Photographer Robert Wallis and writer Jennifer Wallace have criss-crossed the 'swing state' of Florida on the eve of the U.S. presidential elections. With its large number of electoral college votes and an almost even split between Democratic and ...
In the West mud is seen as dirt yet in rural west Africa it is the most common of building materials. It has been used for hundreds of years to build sensational structures - houses, mosques, palaces, temples, entire communities - which are repaired and ...
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 ...