George Polk Awards honor reporting on conflicts in Israel, Sudan, Ukraine and Haiti
Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti of The New York Times Magazine won the Foreign Reporting prize for exposing how Israel condoned and shaped government policy in favor of ultranationalist settlers who terrorized Palestinians in the West Bank.
Declan Walsh and his colleagues at The New York Times won the War Reporting prize for coverage of the civil war in Sudan. The United Arab Emirates paused some of its operations in the war-ravaged nation after Walsh reported that it and other countries were playing a secret role in the conflict in an effort to obtain resources and power.
Sarah A. Topol of The New York Times Magazine received the Sydney Schanberg Prize for long-form investigative or enterprise journalism for 'The Deserter,' a 35,000-word portrait of a combat officer who defected from the Russian military after the invasion of Ukraine.
'Haiti in Crisis' series, which documented how gang violence had upended daily life in the Caribbean nation's capital, Port-au-Prince.
Biggs is a grand niece of the awards' namesake, George Polk, a CBS reporter who was killed while covering the Greek civil war. The awards, presented by Long Island University, were created in 1949 in his honor.
This year, 15 winners were selected from nearly 500 submissions. Winners will be celebrated at a luncheon ceremony April 4 in Manhattan.
'Given the range and depth of exceptional reporting before us, winnowing the list to these 15 meant making some very hard calls,' Polk Awards curator John Darnton said. 'These winners represent the best of the best. The runners-up were all worthy.'
Other winners included: Alissa Zhu, Nick Thieme and Jessica Gallagher of The Baltimore Banner for Local Reporting for revealing the breadth and impact of a lethal overdose crisis; Sara DiNatale of the San Antonio Express-News for State Reporting for exposing solar energy scams that targeted elderly homeowners; and Katherine Eban of Vanity Fair for National Reporting for showing how politics and economic interests hampered the government's response to bird flu.
The Justice Reporting prize went to Katey Rusch and Casey Smith, whose 'Right to Remain Secret' series in the San Francisco Chronicle exposed how police officers arranged to clear their records of misconduct allegations, enabling them to collect hefty pensions.
The Health Care Reporting prize went to a team from STAT for a six-part series on UnitedHealth Group's influence on all aspects of health care. The Medical Reporting prize went to a team from ProPublica for exposing how strict abortion bans led to preventable deaths of pregnant women. The Technology Reporting prize went to Bloomberg Businessweek for stories revealing how sexual predators and drug dealers use online gaming and social media platforms to exploit children.
Two magazine writers were honored for exposes. Jane Mayer of The New Yorker received the Political Reporting prize for 'Pete Hegseth's Secret History,' chronicling the Defense Secretary's troubled past. Rachel Aviv of The New Yorker received the Magazine Reporting prize for 'Alice Munro's Passive Voice,' detailing the late novelist's dismissive reaction to allegations that a romantic partner had sexually abused her daughter.
A team from NBC News and Noticias Telemundo, including the late Susan Carroll, was awarded the National Television Reporting prize for exposing how a Texas medical school was dismembering corpses of people who died alone and leasing the body parts for research and education.
