Or rather it doesnt. The World Trade Organization (OMC in French) is in crisis. While it is supposed to regulate 98% of international trade, between its 164 country members, i.e. just about all countries, it has totally failed to update rules mostly ...

11 December 2019 marks the 25th anniversary of the beginning of the First Chechen War. Though by no means the only conflict to beset the imploding Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the War in Chechnya came to epitomise the chaos and wanton destruction of ...

Every country has its favourite sport. In England, football is the undisputed leader. In India, a huge home audience, running into the hundreds of thousands, is obsessed with cricket. America calls its annual baseball championship the World Series even ...

The Tour du Faso is one of the world's great cycle races. It covers 1,306 kilometres across Burkina Faso every October and has been won 15 out of the past 32 times by local Burkinab teams since its inception in 1987. Until 1998 it was reserved for ...

For Aboriginal communities in Australia's Northern Territory, lack of opportunities and extreme isolation are often coupled with substance abuse, domestic violence and suicide. The annual "carnival", however, brings far flung indigenous ...

Uluru, or Ayers Rock as it was previously known, is one of Australia's most recognisable landmarks which has featured in the background of countless tourist photographs for decades. Considered sacred by local Anangu Aboriginal people, the huge sandstone ...

Crocodiles are sacred in Timor Leste, one of the world's youngest and least developed countries which seceded from Indonesia in the late 1990s. Locals call them 'Abo', or grandfather in the Tetum language, and revere them through their foundation myth ...

All children have dreams, whether they're born in the United Kingdom, Liberia, Haiti, Mexico, Turkey, India or elsewhere. Children dream of finding a place, both literally and figuratively, where they can be who they want to be, freed from the ...

From the statue of Christ at Tupungato one can look out over the vast floodplains of the Valle De Uco. The Andes mountains rise imposingly to the the west and laid out below are rows of poplar and cypress trees, protecting acre after acre of vineyards....

Over the past 10 years, the weather in the Arctic has been changing at an unprecedented rate. In the summer of 2019, air temperatures of 31 C and water temperatures of 20 C were recorded in Alaska, a rise of 3 to 4 degrees C and thus way above the 1.5 ...

In 2012 and 2013, I re-traced the historical migrations of my Mennonite ancestors. I followed their centuries-long journey through Europe, Russia and Siberia, photographing the places and people that had been left behind. I sought an ethereal connection ...

This story is about how the world's largest and most destructive industrial project is impacting Indigenous communities. But it is also about so much more than that. The oil sands are just one example of how centuries of Canadian settler colonialism is ...

The Mahafaly plateau in southeastern Madagascar is one of the driest regions in the country. It only rains a few times a year and the little rain that does fall is immediately absorbed by the porous lime soil. There are no rivers, no lakes or any other ...

The Sahel divides the sands of the Sahara from the tropical forests of Africa, the mainly Arab North from sub-Saharan black African nations in the South, and nomadic pastoralists from sedentary agricultural communities. It is home to around 125 million ...

The tough sport of bare-knuckle boxing is making a comeback in the UK after being largely ignored for decades. It is run by Ultimate Bare Knuckle Boxing (UBKB), the only bare-knuckle academy in the UK, and is based in a gym in Warrington in the Northwest...

There are over 150 million malnourished children in the world today. This contributes to three million child deaths a year. A new photo exhibition co-produced by Concern Worldwide and Panos Pictures shares the stories of individuals behind the statistics...

Hasankeyf is one of the oldest human settlements in the world, located on the banks of the Tigris River in Turkey. It has been continuously inhabited for the past 12,000 years yet this cultural treasure is about to be erased forever. Located in ...

Like much about the vast, empty island nation of Greenland, its football league is full of anomalies and a study in resilience. Since the harsh North Atlantic climate doesn't allow for teams to play on grass pitches, a prerequisite for membership of UEFA...

As of 2019 there are an estimated 3.6 million Syrian refugees living in Turkey. In the city of Gaziantep in the south and near the border with war-ravaged Syria there are currently 500,000. The impact on Gaziantep has been significant. The city of 1.5 ...

South Lincolnshire always seemed far away, not least while growing up there. Its mostly fenland, with flat, damp spaces and big skies separating people and places, as often as not hidden behind tall fences. Its an insular place - by the sea, yet ...

The boy mounted the horse barefoot, with only an ill-fitting Hello Kitty helmet to protect his head and a talisman under his clothing to give him the courage of his ancestors. The last thing Firmansyah (8) remembered about the race was being boxed in ...

LGBT people face intense discrimination and harassment in Kyrgyzstan. Homophobia is widespread and often violent. This is particularly true in Osh, Kyrgyzstans second city, which is intensely traditional and conservative. Many Kyrgyz people see ...

I moved to Prague, the 'Golden City', in 1994 to study at the Academy of Art. It was a mere five years after the Velvet Revolution and the 'City of a hundred spires' was a very different place then. Decades of communist rule still cast a long shadow over...

Britain has now been subjected to more than 10 years of austerity. While those at the top were given the biggest state-sponsored bailout in history during and after the financial crisis of 2008, the rest of society has had to pay for it. For those at the...

The price of vanilla is at an all time high. Between 2014 and 2017, it rose from USD 40 a kilogram to over USD 600. Madagascar, and especially its northeaster Sava region, is the source of around four fifth of the world's cured vanilla with an annual ...

The streets of Eritrea's capital in the run-up to the 2019 Independence Day celebrations on May 24 were unusually quiet. But cafes and restaurant were full of Eritreans from the diaspora who had traveled back to celebrate 28 years of national ...

What is the difference, nutritionally speaking, between a juicy piece of beef tenderloin and a rat's hindquarters. Not a lot, according to rodentologists, or people who study rats and other members of the rodent family. The tissue of mammals, the most ...

After almost four and a half years of war in Syria almost half of the population has now been displaced. Nearly four million people have fled across its borders to the surrounding countries of Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan, while more than six and a ...

On my first trip more than five years ago, the contrast between Iraq and Syria's Kurdish regions could not have been more apparent. In Iraq in 2012, tourism and business development were huge moneymakers in Iraq's Kurdish region, while in Syria, the ...

In 2012, the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo made it mandatory for all civil servants' salaries to be paid into bank accounts. Previously, government employees had received their wages in cash from their superiors. Almost one million ...

The Northeast Passage - the sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans over the top of Norway and Russia - has for centuries fascinated intrepid seafarers in their search for a shortcut between the two oceans. Before the Suez and Panama canals,...

In 2011 South Sudan gained independence from Sudan and become the world's newest country. Yet old grievances between different communities in the new nation quickly erupted into a brutal civl war in 2013, causing thousands to seek safety across the ...

The subject of immigration has been propelled to the top of the political agenda in the United States with the arrival of Donald Trump, a strident nationalist, in the White House. His campaign slogans of "America First" and "Make America ...

One of the main reasons why girls in Uganda miss school or drop out altogether is the lack of readily available sanitary products . Shame and fear mean that three out of ten girls fail to turn up for school during their period. This exacerbates the low ...

A different take on the Brexit debate. Bread is something that unites us all. It is a symbol of peace. If you have bread you have enough to eat. It is also a word for money. Each of the 28 countries in the European Union has its own identity,...

Palm oil has been used for cooking in Africa for thousands of years. Yet more recently, it has become a highly lucrative cash crop that is used in thousands of products ranging from cleaning detergents , shampoo and cosmetics to chocolate, ice cream and ...