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 ...
With a population of 200 million, Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa. About a tenth of people live in the former capital city of Lagos. To relieve it the overcrowded metropolis and to establish a national capital in a country deeply divided ...
The women had fled into the sprawling camps of Goma hoping they would find safety. As the M23 rebel group has swept his part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), it has been accused of murders, rapes and kidnappings. Hundreds of thousands have left...
On 24th June 2022, the US Supreme Court surprised and shocked many when it upheld the ruling in Dobbs vs Jackson Women's Health Organization, a case brought in Mississippi which sought to ban all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. In upholding the ...
From low lying island nations to desiccated parts of Africa and the Middle East, climate change is affecting the way people farm, work and live their lives across the world. In Peru's high Andes, too, melting glaciers and rising temperatures are playing ...
Peru is eighth on the list of countries with the most water, but the capital Lima, where a third of the population live, is located in a coastal desert and over a million people have no access to drinking water. Collecting and storing water is a daily ...
'I am sacrificing myself living here. I have to get out' says a 47 year old man, one of the few remaining inhabitants in a community near the town of Coata in Peru on the shores of Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world - 4000 metres ...
In Sierra Leone, the Chinese have stepped into the void left by the British, plundering natural resources and threatening livelihoods The Hill Station Club in Freetown was once the beating heart of Britain's colonial community. It was here that ...
For generations, the indigenous Khoisan people of South Africa's rugged Cederberg Mountains harvested the leaves of wild rooibos plants to brew tea and make herbal medicines. Once considered a 'poor man's drink', theantioxidant-rich, caffeine-free ...
Albania, one of the poorest countries in Europe with a per capita income of just $4,500, has a subsoil rich in crude oil, estimated at over 5.3 billion barrels. During the communist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha the country was largely isolated from the ...
Clubfoot is among the world's most common birth defects, affecting one in every 800 babies, yet it is a condition that many in the West have never seen. This is because, in countries with advanced health systems, it is quickly and easily treated soon ...
Over the past three years, a modern-day diamond rush has been playing out in the deserts of Namaqualand, South Africa. Driven by poverty and unemployment at home, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis, increasing numbers of ...
Just outside the city of A Coruna on Spain's wild Galician coastline, lie the headquarters of the world's biggest fashion retailer Zara, whose parent company Inditex sits atop the 'fast fashion' industry it helped create. This constantly expanding ...
Japan is facing a unique demographic challenge. Not only does it have, along with a number of other developed countries, one of the lowest birth rates in the world. For reasons that remain intriguing to researchers in the field, Japanese people live ...
Numbering around 35 million, the Fulani, also known as Fula or Peul, are spread across 15 countries in the Sahel region stretching from the Atlantic seaboard in the West to the Red Sea in the East. Around a third of Fulani are pastoralists, making them ...
Banknotes are generally issued by governments or national banks and their imagery is intended to represent the reliability of these banks and of the economic and political system. Of course, their designs are also influenced by other countries' ...