D. Parvaz

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D. Parvaz
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By D. Parvaz in Africa on May 14th, 2012
Shaaban al-Zurok, Taher Moftah and Nasser Omar Khalifa, waiting at the airport [D. Parvaz/Al Jazeera]

A fact of life in Libya is that things are resting on a fragile balance, and at any moment, the slightest nudge can tip things over into chaos.

The strike by the air traffic controllers pushed things firmly into chaos territory on Saturday night, with shouting matches that stretched from the check-in desks to boarding gates and beyond.

Booked on a flight to Benghazi, my fixer, Asaad, and I were told that our flight would be delayed by two hours. Then four and a half. We got a boarding pass for a 10:30pm flight and waited in the lounge, mostly with men with angry looks cemented on their faces.

“If they’d told us there was a strike, I would have made other arrangements – we have jobs to do,” said a man going only as Taher.

At 11:30 Asaad took a stroll and came back telling me that he’d been walking around on the tarmac.

By D. Parvaz in Africa on May 11th, 2012

TRIPOLI, Libya - That Muammar Gaddafi was killed in October is something that is well-known and celebrated by most here.

Tags: Libya
By D. Parvaz in Asia on March 11th, 2012
[D. Parvaz/ Al Jazeera]

In Iitate village, a farming community roughly 40km from the damaged Daiichi nuclear plant, volunteers have been heading out every week to sample soil from rice paddies in order to test the soil.

They want to gauge how badly it remains contaminated from the radioactive steam that shot out after explosions at three of the damaged plants. Here, the government has not yet started any sort of decontamination effort, and the local community - which has been evacuated into temporary housing - has become frustrated and is taking matters into its own hands.

We headed out in the snowy, idyllic - and evacuated - village with a team lead by Hiroshi Iwase, an expert in the field of the medical applications of radiation and currently an assistant professor in radiation protection at the High Energy Institute.

By D. Parvaz in Asia on March 8th, 2012
[D. Parvaz/Al Jazeera]

KESENNUMA, Japan - Those who go to visit the giant fishing vessel dumped inland by the tsunami in the coastal town of Kesennuma, where over 1,000 perished, might find 80-year-old Noriko Kanashi holding court in front of it.

She talks to teenage boys, tourists and journalists alike about what having this ship parked in the middle of a disaster zone means to people who lost so much, in an instant, last year after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake triggered a major tsunami.

The sense of loss has been hard to fight in a community dotted with dozens of emergency shelters and a colossal mess, where there was once a thriving fishing industry.

By D. Parvaz in Middle East on October 21st, 2011
[Photo by D. Parvaz/Al Jazeera]

CAIRO, Egypt - There's virtually nothing on the streets of the country's capital that might give you an indication that Egypt is just weeks away from its parliamentary election - the first one since former president Hosni Mubarak's ousting.

By D. Parvaz in Middle East on October 4th, 2011
Reuters photo

Amnesty International has just released a report on how Syrian security forces are targeting expat Syrians who have spoken out against the Syrian government, in hopes of silencing them.

The report, titled "Mukhabaraat: Violence and harassment against Syrians abroad and their relatives back home" details just how far reaching the tentacles of the regime are.

Even the parents of expat activists aren't spared. The report details how the parents of one activist [his father is 73 years old, his mother 66] were beaten, left bloody and bruised in Homs because he attended a pro-reform demonstration in front of the White House.

The rights group details the Mukhabarat's activities in North America, Europe and Latin America, documenting over 30 cases of expats being targeted by Syrian security forces, who employ surveillance and open threats in an effort to maintain control over anti-government activists living overseas:

By D. Parvaz in Asia on September 12th, 2011
Iwamura oversees a simulation experiment for his soil-decontamination system [D.Parvaz/Al Jazeera]

FUKUSHIMA PREFECTURE – Nestled among the rice paddies and country roads is a workshop where engineers work with a singular focus on a vital project: A process to decontaminate soil from radiation leaking from the Daiichi nuclear power plant roughly 50km away.

There, a large, blue, monster of a machine carries out a four-part process to decontaminate soil, isolating the Caesium-137 particles spewing from the plant, which has been experiencing a meltdown since the March 11 earthquake.

Heading up the project is engineer/inventor Junichi Iwamura, who until the earthquake six month ago, was a professor of business management at Kinki University in Osaka.

Within days after the earthquake and tsunami, it became c

By D. Parvaz in Asia on September 11th, 2011
Campaign posters for local elections are up in the wasteland that was Rikzentakata's waterfront [D. Parvaz/Al Jazeera]

 

After an earthquake and tsunami that left around 20,000 dead or missing, Japan, the world's third-largest economy, is still reeling from the blow. 

Tourism is down, the fishing industry battered and, on top of it all, there's the issue of a nuclear meltdown at the damaged Daiichi plant in Fukushima - and the energy shortage that accompanies it - to contend with.

Tags: Japan
By D. Parvaz in Middle East on April 16th, 2011
Screenshot from al-Arabiya

There are reports of violence in the western city of Ahvaz in Iran's Khuzestan province, where according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, 15 people have been killed and dozens have been injured and detained.

Al-Arabiya TV also has a brief report.

Friday's crackdowns by Iranian security forces came during a protest (dubbed the "Ahvaz Day of Rage") meant to mark incidents that took place in Ahvaz in 2005, when the ethnic Arab population staged rallies against the Iranian government over what they said were systematic injustices and discrimination.

On the April 15, 2005 protest, 360 people were reported to have been arrested.

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By D. Parvaz in Asia on March 29th, 2011
Photo by D. Parvaz

In doing a story on what happened to three towns along Japan's north east coast - each of them hit by the tsunami, but with massive differences in losses and casualties - I decided to put together a slideshow of what Ofunato and Yoshihama looked like after the March 11 disaster. 

(Photos of the hardest hit town or Rikuzentakata are embedded in the original piece)

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