This Week: Modern Slavery In Italy

Canned Tomatoes Picked by Slave Labor

Tobias Jones and Ayo Awokoya

With Italy serving as a gateway to Europe for hundreds of thousands of migrants, the country now has a surplus of largely undocumented agricultural laborers who have been exploited as virtual slaves by Italian organized crime networks. Reporting in a Pulitzer Center-supported story for The Guardian, Ayo Awokoya and Tobias Jones investigate the dangerous living conditions of migrant farm workers who have no means of escaping to a better life. “In the Italian south, the lives of foreign agricultural laborers are so cheap that many NGOs have described their conditions as a modern form of slavery,” they write.

Mining For Gold in The World's Highest Permanent Human Settlement

James Whitlow Delano and Kenneth Dickerman

La Rinconada, Peru, is the world’s highest permanent human settlement—and home to an exploding environmental crisis. In a stunning collection of Pulitzer Center-supported photographs featured in The Washington Post, James Whitlow Delano documents the dangerous overlap of climate change and pollution in his reporting on artisanal gold mining and a fast-melting glacier.

Crimea Reckons With Russian Annexation

Hannah Lucinda Smith

Many of Crimea’s ethnic Russians welcomed the region’s annexation by Russia in 2014, but five years later, a poor economy and a crackdown on political dissent have left some Crimeans dissatisfied. Writing in a Pulitzer Center-supported story for The Atlantic, Hannah Lucinda Smith interviewed Sergey Akimov, a Cossack activist who once supported the annexation, but now is one of its staunchest opponents. Putin “plays hockey while the forests are burning,” Akimov told Smith, “But people believe it. They can’t imagine what they would do without him.”