"When I first visited The Central African Republic (CAR), the country had just descended into the most serious crisis of its short history. In 2013, rebels from the Seleka alliance, a predominantly Muslim militia, overthrew the government, ...

After more than two months of heavy fighting the battle for Mosul continues unabated, even as the news media's gaze has long ago moved on to other matters. Over 2,000 civilians have already died in the fighting while 100,000 more have been displaced....

No one knows the actual number of people who have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea from Africa to Europe. The figure is sure to be in excess of 20,000, making this the deadliest border crossing in the world. The larger disasters are ...

The panda is much more than just an iconic animal associated with China, instantly recognisable by its distinctive black fur patches around its eyes and ears. It has also been a vital diplomatic tool for the Communist government ever since Richard ...

With its mushrooming cities, power-hungry heavy industry and steadily, if less rapidly, growing economy, China's demand for power appears unstoppable. Yet while the country burned its way through billions of tonnes of coal, a fuel it is well endowed ...

The South China Sea is one of the most important maritime environments in the world. Some $ 5.3 trillion worth of goods are shepherded along its shipping lanes every year, accounting for around a third of maritime traffic worldwide. The Sea is also ...

While conflict diamonds have made their way into the news headlines and become the target of high profile campaigns to ban their use, the jade industry has largely escaped such scrutiny. Yet in Myanmar's northern Kachin state, a mountainous and ...

Manila North Cemetery, opened in 1904, is one of the oldest and largest in the Philippines. Its elaborate mausoleums and endless rows of tombs are home to an estimated one million dead - and a few thousand living. The final resting place of ...

Soon after dawn, Win Myint Oo starts a generator and squats on a bamboo platform suspended under a 40-foot, jury-rigged derrick made out of three steel poles and bamboo struts lashed together with rope. The generator powers a winch that lowers a blue...

In June 2016, Rodrigo Duterte won the presidential election in the Philippines with strident promises that he would eradicate drug use and associated criminality by killing thousands of dealers and users. Since then, almost 12,500 people have died, ...

Shishmaref, Alaska is a remote village of about 600 people located 30 miles south of the Arctic Circle, flanked by the Chukchi Sea to the north and an inlet to the south. It sits atop rapidly melting permafrost and in the last decades, the island's ...

Motorcycle culture is deeply embedded in the modern American identity. It is usually associated with outlaws, gangsters, machismo and an independent lifestyle reflecting what many in America feel to be the nation's roots. This culture was made ...

Since April 2016, thousands of native Americans and their supporters have been converging on a site in the Standing Rock Indian Reservation to protest against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline which is supposed to bring fracked crude oil...

Heading south, past the Salton Sea where farmland turns to dusty towns, following the tyre tracks of trailers and camper vans deep into the parched desert, a landscape of shabby vehicles that have taken root in the ground emerges. For years, a ...

Based in Istanbul, Ivor Prickett has been covering the conflict in Iraq and its ripple effects across the region for the past two years. Some of the most brutal fighting to regain parts of Iraq from Islamic State (IS) took place during the battle ...

In the November 2014, Panos photographer Mads Nissen and his colleague Jacob Svendsen from the Danish newspaper Politiken travelled to Sierra Leone to document the ongoing Ebola emergency that was to claim almost 4,000 lives in the West African ...

An agreement between the EU and Turkey in March 2016 stipulated that any migrants or refugees arriving from Turkey in Greece would be sent back to Turkey if they didn't apply for asylum in Greece or if their claim was rejected. The agreement was a ...

Colombia's civil war, a deadly 52 year long national ordeal that left over 200,000 dead and displaced another 5 to 6 million from their homes, finally looks like it might be drawing to a close. What started as partisan conflicts between militias of ...

Her name isn't actually Sarah. For her own safety and for that of her family living in Iraq, her name can't be revealed. She is living in a safe house in Baden-Wrttemberg in Germany with other women and children who have escaped from conflict zones ...

At 2:30 am on 3 August 2014, a woman was baking bread in Gurzeric village in northwestern Iraq when she suddenly heard a gunshot. It was at this moment, in the middle of the night, that militants from Islamic State (IS) started a full assault on ...

The coup attempt of 15 July in Turkey brought about a massive nationwide campaign to silence opposition to the government and punish those suspected of being connected to the plotters. In all, some 15,800 people have been detained, including 10,000 ...

The sleepy town of Veles in the centre of Macedonia seems an unlikely place to have played a potentially decisive role in the 2016 US elections. Yet this faded and morose former industrial town of 55,000 people briefly shot to the world's attention ...

The remote village of Ribnovo in the Rhodope mountains of southwestern Bulgaria has kept its traditional winter marriage ceremony alive despite decades of Communist persecution and subsequent economic hardship. Ribnovo's inhabitants, who are Muslim,...

Aysha is one of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who have undertaken the hazardous and sometimes deadly journey from Syria, through Turkey to Europe over the past two years, fleeing war, persecution and death. It took her over two weeks of ...

The waters of the Prespa Lakes are shared between three countries which border them: Albania, Greece and Macedonia. Over the past century the two lakes, located on a mountain plateau in the southern Balkans have been straddling the faultlines between...

The Greek island of Leros, nestled among the Dodecanese in the southern Aegean, is a place accustomed to outcasts. In Antiquity it was a place of exile for the nearby town of Miletus, now on the Turkish mainland. Later, during Ottoman times the ...

On the Greek island of Leros, in the dilapidated shell of a former mental asylum that served as a jail for political prisoners during the country's dictatorship, a 'hotspot' has been housing stranded refugees who have arrived on boats from Turkey ...

In Japan, where eating is taken very seriously and fish forms a major part of the national diet 'fugu', or pufferfish, is in a league of its own. Not only is it one of the most expensive delicacies on the Japanese menu but it also carries the extra ...

I'm in Nikolai Smetanin's office where he is talking me through a series of photographs of mangled reindeer carcasses. Nikolai is the head of Yakutia's government-run hunting department. With a landmass comparable to India, Yakutia is by far the ...

In the late 1970s, Soviet geologists discovered large uranium deposits near Mardai River in the Dornod province of Eastern Mongolia. The governments of the USSR and Mongolia signed a secret agreement to open a uranium mine in 1981 and Mardai town ...

The Buddha's first sermon, the Dharmachakrapravartana ('Turning of the Wheel of Law') which put forth the Middle Path, The Four Noble Truths and The Eightfold Path after his enlightenment marked the formal beginning of Buddhism in the Indian ...

The Inca were originally a small tribe in the southern highlands of Peru. In less than a century, during the 1400s, they built one of the largest, most organised and tightly controlled empires the world had seen. Their skill in government was ...

Around the Braj region of India which is most closely associated with the festival of Holi, revellers gather at the Shriji Temple (Laadli Sarkar Mahal) in Barsana during Lath mar Holi which usually falls around March. They throw coloured powder at ...

Travelling on an urban subway system is normally a chore, but on Moscow's Metro eight decades of Russian and Soviet history unfold as you hop from station to station. The Moscow Metro opened on 15 May 1935 beginning eight decades of development. As ...

As West Africa's ebola crisis enters its second grim year and with a death toll nearing 7,000 it is easy to lose sight of the fear, sorrow and tragedy of each infection, each silent and painful death in towns and villages across the countries worst ...

On 25 April 2015 a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck central Nepal with Gorkha District at the epicentre, causing widespread destruction of property and infrastructure. A powerful aftershock on 13 May 2015 caused further damage and loss of life. Many ...