Almost 200 years after the death of the famous writer, Jane Austen continues to enthral enthusiasts from around the world who flock in their thousands to the many locations, both real and fictional, that are forever linked to Austen and her works. ...

Rice is the second most produced grain in the world. Around 480 million tonnes were produced in 2013. At 70 million tonnes, Indonesia is the third largest producer, behind China and India. Indonesian have a multitude of words for 'rice' and even ...

Life is tough in Makoko, a sprawling slum of some 100,000 inhabitants, built on stilts into the putrid waters of Lagos Lagoon in Nigeria. The fish in the lagoon are dying, there is no electricity or running water and raw sewage laps at the floors of ...

Even though levels of violent crime in Chicago are down from their epidemically high rates of the early 70s and 90s, the city is battling a consistent scourge of violence that has seen it in the top three US cities with the most murders every year ...

Even though the spread of the deadly Ebola virus, which started in Guinea in the spring of 2014 and spread light wildfire across a number of West African countries, has markedly slowed, countries such as Sierra Leone are still struggling to contain ...

They used to be found in every village and whistle stop. Everyone knew who they were. People often laughed at them but more often than not they laughed with them. At other times people were afraid of their strange ways - afraid of the village ...

On 27 January 1945 the most notorious of Nazi Germany's concentration camps in the small Polish town of Oświęcm, hereafter seared into the collective memory as Auschwitz, was liberated by advancing Soviet forces. It is estimated that ...

6 July 2015 marks the 600th anniversary of the martyrdom of Jan Hus in Konstanz on the shores of Lake Constance in southern Germany. A century before Martin Luther and two hundred years before the split between Catholicism and Protestantism was to ...

On 7 July 2014, following weeks of growing tensions over the tit-for-tat murders of three young Israeli students and a Palestinian teenager from East Jerusalem and rockets being fired out of Gaza, the Israeli army launched a large scale military ...

Somaliland, a self-declared independent state covering the northern third of Somalia, is not known as an economic powerhouse with the fourth lowest GDP in the world. Once a year, however, it becomes the scene of the biggest movement of livestock ...

Despite changes in the law and increased tolerance in many parts of the world, the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people in some regions are still blighted by persecution and the denial of basic human rights. In 76 ...

In the dense forrest of North Kivu, a series of gruesome massacres in villages around the town of Beni have left hundreds of people dead and the local population petrified, wondering why UN peacekeepers and members of the national army (FARDC) ...

Robotica is a series of short stories exploring different ways robots are changing the way we conduct our daily lives. They are at the cutting edge of technology, innovation that could potentially alter the way we live. Autonomous machines. ...

Before the fall of the communist government in Mongolia in 1990 the population of Ulan Bator (or Ulaanbaatar as it is now known) was around 200,000. Nowadays, the city has mushroomed to almost 1.4 million, a third of population of the country. The ...

According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) we have lost 97% of wild tigers in just over a century. There are now only about 3,200 of the big cats left in the wild, three quarters of them in India. And while India's tiger population has increased by ...

Malawi has one cancer specialist for 16 million people and no radiotherapy facility. In Africa, cancer rates are expected to grow 400% over the next 50 years and a survey across the continent found 45% of the countries had no hospice or palliative ...

People don't want to be seen using a foodbank. The story of Britain's hunger gap remains hidden behind closed doors, illustrated only by neat stacks of tins and pasta. This is the story about the foodbank supply lines to the homes and kitchens of ...

Seabirds are indicators of marine health, providing a window under the waves. Over the past 50 years, the world's sea bird populations have declined by 70%. One third of the EU's breeding sea birds are found in Scotland with over a million nesting on...

Syria's protracted crisis three years of debilitating ruin and elusive compromise has torn families from their homes, their country, and each other.The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has registered well over 2.5 million ...

Four years after the magnitude 9.0 Tohoku earthquake triggered a deadly tsunami leading to the Fukushima Dai-ichi power station disaster, hundreds of square miles remain off-limits for habitation due to radioactivity. Japan is currently undertaking ...

China's economy depends on coal - and it has vast quantities of the black stuff left underground to dig up and burn. The country combusts almost as much coal every year as the rest of the world combined and gets fully three quarters of its energy ...

Myanmar was once the world's largest supplier of heroin until it was unseated by a post-Taliban surge in production in Afghanistan. Yet recently, as the country has been welcomed back into the international community following years of pariah status ...

In recent years Burma, long a byword for political repression and brutal military rule, has emerged from its half century of isolation and become the playground of growing numbers of foreign tourists and companies from around the world sniffing ...

The subject of human trafficking in Southeast Asia has recently been highlighted by the tragic fate of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar trying to gain access to Thailand and other neighbouring countries to escape violence and discrimination in their ...

Founded in 1701, the city of Detroit lies on the banks of the Detroit River which links Lake Erie and Lake Huron and divides the USA from Canada on the other bank of the stream. Its central location on a major waterway in the Great Lakes region ...

From the time of Cyrus the Great in the 6th century BC, when a Persian empire stretched from modern day Greece to the Indus, to the present cautious engagement of the West with a more moderate government in Tehran, Iran has attracted the attention of...

The Second Amendment is one of the most fiercely contested parts of the Bill of Rights, and indeed the entire United States Constitution on which America is founded. It reads, in its entirety: 'A well regulated militia, being necessary to the ...

Since the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014 by a local policeman the reports of police violence, often of the lethal kind, directed against predominantly black men keep on hogging the headlines. Not ...

Spending money on buying a dog, taking it to the vet and for walks belonged to white culture and was not the African way'President Jacob Zuma Middle class South Africans people I know as family and friends, but also the strangers I see at the ...

As the world's population shifts from the countryside to the cities, the urban areas need to expand in order to hold the influx of people. One could go to the empty pueblos in the countryside to explore this shift. Another way to document this ...

Sierra Leone is about to overtake Liberia as the country worst affected by West Africa's devastating Ebola epidemic that has claimed close to 6,000 lives across the region according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Almost a fifth of the ...

With Greece entering its 6th year of recession, tens of thousands of small businesses have been forced to close and many more are likely to go the same way. The Greek economy has shrunk by 25% in the last 5 years and this economic pressure is highly ...

Property prices across London continue to rise sharply and many historically poor areas, often inhabited by immigrants, are now being targeted by property developers keen to ride the wave of inner city gentrification. Brixton in South London sits at ...

'I'm a pilot and a photographer. Side Effects is a documentary photographic project about the complicated relationship between humans and nature. It was shot from a paraglider or a gyroplane some 150 m (500 feet) above the ground. I mainly focus on ...

Wildlife poaching is a highly lucrative enterprise across various African countries and some of the most valuable animals, such as elephants, live in and around some of the most troubled regions of the continent. Militia like the Janjaweed in Sudan ...

Tucked between the Tibetan Plateau to the north and India to the south, west and east, Bhutan lies entirely within the Eastern Himalayas. Slightly smaller than Switzerland, 51% of its land is protected, the highest percentage of any nation in Asia. ...