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This week my third story about the legacy of cluster bombs in Vietnam appeared in GlobalPost. The GlobalPost work consists of a 4.5 minute audio slideshow and a text story outlining the policy issues.

The day after GlobalPost published the story Amnesty International released a statement alleging that the U.S. recently used cluster munitions to attack Al Queda in Yemen. The alleged December 17, 2009 attack on the community of al-Ma’jalah in the Abyan area in the south of Yemen reportedly killed 55 people including 14 women, 21 children and 14 alleged members of al-Qa’ida.

On the Amnesty website you can see images of a US-manufactured cruise missile that they say carried the cluster munitions. In a statement on their website, The Cluster Munition Coalition, an NGO working to ban cluster munitions, has called on the U.S. to confirm or deny the report. So far the U.S. government has not released a statement.

This is especially concerning because the U.S. claims they have not used cluster munitions since the first Gulf War. The U.S., along with other manufacturers of cluster munitions, including Russia, China & Israel, has not yet signed the international treaty banning cluster munitions. That treaty becomes international Law this August.

This week several international news outlets ran stories on the Yemen incident including, The Telegraph, Al Jazeera, Bloomberg Business Week. You can watch a video report about the incident on Link TV’s Mosaic News.

And so goes the freelancing life …

As many of you know, I set out on a reporting adventure to Vietnam in 2010. Actually the journey began in the summer of 2009. After I graduated from USC Annenberg, I had the idea that I wanted to do an international story that I felt connected to. That story ended up being about the legacy of war-era explosives in Vietnam. Since my dad is a veteran, I had always wanted to do something to help heal the wounds between Vietnam and America and to promote justice for the people of Vietnam. So I did it! I started fundraising in August and I raised about $5,000 by December. I bought a plane ticket, connected with an ngo working on the issue and started reporting. Out of the trip came several stories.

The first one appeared in February in the Thanh Nien News, a weekly English newspaper in Hoh Chi Minh City. The second story aired on World Vision Report in May. Also in May, the profiles of cluster bomb victims I produced for the Cluster Munition Coalition in exchange for sponsoring a portion of my trip to Vietnam, appeared on their site. The audio slideshow series was also picked up by Seattle PostGlobe and Asia! Magazine. And there’s still more to come! This reporting experiment was a huge learning process for me and I couldn’t have done it without the support (both financial and otherwise) of my friends, family and colleagues who believed in my vision. Thanks so much! There’s still more reporting from Vietnam in the pipeline. But, for the moment, I’m back in Los Angeles working on an immigration story about the secret life of day laborers … and so goes the freelancing life.