The Puszta, a grassy plain in eastern Hungary, is rapidly changing. It is the last European steppe, populated by wild horses and grazing cattle, and one of the world's richest habitats in biodiversity. Loved by poets for its 'rough honesty', it is ...

Afghanistan has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. Facing years of conflict and humanitarian crisis, local midwives are struggling to save lives. With poverty and food shortages at record levels since the Taliban takeover in August...

Peru 1994 - 2021 In 1988 I first went to my mother's home country of Peru and in many ways, I never left. I grew up in a bucolic Southern California suburb where even the trees seemed to have been meticulously placed. Peru's unbridled chaos, ...

Blood-splattered faces and lacerated backs, every type of flesh wound inflicted with barbed wire and random auto parts. All this accompanied by screaming crowds, beer, smoke, sweat and adrenaline. Lucha Libre Extrema is not for the fainthearted and ...

Cheerleading has long been associated with American high school movies and glittery sideline entertainment, but it has a rich history. Cheerleading began in the US in the late 19th century, growing out of the civil war and finding a place among the ...

Every three months a space rocket carrying three astronauts and cosmonauts to the International Space Station launches from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. At around the same time, to the north-east in remote grasslands, three other astronauts fall ...

Thirty-six hours 'screentime' a week is the average for French teenagers. It's the equivalent of the time spent working in a full-time job each week. And adults who, on average, consult their smartphones every six minutes, are hardly setting a better ...

Few places on earth are currently as strategically sensitive as the Taiwan Strait, a 180 km wide body of water separating the island nation of Taiwan and its huge and increasingly bellicose neighbour, China. A small archipelago of some 36 islands, ...

At the end of the 1940s more than a million inhabitants lived in the Hungarian Farmlands. Even between 1945 and 1948 as many as 80 thousand new ranch houses were put up by those settling down in the prairie, wishing to be closer to their lands and ...

Whether real or fake, relics of saints are powerful objects of worship. A sacred version of the 'grand tour' consists of a busy itinerary, visiting innumerable Christian relics of saints that are kept in Rome and all over the Italian entire ...

One of the world's most dangerous volcanos is situated in the heart of Italy, near Naples. Yet it is not just Mount Vesuvius which, famously covered the city of Pompeii in deadly layers of lava and volcanic ash in 79 AD, but the potentially catastrophic ...

The world's most valuable marble has been quarried in Carrara for two thousand years. But is it still sustainable? Fifteen centuries ago the Gallic poet Namazianus described the Apuan Alps, the source of the world's most prized marble as 'dives ...

A series of droughts in the Amazon basin, especially affecting the Amazon, Negro, and Solimoes rivers, are drastically lowering water levels and disrupting local transport and the lives of communities dependent on the rivers for their livelihood. Some of...

With images taken along various sections of the almost 2,000 mile long border between Mexico and the United States, Daniel Ochoa de Olza invites the viewer to question the function and material reality of this highly politicised frontier between the two ...

In India, the 'Green Revolution' of the 1960s is not the untrammelled success that many of its boosters have claimed, though the myth persists until today. Excessive use of fertiliser and pesticides has contaminated soil, water and food and endangered ...

Convulsed by armed conflict and weakened by decades of instability, the East of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is facing a new and growing challenge - the rapid spread of monkeypox, or Mpox, an infectious viral disease that causes fever and ...

Frank OConnor and Jude Sherry wanted to show me another side of Cork. Mr. OConnor and Ms. Sherry moved to Cork, a city in the south of Ireland, in 2018 after a two-year stint in the Netherlands. They were immediately struck by the number of vacant ...

Thousands of miles from war-ravaged Europe another epic showdown was unfolding in the early 1940s in Southeast Asia between the Imperial Japanese Army and US forces and their allies. The Solomon Islands, strategically located between Japan and Australia ...

Somewhere beneath the expanse of floodwater stretching beyond the horizon, lies William Yon Bol's lost home and livelihood. His dead livestock and most of his possessions are waist-deep under the water which swept in one night three years ago. His family...

More than two and a half years have passed since Russia launched a full-scale invasions of Ukraine and an estimated 3.3 million people remain displaced within their own country after fleeing their homes. Another six million are living abroad. As Russian ...

In a small town in central Tanzania, a trailblazing academy for giant rats is saving lives and changing perceptions of the world's most maligned animal. For the past twenty years, Apopo's African Giant Pouched Rats have been using their acute sense of ...

Florida has its feet in the water - and while this isn't new or just happened suddenly, the responses to the crisis are starting to show their limits. Laurent Weyl travelled through the most vulnerable areas of Florida in search of sustainable and ...

When war broke out in the middle of Khartoum, Sudan's sprawling capital city in April 2023, many were caught off guard. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) had been welcomed into the fold of Sudan's Armed Forces (SAF), only to turn on them and move to seize ...

The Oltenian Sahara is the name given to an area of around 80,000 hectares in southern Romania that has progressively decertified over the past 80 years, mainly due to Communist central planning that led to massive deforestation and the draining of the ...

There are around 5,000 active drug users residing in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, a 10-block corridor that runs through the heart of the city. Walking the half-mile stretch is profoundly shocking. Bodies lie scattered on the tree-lined streets and ...

From computers and mobile phones to cameras and printers, coltan is used in myriad electronic devices that are proliferating at an exponential rate across the world. With governments around the world pledging to cut their carbon emissions by gradually ...

The Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan is the unknown counterpart to Armenia's Nagorno-Karabakh: due to the tensions between the two countries, the exclave has been living in isolation for decades. Although it shares borders with Armenia, Iran and Turkey,...

With a population of over 1.4 billion, India is the most populous country on earth. Yet the number of female skateboarders can be counted on one hand. Chantal Pinzi met the women who are using skateboarding to challenge traditional gender stereotypes and...

Central America's criminal organisations keep growing in strength, seemingly impervious to the crime fighting efforts of national governments and the ever shifting patterns of their business from people trafficking to extortion and contract killing, ...

Livestock farming on an Industrial scale across Europe is causing widespread environmental degradation and serious damage to the health of people living in close proximity to factory farms. Scientist attempting to define what might come to define the ...

The history of migration across the Mediterranean goes back thousands of years. In recent years, tens of thousands of people have crossed the Mediterranean by boat from North Africa and Turkey to seek asylum or to migrate to Europe. The central ...

A quarter of Romanias population, or some six million people, now lives outside the country's borders. The vast majority of these have come from the countryside and the money they send back home has irreversibly changed their villages. Even though they ...

In the densely populated enclave of Gaza, home to over 2 million Palestinians, daily life is overshadowed by peril and hardship. Described by the UN Secretary General as a "humanitarian catastrophe," the region grapples with the ongoing consequences of a...

Isolated in a generic hotel room amongst the drab grey of Istanbuls sprawling concrete suburbs, 19 year old Yuto from Japan spends his days between his room and the physiotherapy sessions in the hotels basement. The process he has chosen last for three ...

Half a million died in 100 days: neighbours attacked neighbours, children saw their families slaughtered. But 30 years on, many of the victims and perpetrators have forged reconciliations even become friends. How did it happen? The most extraordinary...

Near the western edge of the Bay of Naples, away from the famous ruins of Pompeii to the South, lies the town of Pozzuoli, a community of some 81,000 that has become popular with people seeking cheaper rents than in neighbouring Napoli. Yet unlike ...