June 3, 2009

New Zealand The World’s Safest Country

Photo by flickr user <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/faeryboots/3200309144/" target="new">faeryboots</a> used under a Creative Commons license.

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Citizens of Reykjavik, lock your doors! Iceland is no longer safe! Well, not as safe as it was last year, according to the third-annual Global Peace Index, released Tuesday. The brainchild of Australian tech entrepreneur, Steve Killelea, the study takes after similar annual ventures, such as Freedom in the World, and purports to be the world’s only quantitative measure of global peace. Iceland topped the list in the first two years, but the global recession–a particularly dramatic event for the island nation, which led to the complete implosion of its government and banking system–has shuffled the deck. Still, the results are pretty much what you’d expect. The three safest countries on Earth are New Zealand, Denmark, and Norway–all relatively small, affluent, and democratic nations. Island countries also fair well. At the bottom end of the scale there are no surprises. Iraq remains the worst place in the world to go in search of peace, followed by Afghanistan and Somalia. But unless those places are on your vacation agenda, you should probably be alright. Full results of the report are available here.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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