The Podcast prize went to Ben Austen and Bill Healy for Audible's 'The Parole Room,' which tracks a man's 20th attempt to win his release from prison, more than a half-century after he was convicted of killing two Chicago police officers — a crime he maintains he did not commit.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Hill
8 minutes ago
- The Hill
Sexual violence in conflicts worldwide increased by 25% last year, UN says
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Sexual violence in conflicts worldwide increased by 25% last year, with the highest number of cases in the Central African Republic, Congo, Haiti, Somalia and South Sudan, according to a U.N. report released Thursday. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres' annual report said more than 4,600 people survived sexual violence in 2024, with armed groups carrying out the majority of the abuse but some by government forces. He stressed that the U.N.-verified figures don't reflect the global scale and prevalence of these crimes. The report's blacklist names 63 government and non-government parties in a dozen countries suspected of committing or being responsible for rape and other forms of sexual violence in conflict, including Hamas militants, whose attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, sparked the war in Gaza. Over 70% of those listed have appeared on the report's blacklist annex for five years or more without creating steps to prevent the violence, the U.N. chief said. U.N. warns Israel and Russia about allegations For the first time, the report includes two parties that have been notified the U.N. has 'credible information' that could put them on next year's blacklist if they don't take preventive actions: Israel's military and security forces over allegations of sexual abuse of Palestinians primarily in prisons and detention, and Russian forces and affiliated armed groups against Ukrainian prisoners of war. Israeli U.N. Ambassador Danny Danon, who circulated a letter Tuesday from Guterres about the country's forces being put on notice, said the allegations 'are steeped in biased publications.' 'The U.N. must focus on the shocking war crimes and sexual violence of Hamas and the release of all hostages,' he said. Russia's U.N. mission said it had no comment on the secretary-general's warning. The 34-page report said 'conflict-related sexual violence' refers to rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced pregnancy, forced abortion, forced sterilization, forced marriage and other forms of sexual violence. The majority of victims are women and girls. 'In 2024, proliferating and escalating conflicts were marked by widespread conflict-related sexual violence, amid record levels of displacement and increased militarization,' Guterres said. 'Sexual violence continued to be used as a tactic of war, torture, terrorism and political repression, while multiple and overlapping political, security and humanitarian crises deepened.' The toll of sexual violence in conflict The U.N. says women and girls were attacked in their homes, on roads and while trying to earn a living, with victims ranging in age from 1 to 75. Reports of summary executions of victims after rape persisted in Congo and Myanmar, it said. In an increasing number of places, the report said armed groups 'used sexual violence as a tactic to gain and consolidate control over territory and lucrative natural resources.' Women and girls perceived to be associated with rival armed groups were targeted with sexual violence in the Central African Republic, Congo and Haiti, it said. In detention facilities, the report said sexual violence was perpetrated 'including as a form of torture,' reportedly in Israel and the Palestinian territories, Libya, Myanmar, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen. 'Most of the reported incidents against men and boys occurred in detention, consistent with previous years, and included rape, threats of rape and the electrocution and beating of genitals,' the report said. U.N. report details where abuse is occurring The U.N. peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic documented cases of rape, gang rape, forced marriage and sexual slavery affecting 215 women, 191 girls and seven men. In mineral-rich eastern Congo, the peacekeeping mission documented nearly 800 cases last year, including rape, gang rape, sexual slavery and forced marriage, 'often accompanied by extreme physical violence,' the report said. The number of cases involving the M23 rebel group, now controlling the main city Goma, rose from 43 in 2022 to 152 in 2024, it said. In Sudan, where civil war is raging, the report said that groups providing services to victims of sexual violence recorded 221 rape cases against 147 girls and 74 boys since the beginning of 2024, 'with 16% of survivors under five years of age, including four one-year-olds.'
Boston Globe
38 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
With arson and land grabs, Israeli settler attacks in West Bank hit record high
'Before the war, they harassed us, but not like this,' said Muhammad Sabr Asalaya, 56, the junkyard owner. 'Now they're trying to expel as many people as they can and annex as much land as they can.' Such attacks were on the rise before Hamas led a deadly raid on Israel in 2023, setting off the war in Gaza, and they have since become the new normal across much of the West Bank. With the world's attention on Gaza, extremist settlers in the West Bank are carrying out one of the most violent and effective campaigns of intimidation and land-grabbing since Israel occupied the territory during the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. Advertisement Settlers carried out more than 750 attacks on Palestinians and their property during the first half of this year, an average of nearly 130 assaults a month, according to records compiled by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. That is the highest monthly average since the UN started compiling such records in 2006. Advertisement The Israeli military has recorded a similar surge in