On a flight to Dubai in February, when I looked at the flight path on my seat screen, I had a sickening feeling that something terrible would happen before my return flight. Sadly, my hunch was correct. Moreover, the war was worse than what I had expected, and that was only the beginning. It was even more eerily to notice that the shortest direct line between Toronto and Dubai would
The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is hardly a dead zone or time capsule. For these self-settlers who have moved back to their villages inside the zone illegally, life has to go on. Still, aside from their contaminated farmlands, memories of a better time are what they really cherished.
On that fateful morning of April 26, 1986, the supposedly state-of-the art Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant exploded during an experiment, releasing 400 times as much radiation material into the environment as that of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. The accident ultimately led to the downfall the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, but not necessarily for the better. Today, the fallout of Chernobyl,