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Victor Logan, "Stinga" displays an award recognizing his efforts to uphold the 1995 gang truce and to better himself through the Conscious Youth Development Program. It reads: CYDP 2nd Aniversary of the Bird’s Isle Declaration recognizes Victor Logan for resolving to change in spite of the odds. February 16, 1997. Photo by Donna DeCesare

Struggling to Change in Spite of the Odds

Belize City, Belize–”Stinga,” is a Conscious Youth success story. The former head of the Black Scorpion Posse, BSP, is one of the original gang leaders, who signed a historic truce halting gun battles on Belize City streets. Stinga surveys his muddy surroundings before

Donna DeCesare August 31, 1999
In Baku, Azerbaijan, the oil industry is the ball and chain of the city’s environment.

Letter from Baku, Azerbaijan

On the farthest eastern reaches of Europe lies the Caspian Sea, a milky green land-locked sea that hides many treasures. In Baku, Azerbaijan, the oil industry is the ball and chain of the city’s environment. Traveling in the Caucasus is quite dangerous, especially

Stanley Greene August 31, 1999
Homeless children in Nogales, Sonora, learn to read and write in a classroom at Mi Nueva Casa. Their teacher is Gloria Judith Rodriguez. Photo by Jeffry D. Scott

Nogales Plans to Rescue Children from Border Underworld

Veronica was ten years old when she first went into the tunnels. She insists she wasn’t thrown out of her house or abandoned like many of the other kids who lived with her in the miles of concrete storm channels that run beneath

Miriam Davidson August 31, 1999
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Selling Seniors on HMO’s

WHEATON, Md.—On a muggy August morning at Hot Shoppes cafeteria, salesman Matt Buckley tells a group of retirees over coffee that Medicare is changing and they must adapt. The seniors seem worried by the prospect. Yet they know Medicare, the U.S. government’s $211-billion-a-year,

Fred Schulte December 6, 1998
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Doom Thy Neighbor: After Hiroshima and Nagasaki… Lahore and Bombay?

Note: The pictures for this story are copyrighted and not available for web publication.   Islamabad—-In the coded signal sent to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to announce India’s recent nuclear detonations, Indian scientists invoked the name of Shakti, a Hindu goddess. “Shakti

Lawrence Lifschuitz December 6, 1998
Darryll Vann is in a shrinking minority group--African-American men who teach youngsters. Only 11 percent of elementary school teachers are male and a much smaller percentage of them are African-American. Photo by David Snider

True Heroes

Of the 27 faculty members teaching 549 minority students at Garrison Elementary School in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington D.C., two are black males. Darryll Vann has 26 boys and girls in his kindergarten class, Hassan Abdullah 21 in his first-grade class. Darryll

Colman McCarthy December 6, 1998
Organizer Juan Carlos Molina, of the Workplace Project, shared with domestic workers some history of workers’ cooperatives worldwide, as the women began meeting recently to consider setting up their own co-op. Photo by Jerrilyn Hedrington

Maids

Shahida Ahmed fled Bangladesh for the United States four years ago, horrified that whoever planted a bomb to blow apart her husband’s body would come next for her. With no hope of going home again, she is awaiting a decision on her request

Katti Gray December 5, 1998
Lionel “Rusty” Bernstein, as shown in a police mug shot taken in the evening of his arrest during the Rovinia raid. Photo courtesy of the South Africa History Archives, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Messages from Underground

We had just finished our first cup of tea, when Hilda Bernstein rose and left the kitchen. Several minutes passed. Hilda was eighty-one years old and had acquired an artificial hip not long ago, and she negotiated the staircase of the small townhouse

Glenn Frankel December 5, 1998
Ida Tarbell

Ida Tarbell: A Reporter’s Life

Obviously intelligent and a fast learner, the 23-year-old Ida M. Tarbell quickly expanded her job description after beginning her journalism career on The Chautauquan magazine during 1880. As a result, she received a broad education on all manner of topics. Ida Tarbell She

Steve Weinberg December 5, 1998
A woman walks on the U.S. side of the border as smoke pours over the wall from Nogales, Sonora. The smoke smelled of burning plastic. Photos by Jeffry D. Scott

Bridging Troubled Waters in Ambos Nogales

In the hillside shantytowns of Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, people get drinking water from trucks and store it in barrels salvaged from the dump or nearby factories. They have no choice. The city’s crumbling, 50-year-old water distribution system doesn’t extend to where they live.

