In the fields of Sanlucar la Mayor outside Seville, Europe's first commercial solar power station offers a startling glimpse into a future powered by renewable energy sources. The PS10 plant produces electricity with 624 heliostats (movable mirrors), ...
According to the United Nations, the beginning of 2007 marked a dramatic demographic turning point. For the first time in human history, more than half of humanity is living in cities with millions more moving from the countryside to urban areas ...
Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans risk their lives each year trying to reach the United States. The UN estimates that some 25 million of them have now immigrated to the US. Most migrants these days come from Central America where poverty, lack...
Four trips to North Korea, each with the same official, hour-by-hour itinerary as the previous visit. The birthplace of Kim Il Sung, the Triumphal Arch, the Museum of International Friendship, the Number One Shop, the tower representing 'Juche' ideology ...
Helmand Province has been the setting for some of the heaviest fighting of the Afghan war. As part of the troop surge announced by President Obama at the end of 2009, the number of US soldiers in the province was increased to 20,000 by the summer of ...
Afghanistan is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world.The Soviet occupation of the country from 1979 until the final withdrawal in 1989 saw the urban centres controlled by Soviet troops and Soviet-backed militia, locked in constant ...
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's diminutive president since 2005, is no stranger to controversy. He famously called for the State of Israel to be "wiped off the map" and has shown remarkable truculence in the face of international condemnation of the ...
Somalia has not had a functioning central government since 1991. While northern parts of the country have broken away, setting up de facto proto-states including Puntland and Somaliland, the rump of the country remains perennially riven by fighting ...
Afghanistan used to be a peaceful country, popular with hippies coming from Europe to South East Asia. But things changed dramatically after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The Soviet intervention left two million dead, a third of the ...
The Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world without a nation, numbering over 30 million people with a common language and culture. Kurdish history came to a virtual standstill after World War I, when the region known as Kurdistan was divided ...
Under the brief reign of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the country's women bore the brunt of the suffering.Amnesty International calls Afghanistan under the Taliban 'a humanrightscatastrophe' and many Afghan women who struggled to survive this era ...
Lake Urmia in Iran's far Northwest, close to the border with Turkey, is the largest lake in the Middle East and the third largest salt lake on earth. Much like the much more famous Aral Sea, however, it has been shrinking over the past three decades,...
Before the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran under the Shah had close relations with the United States which saw it as a reliable ally in a volatile region and an important bulwark against the neighbouring Soviet Union. With its vast oil reserves, ...
The Hijab, a headscarf worn by Muslim women in the presence of men they are not closely related to, divides opinion both in Muslim countries and in secular countries which Muslims call home. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, where Shia Islam has ...
Dhaka is the fastest growing megacity in the world and one of the poorest. It is the keeper of strong survivors, restless migrants and climate refugees. If a city is made of dreams and desires then a megacity is made of dreams, desires and fears. ...
MASS LAYOFFS SUMMARY SEPTEMBER 2010 For release 10:00 a.m. (EDT) Friday, October 22, 2010 USDL-10-1452 BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR Employers took 1,486 mass layoff actions in September that resulted in the separation ...
One in four people in Sweden will have personal experiences with mental illness in their lives according to Fountain House, an international mental health charity. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), around 450 million people worldwide ...
Flatlands focuses on Johannesburg's inner city. The work documents people who have moved into this high-rise urban environment; many of them refugees, all of them searching for 'gold' in one form or another. And so it has always been. For over a ...
Brakpan is a small town that lies on the East Rand of Gauteng, sandwiched between Boksburg, Benoni and Springs. A once-prosperous mining community, today there are pawnshops, roadhouses, mechanics, mini casinos and other day-to-day shops lining the ...
It was night. I had cut my hair, shaved my beard, and was dressed in blue overalls, a long sleeve blue shirt, and a blue baseball hat. I was one of them. 'Come here', Cornelius said. He was sitting with his wife in the corner of their dining room ...
It wasn't clear if they were lovers or just friends. I don't think they even knew. They had a chemistry that radiated from their intertwined bodies and spread over the crowd in tangible waves. Ceci and Meme were like yin and yang. Ceci was a ...
"It's not easy to catch a condor", Americo Waman said. He leaned in closer and his voice fell to a whisper. "You have to pay the Apus (Andean Gods) with incense, a coca seed, and a piece of llama heart. You must ask the mountains if you can borrow the ...
The southern tip of South America, made up of the Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego and thousands of smaller islands, is separated from the continent by the Strait of Magellan, where the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans meet in tempestuous seas, and shared...
Legend has it that mountains used to walk and talk like humans. One of these mountains was Tunupa, a woman who lived with her husband and three children. One of the children died and the husband left, taking another child with him. In her grief, ...
It sounds like a contradiction in terms, and in many ways it is. But Bolivia - completely landlocked and at least 100 miles from the Pacific Ocean at its western-most point - is maintaining, and intensely proud of, its Fuerza Naval Boliviana, or ...
Bolivia is one of several countries in South America which is home to communities of Mennonites, a group of Christian Anabaptists who migrated to the Americas from Eastern Europe in a number of waves from the late 17th century until the 1950s. ...
On their epic 7 month journey from Quito in Ecuador down to Tierra del Fuego at the bottom of the South American subcontinent, Karla Gachet and Ivan Kashinsky encountered myriad different communities, landscapes and experiences. The last foray was to...
"Jallalla maestritos!" - "Jallalla," they all respond. In complete darkness, illuminated only with the lights on our helmets, I was chewing coca leaves with five miners and a devil made of clay, better known as Uncle Lucas. In front of him, coca ...
Richly adorned multi-storey mansions with elaborate turrets, balconies, pillars and adornments from across the history of architecture are not the first thing that springs to mind when one thinks of Roma, or Gypsies as they are disparagingly known ...
The Yasuni National Park in the east of Ecuador, home to the indigenous Waorani and Kichwa groups amongst others, is one of the most biologically diverse places on earth, boasting the world's highest density of amphibian, tree and bat species. The ...
Every May, the small mountain communities of Acatlan and Zitlala in the Mexican state of Guerrero erupt in raucous celebrations during the Catholic Holy week which coincides with the beginning of the spring planting season. The annual celebrations ...
The afternoon sun ignited the dust clouds as silhouettes danced along the mountain path between Salasaca and Pelileo. They passed like a pack of wolves closing in on its prey, with swords in the air and aguardiente (cane alcohol) on their breath, ...
Carmen Rosa works in a restaurant high in the Bolivian Andes. Like many Aymara women, she wears large colourful dresses, several petticoats and a bowler hat tipped slightly to one side. But unlike most Cholitas, Carmen spends her free time leaping from...
It's a painfully familiar story: a huge, ruthless oil company descends on a quiet, rural location, extracts vast quantities of crude oil with total disregard for the environmental pollution caused, then winds down its operation and leaves the ...
The Gringo The handsome Techno-Cumbia star took the Ñusta, an indigenous beauty queen, by the hand. "Are you single", he screamed into the microphone, holding her hand up in the air. "Yes, I'm single, and looking for a man", she yelled out ...
An industrial estate on the outskirts of the Colombian capital Bogota may not be the most romantic association most buyers of elaborate flower bouquets would want to make with their colourful and fragrant expressions of affection. Yet Colombia has ...