into a reporting trip in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and that morning, I had...

By Michael Holtz, Staff writer KATHMANDU, NEPAL — This story was designed to be read on the Monitor's long-form platform. Click here for that version. On a cool spring day last year, Dorje Lama was...

JULIA BARTON Captured Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko came home to a hero’s welcome May 25 after a prisoner exchange with Russia. But more than two years after Russia’s annexation of the Crimean...

MATT KENNARD AND CLAIRE PROVOST The Grand Cunard Building in Liverpool sits on the edge of the River Mersey and the port city’s historic docklands. It was here that the city was propelled to...

ROBIN SHULMAN TORONTO — Amir Al Jabouli leads the way, holding his Samsung phone out into the snowfall with his bare right hand. The instructions the speakerphone emits are barely audible in the whir...

CHAKHAM, Nepal - It is the first time Nawang Tsultrim has harbored any sense of hope in a year. "They will begin to build my house tomorrow," she says cheerfully, picking through a pile of rubble...

JANE QIU Kodari is a ghost town on an empty Nepalese highway that cuts through some of the steepest slopes of the Himalayas. One year after the magnitude-7.8 Gorkha earthquake killed nearly 9,000...

LESLIE ROBERTS PAILIN, Cambodia—No one knows exactly why resistance to malaria drugs always emerges first in this remote western province of Cambodia, nestled in the Cardamom Mountains. “The reasons...

ANA P. SANTOS MANILA, Philippines – When the Philippines passed the HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Act in 1998, it was celebrated as a pioneering law that primarily aimed to protect the rights of...

ARIEL ZIRULNICK MANDERA and GARISSA, Kenya — Teaching finally resumed last week at Garissa University, the northeast Kenyan college where al-Shabab killed 148 people last April. The attack by the al...

Jason Motlagh Maryam was strolling to her family’s farm in the rocky hills behind the northeastern Nigerian town of Gwoza when two Boko Haram fighters blocked her path. The insurgents had overrun the...

ARIEL ZIRULNICK MANDERA, Kenya — A growing number of Kenya’s ethnic Somalis have vanished or turned up dead after being detained amid a crackdown by security forces on Islamist extremists. Read the...

JAE LEE Francis Kyakulaga, a district sanitation manager, and I had finished eating a meal at the ground floor restaurant of the Mwaana Hotel on the Trans-African Highway in Uganda. During the meal,...

MELLISSA FUNG Munawar is the name she wants me to use: it’s not her real one because she’s afraid her in-laws will try to find her. Her story begins far from the safety of the women’s shelter where I...

JENNIFER KOONS A middle-aged man passes a 12-year-old on the street. He stops her, tells her she’s beautiful and says he wants to make her his wife. The girl lowers her eyes in deference but shakes...