Greenland

Just about everything you need to know about Greenland is in these two pictures. Everything else can be learned by reading my "Greenland Dispatch."

Sonny Landham Is Insane

Porn star turned Predator co-star turned right-wing whack-job Sonny Landham has announced that he will challenge Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for his Senate seat, running as a Libertarian. A couple of years ago I interviewed Landham for the Southern Poverty Law Center; he sounded both drunk and insane. The piece is here: Landham.pdf

Azerbaijan

This is the skyline of Baku as seen through the trash-fire haze of the outer Balakhani oil fields. The oil fields are mostly used up, but a few pumps continue to operate amidst the ghost derricks and the burning dump. Baku is regularly rated the most polluted city in the world. This old woman is standing on a side street in Sumgayit, the former hub of Azeri chemicals production. One of the main tourist draws here is a Baby Cemetery honoring those who died in infancy as a result of Soviet pollution, which was of a magnitude worse than it is even today. My article about oil and human rights in Azerbaijan is here.

2008 New Hampshire Primary

This little girl turned around and looked at me right as I was focusing a shot on Obama from across the distance of an airplane hanger. I have no idea how or why she settled on my camera among all the others. The next day I attended a Mike Huckabee rally starring Chuck Norris, which I wrote about here.

Lyovikha, Southern Urals

These four kids live in the crumbling mining ghost-settlement of Lyovikha, about an hour outside the southern Urals city of Nizhny Tagil. Constructed in the 1920s to house miners who plied the Urals of iron ore, today Lyovikha is a hellhole of 80-plus percent unemployment, fetus-warping alcoholism, and recreational violence. I visited the town while reporting a story on Lyovikha's most famous son: Eddie Chudinov, the ringleader of a pimp gang responsible for the deaths of dozens of area teenage girls. Though many of these girls were found in the forest bordering Lyovikha, residents like Oleg Masgalin (second from left) just shrugged it off. "There's a lot of violence here," he said. "Most people have never been sober in their lives. Come back at night and see how this place turns to Hell." The story is here.