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 ...
Although still deemed as insufficiently documented to be included in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder Fifth Edition (DSM-5-TR), problematic or pathological internet use constitutes a global - and...
In February 1995, during the holy month of Ramadan, a collective panic caused by the presumed presence of a shape-shifting spirit took hold of the island of Zanzibar. In local folklore 'popobawa', or bat wing in Swahili, is an evil spirit that descends ...