Brent Renaud, US Journalist, Shot Dead In Ukraine

Under the Geneva Conventions, journalists working in conflict zones are regarded as civilians, meaning targeted attacks against them constitute war crimes. Earlier this month, a team of journalists with Britain’s Sky News came under a suspected Russian ambush despite repeatedly identifying themselves. Correspondent Stuart Ramsay was shot and wounded, and the crew was subsequently evacuated to the UK.

Carlos Martinez de la Serna, program director with the Committee to Protect Journalists, on Sunday condemned Renaud’s killing and called for the perpetrators to be brought to justice.

“We are shocked and saddened to learn of the death of US journalist Brent Renaud in Ukraine. This kind of attack is totally unacceptable, and is a violation of international law,” Martinez de la Serna said in a statement. “Russian forces in Ukraine must stop all violence against journalists and other civilians at once, and whoever killed Renaud should be held to account.”

In 2015, Renaud and his brother, Craig, won a Peabody Award for their Vice News documentary Last Chance Highwhich was praised for its “uncompromising look at school violence and its compassionate depiction” of troubled public school students with severe emotional disorders.

Renaud, who was from Little Rock, Arkansas, was also made a Nieman Fellow in 2019 by Harvard University. Ann Marie Lipinski, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, said the Nieman community was heartsick to learn of his death. “Our Nieman Fellow Brent Renaud was gifted and kind, and his work was infused with humanity,” she wrote on Twitter

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Pakistan Flooding Videos Show Buildings Being Washed Away

These are the devastating effects that Pakistan’s floods are wreaking on the country.

Dubbed “the monster monsoon of the decade” by Pakistan’s climate change minister Sherry Rehman, torrential rain in the region has killed at least 982 people since June, according to the National Disaster Management Authority.

Every 24 hours, the agency lists hundreds of men, women, and children who have been injured or killed because of collapsed roofs, flash floods, or drowning.

“Pakistan is living through a serious climate catastrophe, one of the hardest in the decade,” Rehman said in a Twitter video. “We are, at the moment, at the ground zero of the frontline of extreme weather events in an unrelenting cascade of heat waves, forest fires, flash floods, multiple glacial lake outbursts, flood events, and now the monster monsoon of the decade is wreaking havoc nonstop throughout the country.”

The unprecedented deluge — worse than Pakistan’s 2010 “superflood,” which affected 20 million people — has overwhelmed the country’s resources, prompting leaders to urge the international community to help with relief efforts.

One of the hardest-hit provinces, Sindh, has requested 1 million tents for its displaced residents, Rehman told Reuters. But there aren’t enough tents, and people are seeking refuge in makeshift shelters in school buildings and mosques, she said.

The streets are filled with stagnant sewage water, and the risk of waterborne diseases is high.

“This is clearly the climate crisis of the decade,” Rehman said. “Through no fault of our own,” she added, noting that Pakistan

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Ukraine’s Nuclear Reactors Are Now War Zones

Every nuclear reactor is a balancing act, where fuel rods are carefully preserved just close enough together to generate the heat needed to generate electricity, while being continually monitored to prevent overheating, which would melt the fuel. This requires continuous cooling and a highly trained staff. The reactors themselves are covered with a steel shell and a heavy layer of concrete, expressly designed to withstand projectiles and plane crashes, and meant to contain the heat of the fuel melting down in a disaster. The Chornobyl reactors lacked this level of protection, which led to the open-air release of radioactive material.

Ukraine has four operational nuclear facilities, including Zaporizhzhia, according to the IAEA’s Power Reactor Information System database. According to Joshua Pollack of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, there are at least two worrying scenarios that concern experts about nuclear power plants becoming engulfed in war zones:

• While reactors are very tough, their pools, containing used-but-still-hot fuel rods, aren’t. If a cooling pond is damaged and stops working, the water eventually boils off, and these fuel rods will catch on fire, spewing radioactive particles skyward. This was a major concern in the Fukushima disaster.

• If a reactor shuts down, loses access to outside power, and then loses its backup power, the coolant inside the reactor itself stops flowing. Shortly later, the fuel catches on fire inside the reactor and releases hydrogen gas. “As we learned in Fukushima, this is quite dangerous,” Pollack said. In that disaster,

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