Morocco, a Muslim country whose culture is a blend of Arab, Berber, European and African influences, feels more than most the tension between modernity and tradition which is a feature of the Islamic world. King Mohammed VI, who came to power in 1999, ...
They've been inside for nine months, but still face a three year stretch. More than two hundred children live with their mothers in Spanish jails. The law says that they can stay in prison up to the age of three. 'The mother's unit is very different ...
Venezuela's El Sistema is one of the world's most successful community arts projects. It offers children from all backgrounds access to a classical music education in a country where many have little hope of ever escaping from poverty. Its director Jose ...
Claudette Habesch looks around the garden and points. 'Half of that tree gives lemons; the other half oranges', she says. She has returned to her childhood home in the old city of Jerusalem for the first time in over sixty years. In the 1940s, the ...
Ferran Adri started out washing dishes and went on to become the most celebrated chef in the world. The organised anarchy of his cooking led the way as a band of Spanish chefs came to dominate 21st century haute cuisine. El Bulli, Adri's ...
In 1941, Marcial Maciel founded the Legion of Christ, one of the Roman Catholic Church's most conservative orders. Born out of the anticlerical feeling of 30s and 40s Mexico, Fr. Maciel sought to mix the elitism of Opus Dei with the passionate ...
The Millennium Seed Bank Partnership (MSBP), has set itself the enormous task of collecting the seeds of all the world's wild plants and preserving them for the future. The organisers are particularly concerned about the estimated 60 000 to 100 000 ...
After the first anniversaries of major uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen have come and gone and a violent, deadly summer threatens to engulf Syria in all out civil war, the Arab Spring seems to have lost none of its intensity and looks set...
Until January 2012, Mali was considered one of the most stable countries in Africa, with a succession of democratically elected presidents who ruled the country of 14.5 million since democracy was established in 1991. A growing rebellion by Tuaregs ...
Sport is one of our greatest means of expression, offering its participants and spectators a means to escape reality, proclaim their identity and demonstrate great feats of strength, endurance and skill. At its best, it allows people the world over to ...
All wars leave their traces, and not only in the form of cemeteries where lines of the fallen lie in their thousands. Each war generates its own defence system. New weapons are invented that lead to new strategies and new fear. Once peace has been ...
Following the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in 2005, Martin Roemers produced a series of photographs of veterans from the Netherlands, the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia and Germany. The pictures are accompanied by short ...
Fifty years ago, the very first Trabant rolled off the production line at the Sachsenring Automobile Works in Zwickau. The compact car with a plastic body would become a potent and enduring symbol of the German Democratic Republic, as over three million ...
150 years ago, Bernadette Soubirous had a vision which would change her life. The 14 year old was gathering firewood from a grotto outside the town of Lourdes, a rural backwater in southern France, when she first saw what she termed 'a small young lady' ...
In 2015 it will be 65 years since the end of World War II in Europe. After the war was over, many thousands of people would never see again. Martin Roemers photographed and interviewed some of those who lost their sight as a result of the conflict. He ...
Half of humanity now lives in a city, and the United Nations has predicted that 70 per cent of the world's population will reside in urban areas by 2050. Across the developing world, cities gain an average of five million residents every month.India ...
When popular uprisings began across north Africa and the Middle East in early 2011, Yemen's autocratic president Ali Abdullah Saleh was already facing an armed rebellion in the north and separatist protests in the south. Yemen is widely considered to...
The Grand Trunk Road is the oldest, longest, and most famous highway in southern Asia. For millennia the Grand Trunk Road was used by invaders to conquer the subcontinent. After the British arrived in the 17th century, they used it as the main artery...
May 2014 marks the 10th anniversary of Poland joining the European Union. During the past decade Poles have established themselves as the largest group of economic migrants ever to arrive in Britain. Over half a million people use Polish as their ...
In July 2014 Yorkshire will host Le Grand Depart, the first two stages of the world's greatest cycle race, the Tour de France. The riders will travel through spectacular countryside as well as much of the region's former industrial heartland. Many of...
Child malnutrition has reached emergency levels in Pakistan, particularly in Sindh province, where monsoon floods devastated the country's poorest region for a second year running. It is the single biggest contributor to deaths amongst under-fives by...
In Linfen, the most polluted city on earth, the smog is so thick that it seems to consume its source. Steel plants, coking plants and cement factories loom out of the haze and then disappear once more as one travels along the outskirts of this city. ...
In Jilin province, at the heart of China's industrial rust belt, a new coal power station is under construction. The station is already operational but every day is another step in its gradual but steady expansion. It is a scene repeated across the ...
A thick layer of grey ash covers the surface of the roads leading to an industrial site. The air in the city is acrid and thick. Steel plants, coking plants and cement factories loom out of the haze and disappear once more as one travels beyond the city....
The writer J.G. Ballard died on April 19th 2009 at the age of 78. He had lived in a semi-detached house in Shepperton, a commuter town outside London, for most of his life.'I came to live in Shepperton in 1960' he told an interviewer in 2008. 'I ...
Beijing has undergone enormous change in the space of a few years. Although the political regime remains the same, the loosening of economic policies and regulations is the main driver of this change. As a result investment in real estate in Beijing and ...
The Three Gorges Dam project, first conceived by Mao in the 1970s and due for completion in 2006, is an extraordinary feat of engineering. The dam is 185 metres tall and 2,309 metres long. Behind its vast walls, a reservoir will stretch over 650 ...
It's almost midnight in Dalston, an up and coming area of East London, as we arrive at Die Freche Muse, a neo-burlesque club night that describes itself as 'irreverent, decadent, sexually ambivalent and dissolute'. The location had been kept secret ...
This project explores the industrial hinterlands of four remote provinces in northern China: Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Shanxi and Shaanxi. In the past three decades the rapid process of industrialisation has transformed their formerly bucolic ...
This project is a road trip around the coastal regions of England, Wales and Scotland, which together make up an island that is the largest in Europe and the ninth largest in the world. My intention is to explore aspects of Britain's identity by ...
Every day, busloads of Russians cross into Chinese border towns like Suifenhe and Dongning to buy cheap Chinese goods. They are entrepreneurs, here for business. The items available range from textiles to timber to scrap metal. However, behind this ...
Even by the standards of hermit regimes, Burma lives in a world of its own, a shadow of the country that was once the world's largest rice producer. Rangoon, once so alive with diversity and people from across the region is today a place of ...
With golf courses, marinas, hotel complexes and amusement parks mushrooming out of the ground and the waters along the the Straits of Johor, Malaysia's watery border with Singapore, the area is being transformed into an Eldorado for the region's ...
For centuries, ships following the trade winds ventured into the Straits of Malacca, a narrow 805 km stretch of water between peninsular Malaysia and the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Today, from an economic perspective, it remains one of the most ...
The Black Sea - mysterious, menacing and mythical - is at the heart of centuries of warfare, turmoil and historical drama. A mixture of totalitarian regimes and young democracies, a melting pot of ethnic minorities, the Black Sea region is a point of...
At the end of its nearly 2,900 km course, the Danube, Europe's longest river, spreads out into countless tentacles over a huge, watery plain along the border between Romania and Ukraine. The Danube Delta, Europe's second largest after the great ...