This Week in Review: Grabbing Gold

<strong>This Week</strong>
<strong>Grabbing Gold<strong><br>
From Eastern Europe to South America, soaring gold prices have triggered a global gold rush. Industrial mining companies—quite a few of them based in Canada—are muscling aside small local operations and laying waste to large swaths of previously pristine countryside. It is an under-reported crisis that has been on the Pulitzer Center's radar for more than a year, and it now seems to be gaining some media traction.<br>
In a front-page story for the International Herald Tribune, Dimiter Kenarov writes about a small corner of Bulgaria where residents are worried that plans by a Canadian company and its Bulgarian subsidiary to start up a <a href="/reporting/bulgaria-government-gold-mine-water-sanitation-economy"> large-scale mining operation</a> will destroy their traditional way of life. The mining company says there is nothing to fear, but history suggests otherwise.<br>
Nadja Drost picks up the story in South America, visiting La Toma, Colombia, where a determined group of Afro-Colombian women are fighting to hold on to the <a href="/reporting/colombia-women-goldrush-mining-econom">gold-rich </a> land that has sustained their community for centuries. Nadja's report is available on PBS's Women War &amp; Peace website.<br>
<strong>The Kurds and the Quake</strong><br>
Jenna Krajeski recently reported from southeastern Turkey on a group of Kurdish children—now young adults—who were released from prison after receiving harsh sentences for minor offenses. She follows up with a report on the <a href="/reporting/turkey-kurdish-earthquake-aid-politics">political fallout</a> from the earthquake that struck the Kurdish area late last month. Writing for The New Yorker, Jenna notes that the quake's devastation produced a few heartening moments of ethnic solidarity, but that the deep fissures in Turkish society are probably earthquake resistant.<br>
FotoWeek DC, which begins today, features the work of several Pulitzer Center grantees. In addition to the <a href="/blog/pulitzer-center-fotoweek-dc-journalism">panels and discussions</a> listed on the right, several of our photojournalists will next week visit nearly two dozen schools in the Washington, DC area as part of our educational outreach initiative.<br>
Until next week,<br>
Tom Hundley
Senior Editor
[email protected]</strong></strong>