This weekend marks the 15-year anniversary of the Los Angeles riots, also called the Rodney King riots, named for the man whose brutal beating by Los Angeles police officers was caught on tape. When three of the four police officers were acquitted, lootings, fires, and beatings went on for days in and around South Central Los Angeles and nearby Koreatown, leaving at least 55 people dead, thousands injured, livelihoods lost, and a community damaged.
The nightmare of Chernobyl continues to be a painful reality for those exposed to its radioactive fallout. In Chernobyl Legacy, Paul Fusco faces the human tragedy of the world's worst nuclear energy disaster.
Point and Shoot
by Philip Jones Griffiths
Throughout his long career, Phillip Jones Griffiths has poignantly documented violent conflict with unabashed honesty and disdain for its consequences. "I’ve covered many wars and seen what bullets do to flesh and I’m rather proud to say that I got all that macho stuff out of my system in my youth."
April 27 is Arbor Day. In a sequence of images that takes us on a journey through five continents, Franklin explores trees, that organic entity most adored, contemplated, used, protected, destroyed, and worked by man, and invites us to reflect upon the complex relationship between humans and the environment.
This week in 1986, the world’s worst nuclear explosion took place at the Chernobyl nuclear power station. After an attempted Soviet coverup, residents were evacuated, though thousands remained. The disaster caused toxic radiation to drift into the atmosphere of surrounding areas and to Europe, contaminating millions of acres of forest, endangering livestock, and causing 32 immediate deaths and several thousand radiation-illness and cancer-related deaths later. The last reactor unit of the power station was closed in 2000. Magnum and Slate present the people of the areas surrounding the plant, with special attention paid to the young.