On 12 January 2010 southern Haiti was shaken by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince, the capital, killing hundreds of thousands of people and leaving over a million homeless. Though the estimates of fatalities vary widely ...

PIGS is a term coined by the business and financial press as a way to refer to Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain during their current financial plight. Some would also include Ireland in this group, but since it never possessed an empire, it hasn't ...

Cargo cults are religious practices in Melanesia, the Pacific region stretching from Fiji in the East to Papua New Guinea in the West, which focus on obtaining the 'cargo' (or material wealth) from the Western World through magic, religious rituals ...

In Haiti today, more than 300,000 children are victims of domestic slavery. In Haitian Creole they are called restaveks, from the French reste avec or 'stay with'. Many parents who live in poverty are unable to feed their children and give them away ...

The tiny island nation of Nauru, a 21 square kilometre speck of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean just south of the Equator, today finds itself at the centre of the controversial immigration policy of Australia, its vast and increasingly ...

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is a dangerous place for women, or 'meri' as they are called in Tok Pisin, the local language. Violence against women is seen as normal. According to recent statistics from the Papua New Guinea National Department of Health, ...

Sorcery-related violence is widespread in Melanesia. In Papua New Guinea (PNG) it can take a particularly savage form. In the Highlands Region witch-hunts occur in almost every province. Belief in 'sanguma' (witches) or 'puri-puri' (black magic) is ...

Remote Manus Island was once one of the least developed places in Papua New Guinea due to its remoteness. Since the early 2000s, however, it has become one of the centres of Australia's 'Pacific Solution', a controversial system of processing asylum ...

The tiny island of Ebeye in Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands, has a total area of 0.36 square kilometres and is home to over 13,000 people, most of whom were moved there from nearby islands because of a US Army missile range-testing program that was...

At the end of the 15th century, tens of thousands of Jews were expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabelle, the 'Catholic Monarchs', who had brought the Inquisition to Spain and were rooting out any deviant Christian movements as well as ridding ...

The tiny island of Niue in the South Pacific, also known as the Rock of Polynesia, is one of the most remote places on earth. It can only be accessed by plane, on a three and a half hour flight from Auckland which flies once or twice a week, or by ...

Warm Waters is a long-term photographic project by Vlad Sokhin investigating the effects of climate change on the nature and people of communities living in and around the Pacific Ocean. Tackling one of the biggest issues facing mankind through the ...

In the age of universal mobile phone coverage, Facebook and Lonely Planet guides there are still a few countries which tightly restrict independent tourism. North Korea takes great pains to ensure that foreign visitors only get to see the socialist ...

Like many of the cities that were built and populated against all odds in the days of the Soviet Union's breakneck development of the 1930s and 40s, Norilsk doubled up as a prison camp, part of the vast network of forced labour colonies that became ...

The Kupol ('Dome') Gold Mine in Russia's far northeastern Chukotka Autonomous Okrug is a fully functioning self-contained mini-city of 1,200 workers who live on the remote station in shifts around the year. For three months of the year - between ...

Russia's Taimyr region, stretching far into the arctic ocean, high above the arctic circle, is home to almost two thirds of the world's wild reindeer population. The local indigenous groups - Nenets, Dolgans and Nganasans - are famous for their ...

Since the end of Apartheid in South Africa in 1994, around three million black South Africans have risen into the country's middle class. Until recently, the middle class was almost exclusively white but demographics have rapidly altered this ...

In the far reaches of North Dakota, close to the Canadian border, a remote and inhospitable landscape has turned into an El Dorado for oil companies forever searching for new reserves and for thousands of victims of the credit crunch. The result is ...

In the ever shifting web of alliances, offensives and counter offensives that have characterised Syria's brutal civil war, the People's Protection Units (or YPG by their Kurdish acronym) have been a consistent force in the far northeast of the ...

In the 70th year after nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and 100 years after chemical weapons were used at the Battle of Ypres during the First World War, we are experiencing one of the most insecure periods in decades. The ...

As the Syrian Civil War draws to the end of its fourth lethal year, Panos photographer Teun Voeten and Dutch journalist Robert Dulmers made their way to Syria, taking the official, government sanctioned route and travelling with the Syrian Army. ...

For decades now the United States has been Israel's staunchest Western ally and its most generous foreign benefactor. With annual grants of between $ 1 and $ 3 billion since 1985, three quarters of which Israel is required to spend on American goods ...

9 November 2014 is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The 3.6 metre high concrete embodiment of the division of Europe into a democratic, US-focused West and a Communist, Moscow-dominated East, ran through the heart of one of ...

Enthusiasm for the European Union (EU) is at a historical low and radical anti-EU parties are polling high in European and national elections. Amongst the many complaints coming from citizens of the 28-member club are the lack of transparency of ...

The history of Poland is filled with tales of foreign invasion, partition and occupation. In the period between 1795, when the country was carved up between Tsarist Russia, Austria-Hungary and Prussia for the third time in a generation, and 1918 when...

The North Parade Bingo Club in Skegness, a fading seaside resort on the northeastern coast of Britain, is one of the few remaining dinosaurs of the heyday of Bingo, that hearkens back to a bygone era. As the Bingo industry in general has gone into ...

This essay focuses on young South Africans who were born after the end of apartheid. Twenty years after the beginning of democracy in South Africa the 2014 national elections marked the first occasion in which a new generation of youngsters born into...

Along the Jamuna River, one of the three main waterways that flow south through Bangladesh, regular flooding and heavy rains have led to levels of erosion along the riverbanks that even concerted efforts by the government to reinforce them with ...

'I grew up with my ancestors having orange beards or hair. It is so common in our culture that I hardly took any notice of it. As time went on, however, I found out that dying hair with henna has a special place in Muslim culture. I was curious to ...

After yet another rickety craft packed with migrants heading for Europe sank in the Mediterraneon on 3 October 2013 with a loss of 368 lives, the Italian government decided to put together a flotilla of five warships that would patrol the sea and ...

As the sky brightens, fresh gusts of air sweep along the empty streets where a few 'pexeiras' (fish sellers) are preparing their trays filled with that morning's catch which they carry on their heads from door to door. People jog along Cabral Canela ...

Straddling the equator in the gulf of Guinea lies the island nation of Sao Tome and Principe, the second smallest African nation and the smallest among Portuguese speaking countries. Previously uninhabited, it was discovered around 1470 by Portuguese...

From the early 16th century onwards, Portuguese settlers who had come to the new colony of Sao Tome and Principe started importing slave labour from the African mainland to work on the sugar plantations (or rocas) that were spreading across the lush ...

On 25 April 2015 a devastating earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale struck Nepal, killing over 8,000 people and injuring almost twice that number, destroying or damaging more than 700,000 houses, and displacing 2.8 million people. The ...

In some of Thailand's toughest prisons, where murderers and rapists rub shoulder with career criminals of all stripes, an ancient combat sport has become an unusual means of encouraging inmates to reform themselves, potentially working toward an ...

On 20 July 2015, Chad's former dictator Hissene Habre, who ruled the country from 1982 until 1990, will stand before a court in Senegal, accused of crimes against humanity, torture and war crimes. The court that is prosecuting him, the Extraordinary ...