settler violence, though it has documented only 440 attacks in the same period, according to unpublished internal records reviewed by The New York Times. The military, which is the sovereign power in the occupied territory, says it tries to prevent the attacks, but a Times investigation last year found that Israeli authorities have for decades failed to impose meaningful restraints on criminal settlers. While Israel usually prosecutes Palestinians under military law, settlers are typically charged under civil law, if they are prosecuted at all. For this article, reporters for the Times visited five villages recently attacked by settlers, reviewed security footage of several episodes and cellphone footage of others, and spoke with residents of the afflicted villages as well as Israeli military officers and settler leaders. Our reporting found that masked settlers typically sneak into Palestinian villages in the dead of night, setting fire to vehicles and buildings. In some cases, they enter during the daylight hours, leading to confrontations with residents. Sometimes the clashes have involved the Israeli military, leading to the killings of several Palestinians, including a Palestinian American. In one daytime attack, settlers threw a firebomb into a child's bedroom, the child's family said. The vast majority of the 700,000 Jewish Israelis who have settled since 1967 in the West Bank and East Jerusalem— in settlements considered illegal by most of the international community — are not involved in such violence. Mainstream settler leaders say they have a right to the land but oppose attacking Palestinians. Advertisement Hard-line settler leaders acknowledge that their aim is to intimidate Palestinians into leaving strategic tracts of territory that many Palestinians hope may one day form the spine of a state. 'It's not the nicest thing to evacuate a population,' Ariel Danino, a prominent settler activist, said in an interview with the Times in 2023. 'But we're talking about a war over the land, and this is what is done during times of war.' In a recent call, Danino said he stood by the comments but declined a second interview. For several years, the settlers had focused their intimidation on tiny, seminomadic herding communities along a remote chain of hilltops northeast of Ramallah, the main Palestinian city in the West Bank. That campaign has largely succeeded, forcing at least 38 communities to leave their hamlets and encampments since 2023, according to records compiled by B'Tselem, an Israeli rights group. That has eroded the Palestinian presence there and ceded the surrounding slopes to settlers, who have seized the chance to build more small settlement outposts, or encampments. Since the start of 2023, settlers have built more than 130 outposts, mostly in rural areas of the West Bank, that are technically unauthorized but often tolerated by the Israeli government. That is more than they had built in the previous two decades combined, according to research by Peace Now, an Israeli group that backs the creation of a Palestinian state. Now, settlers have expanded their scope. They are increasingly targeting a cluster of wealthier, larger, and better-connected Palestinian villages closer to Ramallah — villages like Burqa and its neighbor, Beitin. Before the junkyard attack in Burqa, masked settlers had, in fact, begun to rampage in Beitin. Just after 1 a.m., Abdallah Abbas, a retired teacher in that village, woke to find his sedan on fire and a Star of David sprayed on the wall of his garden. Advertisement Roughly an hour later, security footage showed, two masked arsonists stole into the yard of Leila Jaraba's house, a few hundred yards away on the edge of the village. One sprayed the hood of Jaraba's car with something flammable, and his accomplice set the car on fire. 'We knew our turn would come,' said Jaraba, 28, who was cowering inside with her husband and two sons, ages 2 and 4 months. 'They want to take this land; they want to kick us out.' About an hour later, masked settlers entered Burqa and attacked Sabr Asalaya's junkyard. Villagers said in interviews that they suspected the same group of settlers might have moved from place to place, wreaking havoc. This sequence of attacks was just a snapshot of a broader pattern of violence in the area. In the first half of 2025, there were an average of 17 attacks a month in this approximately 40-square-mile area, according to the UN. That was nearly twice the monthly rate in 2024 and roughly five times as many as in 2022. The attacks have occurred against the backdrop of intensifying efforts by the Israeli government, which is partly led by longtime settler activists, to entrench its grip on the West Bank. Since entering office in late 2022, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government have authorized more than 30 settlements, some of which were previously built without government permission and have been granted retroactive authorization. It is the largest wave of government-led settlement activity since before the Oslo peace process in the 1990s. Advertisement Simultaneously, the Israeli military has captured and demolished key urban neighborhoods in the northern West Bank that are technically administered by the Palestinian Authority, a semiautonomous institution that oversees civil governance in Palestinian cities. The military has also installed hundreds of roadblocks and checkpoints across the territory. The Israeli military defends its actions as a means of containing Palestinian militant groups that launch terrorist attacks on Israelis. But it has further complicated the lives of most Palestinians in the West Bank, stifled the economy, left tens of thousands of people homeless, and made it even harder for most Palestinians to journey to nearby cities. In villages like Burqa, settlers' attacks make life especially untenable. Repeated arson attacks have damaged scores of used cars that Sabr Asalaya, the junkyard owner, said he had bought from dealers in Israel. 'We are encircled,' Sabr Asalaya said. 'We can't even herd our cattle. We're locked in.'
