Health care systems are creaking all over the industrialised world and as people live longer, caring for the elderly is becoming an ever greater challenge, especially in societies where people are highly mobile and extended families rarely live in the ...
Varanasi, or it's more poetic names Kashi and Benares ('City of Light') is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world. The significance and history of the place is clearly visible along the sprawling riverside ghats, a system of steps ...
When the drug known as 'kush' first arrived in Sierra Leone six years ago, few had ever heard of it. Extremely potent, dangerously unpredictable and dirt cheap, it has been spreading like wildfire ever since, proving irresistible to growing numbers of ...
Bullfighting in Spain is more than a sport. It is a unique cultural phenomenon that brings together ritualistic performance art and the thrill of danger in a tradition that dates back to Roman times and beyond. It has also been dividing opinion more ...
Off the coast of Sierra Leone, a remote island once home to three villages, large areas of forest and thousands of people is on the verge of disappearing into the sea, its land stripped away by devastating coastal erosion. In just ten years, Nyangai has ...
The bright and opulent prints with their infinite variety of patterns have become the symbol of a continent, appreciated around the world in a virtuous circle of globalisation that connects Kinshasa and Accra to Paris and New York. They are a familiar ...
The central Mediterranean has long been Europe's deadliest border. In 2023, some 3041 migrants lost their lives or were recorded missing at sea according to the Missing Migrants Project, an initiative of the International Organisation for Migration, the ...
The Democratic Republic of Congo, four times the size of France with a population of 102 million, has long been a source of regional instability and the epitome of ungovernability. With only just over 3,000 kilometres of paved roads for a territory ...
'I didn't want to be on the passenger seat. I wanted my own car, my own low rider, and I wanted to drive it myself,' explains Sandy Avila from Los Angeles. The 40-year-old mother of four not only built her own low rider; she also founded one of the few ...
Fire has been part of life in Australia for tens of thousands of years and indigenous Australians know and appreciate how wildfires regenerate the land and regulate its natural cycles. In recent years, however, various factors have conspired to make ...
The Beastie Boys, an American hip-hop group from New York, may have coined the term when they described the mullet hairstyle in their 1994 song 'Mullet Head' with the lines 'number one on the side and don't touch the back, number six on the top and don't...
Only 150 kilometres from Washington, DC, and a mere speck of dry land measuring three square kilometres, Tangier island in Chesapeake Bay offers both a journey back in time and a vision of the future if climate change continues at the present rate. The ...
This project appears to be a very straightforward concept. A series of photographs of couples kissing in the street, in parks, on public transport and other public places;photographs generated in the purest form of documentary-style photography. At a ...
With obscure origins in pagan customs and dating back to medieval times, the spring festivities of La Maya offers a strange and colourful spectacle celebrating the arrival of spring. Every 2nd May the families of girls aged between 7 and 11 gather to ...
On the ochre plains along the Mekong River the station emerges like a monumental pagoda of glass and steel. Vientiane railway station is written in large red letters on the facade in interlacing Laos and Chinese characters. At the entrance, monks in ...
Contemporary Europe has seen a steep increase in social tensions, aggressive politics, hostility towards outsiders and a new wave of nationalist, identitarian movements over the past decades. Discrimination against and isolation of minorities are ...
Today, 2.5 billion people worldwide depend on charcoal to cook their daily meals. Charcoal has been used as a fuel for over 30,000 years for anything from art and medicine to chemistry and metallurgy. The most wide-spread use of charcoal, however, has...
On arriving in the town of Pujas, in the depths of the Peruvian Andes, one first witnesses the complexity of the geography - the mountains hidden in the fog and the river that runs in silence at the bottom of the valley. This overwhelming sensation makes...
The Osage Nation is a Native American tribe that formed around the Ohio Valley over two and half thousand years ago and migrated further south after suffering huge losses due to European diseases and frequent conflict with the Iroquois in the 17th and ...
Abyei's rich oil reserves make the region economically desirable to both Sudan and South Sudan. Its border location has also led to conflicting ethnic, cultural, and linguistic claims. Resolving the status of the Abyei Area is one of the essential steps ...
The German word 'Fernweh' describes the desire to leave everything you know and hold dear behind and travel the world, a longing for a distant place that you don't yet know. My ownFernwehhas taken me to far-flung corners of the world to photograph. Out ...
'Prepare for liftoff!' jokes the anaesthetist as he administers ketamine intravenously to 26 year old Maximilian von Raven. Within seconds, the shaven-headed young man on the operating table becomes unresponsive. The surgical team immediately springs ...
On the journey from Uruapan, dubbed the 'Avocado Capital of the World', to Mexico's 'green gold' avocado plantations, the landscape is transformed. Just a short drive out of town dark pine forests give way to the regimented lines of avocado trees ...
For hundreds of years, people have flourished in the floating villages of Tonle Sap lake, a vast body of water in central Cambodia renowned as one of the world's most productive freshwater fisheries. Its riches once fuelled the growth of the empire that ...
Stainless steel is used in the manufacture of everything from sky scrapers to saucepans, and in recent years, demand for the alloy has soared. Producing it requires vast amounts ofchromeore, and with by far the world's largest deposits, South Africa is ...
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 Russian military personnel and other fighting forces are alleged to have committed numerous war crimes across the country. The list of charges is long and disturbing: deliberate ...
Kokpar, an ancient equestrian sport in which horse-mounted players attempt to advance a headless goat carcass towards the opposing team's goal, is said to have originated with Genghis Khan's 13th century mounted raiders, though it might be older still. ...
For over two centuries, the small Cumbrian town of Appleby-in-Westmorland has been the site of an annual fair where local farmers and breeders have sold their sheep, cattle and horses. Held in June on Gallows Hill, the site of a former execution ground, ...
Along the LA Wash in Los Angeles there is a hole in the fence called the 'rabbit hole'. It leads to a territory where trees and shrubs eclipse the endless concrete of the LA River, forming a natural hide-away for the people society does not want to see....
On a rainy Sunday evening the area around the Convention Centre in Sejong, where my guesthouse is located, is deserted. For miles around, there are no shops, no restaurants, nothing moving on the streets. The loud croaking of bullfrogs can be heard from ...
Cairo, Egypt's capital, is a sprawling metropolis of over 22 million people that traces its roots back to the 7th century following the Arab conquests. Yet a much older association - the pyramids of Giza - are located just across the Nile and connect the...
Asian elephants have had a special place in Thai culture for centuries and play a central role in the local tourism industry. With the onset of the Covid pandemic in 2020, however, and the ensuing travel restrictions that prevented tourists from visiting...
Lima, Peru's capital, is one of the largest cities in the world located in the middle of a desert and gets less than an inch of rain a year. Recent migration from the countryside has started putting severe strain on its limited water resources. Of Peru's...
Development is an ambition of most societies, present since the appearance of our species. This is expressed in human efforts to adapt the environment, transforming habitats to ensure the survival of the group. Development is usually geared toward an ...
At the time of her birth in Guizhou province, during the height of Chairman Mao's reign, Mother Wu's family laboured futilely during the disastrous Great Leap Forward. A drive to boost agricultural productivity through quasi-science devastated crops for ...
The world population hit the 8 billion landmark this year driven by better medicine, sanitation and food production according to the United Nations. Yet China, which for millennia has been the most populous on earth, for the first time will see its ...