Miriam Davidson December 5, 1998
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Benazir Bhutto: Comeback Kid?

Note: The pictures for this story are copyrighted and not available for web publication. Benazir Bhutto, world-class political pugilist, is refusing to go down for the count. For over a year now, this twice-elected, twice-deposed ex-prime minister of Pakistan, has seemed to be

Emily MacFarquhar December 5, 1998
Sonia, a young Los Angeles girt, wears a memorial T-shirt from her brother Ulises’ gang funeral. A local Mara Salvatrucha gang member raises the lid of the coffin he was sanding to strike a pose of respect to the memory of his dead homeboy. Photo by APF Fellow Donna Decesare

Avenging Angels: Homegirl Survival Stories

Text and photos by Donna DeCesare “The weak one is the one society thinks is good, but that’s the one that is going to end up dead.” –Angel, Latina gang member “Trippy” from Mara Salvatrucha getting a new tattoo. Photo by APF Fellow

Donna DeCesare December 5, 1998
A photo taken by Discovery astronauts in 1991 shows the thick haze over the central Andes in Bolivia. The pollution is caused by the extensive dry seasonal burning in the Amazon basin. The hase is trapped in the lower atmosphere by a stable layer of air. The forests are being burned, in many cases, for coca production. AP/Wide World Photo.

Coca Fields: Better than Devastation?

Ichoa, Bolivia – The yap of a toucan sounded from a treetop near the Ichoa ranger post in Bolivia’s Isiboro-Secure National Park. From the cabin’s porch, park director Hans Rocha picked out the bird’s long-billed silhouette, framed against the foothills of the Andes,

Corinne Schmidt November 16, 1998
Jose Santos (left) and Salvador Valdez (right) in a Hidalgo jail this spring. These traveling stamp salesmen were falsely accused of kidnaping in rural Mexico. Photo by Jorge Muedano

Lynching in Huejutla

Looking back, people say they didn’t much notice the two men – one fat and one thin – lurching along the unpaved roads in their gray 1980 Chevrolet pickup early on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 24. Like most days in Huejutla, Hidalgo

Sam Quinones October 28, 1998
The Lessons of Ida Tarbell

The Lessons of Ida Tarbell 2

When Ida Tarbell left home in 1876 to attend Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa., she was doing more than advancing the independence of women during an era when most were denied higher education. Tarbell was also preparing herself, unwittingly, to produce the most

Steve Weinberg April 25, 1998
A portable sign warns motorists that they are approaching a Border Patrol checkpoint on Interstate 19 in southern Arizona.

Border Patrol Catches Flak at Arizona Checkpoint

Photos by Jeffry Scott A spring shower has just ended, and as the sun sets over southern Arizona, five United States Border Patrol agents work quickly to reopen a traffic checkpoint on the main highway north from Nogales. The checkpoint, which is taken

Miriam Davidson April 24, 1998
Against the backdrop of war ruins, a young widow — one of the thousands in Abkhazia — waits for a bus in Sukhumi, the capital of the self-proclaimed republic. With public transport scarce, the wait can stretch to an hour. Much of the city center, once lined with palms and oleander, now lies in rubble. Although the fighting ended four years ago, thanks to the post-war economic free-fall, few of the many ruined buildings have been restored.

Report from Abkhazia

By Andrew Meier with photos by Mia Foster SUKHUMI — One afternoon not long ago in the beleaguered capital of Abkhazia, a tiny self-proclaimed republic on the Black Sea, its reigning satrap, Vladislav Ardzinba, paced his spartan office, nervously awaiting a call from

Andrew Meier April 24, 1998
Douge Cook

Are Regulators Being Bought Off by the HMO Money Machines?

Florida health czar Doug Cook said he was “sick for a week” after he learned two of his HMO regulators had accepted more than $90,000 in consulting fees from two Medicaid health plans. “Common sense would indicate this is extremely improper,” said Cook,

Fred Schulte April 24, 1998
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The United States, Libya and the Liberian Civil War

Note: The pictures published with this story are copyrighted and not available for reproduction.    MONROVIA, Liberia — The Liberian civil war strikes many Westerners as a incomprehensible jumble of tribes, feuding warlords and senseless mayhem. How else can one describe what began

Kenneth Noble April 24, 1998