The Hill
2 hours ago
- The Hill
Japan marks end of WWII as survivors remember wartime emperor's surrender speech 80 years ago
TOKYO (AP) — Friday is the 80th anniversary of then-Emperor Hirohito's announcement of Japan's World War II surrender, but as living witnesses die and memories fade, questions remain in Japan about how the war should be taught to younger generations. A national ceremony will begin at Tokyo's Budokan hall at noon, the same time then-Emperor Hirohito's 4½-minute prerecorded speech began on Aug. 15, 1945, on national radio. Hirohito's responsibility for the war remains controversial today, and Japan has struggled to come to terms with its wartime past, both at home and in the Asian countries it brutally invaded. In 1995, then-Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama apologized over Japan's aggression in Asia. It was welcomed abroad but there has since been continual pushback against it by revisionists and those who deny responsibility. Here's a look at the speech and the memories of some of the people who heard the announcement. Japan's military saw violence, suicides and chaos right up until the official surrender Even after the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was dispute within the military government over if or how the war should be ended. The day before the announcement, Hirohito, dressed in a formal military uniform, met with top government officials in a bunker at the Imperial Palace to approve Japan's surrender. Staff members for NHK, the national broadcaster, were secretly called in, and Hirohito recorded the speech twice, finishing late that night. Palace officials hid the recordings to protect them from sabotage attempts by a group of army officers, who at one point seized the broadcast facility. Despite the chaos, palace officials safely delivered the recordings to NHK for radio transmission at noon on Aug. 15, 1945. Up until the moment of the surrender announcement, there were suicides, coup attempts and fighting among army officers. The action-filled drama of the days before Hirohito's radio address was made into a film, 'Japan's Longest Day,' as well as a graphic novel. Hirohito's voice, which most Japanese were hearing for the first time because he was considered a living god, was not easy to understand because of poor sound quality and the arcane language he used. The message was clear, though: Japan had lost the war. Fumiko Doi heard the emperor's address at home in Nagasaki just 6 days after surviving the atomic bombing She remembers that her neighbors gathered at her home to listen to a radio placed on top of a cabinet. She did not understand what exactly was said, but later learned it was the announcement of Japan's surrender. It was not a surprise, because she had heard her mother say that Japan would lose. 'I only wish the emperor had issued an order to end the war sooner,' Doi says. The Nagasaki bombing and an attack on Hiroshima three days earlier together killed more than 210,000 people and left many survivors with radiation-induced illnesses. On Aug. 9, 1945, at 11:02 a.m., Doi was on a train 5 kilometers (3 miles) away from the location a U.S. B-29 dropped the atomic bomb. Her mother and two of her three brothers died of cancer, and two sisters have struggled with their health. Relief and tears as the emperor's speech reached a hospital filled with wounded Reiko Muto, who survived the massive Tokyo firebombing just five months earlier as a 17-year-old nursing student, was at her hospital on Aug. 15. Everyone gathered in an auditorium for 'an important broadcast.' People cried when the emperor's muffled voice came on the radio. 'The first thing that came to my mind was that now I could leave the lights on at night,' Muto said. 'I was so relieved that the war was over.' The March 10, 1945, U.S. firebombing of Tokyo killed more than 100,000 people. Truckloads of people with serious burns cried in pain and begged for water, but because of a shortage of medical supplies, the best she could do was to comfort them. But the end of the war didn't immediately end the hardship. Her hospital and nursing school were occupied by the allied powers, though she managed to graduate two years later and pursued a career in pediatric nursing. 'What we went through should never be repeated,' she says. For Tamiko Sora, a Hiroshima survivor, the surrender speech is a bittersweet memory Sora, her two sisters and their parents barely survived the atomic bombing on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, when the blast destroyed her home just 1.4 kilometers (0.9 mile) from the hypocenter, and Sora's face was burned. Her grandmother suffered severe burns, and her uncle and aunt were never found. While taking shelter at a relatives' home, her parents listened to the radio broadcast, but sound quality was particularly bad in Hiroshima because the atomic bombing destroyed key infrastructure. Her grandmother, who died later that day, sounded disappointed about the announcement, Sora said. Her grandmother's generation venerated the emperor, and his acknowledgment of Japan's defeat must have discouraged her far more than the rest of the family imagined, Sora said. Despite the sadness of her grandmother's death, the surrender speech gave Sora peace of mind. 'War brings horror and intimidation even to little children,' she said. The emperor and prime minister speak on Aug. 15 Hirohito's son and grandson have repeatedly expressed deep remorse over the war, but prime ministers since 2013 have not apologized to Asian victims of Japan's aggression amid a government lean toward revisionism. Hirohito's grandson, current Emperor Naruhito, has repeatedly stressed the importance of telling the war's tragic history to younger generations. He has traveled to Iwo Jima, Okinawa and Hiroshima, and is expected to visit Nagasaki with his daughter, Princess Aiko, in September. Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, who has signaled a more neutral view of Japan's wartime history, has said he is determined to keep passing on the tragedy of the war.
