It's a journey of horrors, the kind you would only make if you were truly desperate. But in the failed state of Somalia there are a lot of desperate people. Up to a quarter of a million Somalis are now living in Yemen after undertaking the harrowing boat...

Strictly Come Dancing is the most watched television programme in the world, according to figures released by industry magazine Television Business International in November 2008. The show, which began in the UK in 1949, has spawned more international ...

Iran is a country divided. Following the disputed election held in June 2009, that division was symbolised by a single street: Vali asr Avenue, the spine of Tehran. At one end, supporters of incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have rallied in his ...

Standing in mud that reaches up to their knees, hundreds of men form a human chain that snakes to the horizon. They are trying to rebuild a flood barrier with their bare hands. There are no excavators or trucks, no cement or iron. Everything here is ...

A stricken oil tanker sits in a slick of 200 tons of diesel, 100 miles south of Norway's capital city, Oslo. The usually picturesque landscapes of Sastein and Langesund, site of wildlife sanctuaries and tourist beaches, saw thousands of birds slaughtered...

The smell gets in your clothes and stays. The sun barely shines through the windows. Walls that were once white are now black. The streets are covered in a dirty layer of ash, and the horizon is dominated by factory chimneys and slag heaps that are ...

For close to 8 millennia, the cobbled streets of Aleppo have echoed with the footfall of traders and shoppers. The narrow alleyways of its souks, marked by 2000 years of continuous construction, sell much the same wares now as they did centuries ago, ...

'This work is about people on the run. For almost seven years I have followed in their footsteps - marked by war and unbearable anxieties, but also by hopes and aspirations. This pursuit has taken me to a refugee camp in Congo, to an earthen hut ...

Six months after Japan was rocked by a huge earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, two Panos photographers - William Daniels and Espen Rasmussen - travelled back to the devastated areas to document the continuing reconstruction. William Daniels, ...

After 3 decades of sham elections which saw Egypt's former president Hosni Mubarak re-elected on four occasions with ludicrously large majorities, the country is now entering a new era with an eagerly awaited election that is to start on 28 November....

The Nobel Peace Prize this year has been awarded to three women - Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson and Leymah Gbowee from Liberia and Tawakkul Karman from Yemen. The Nobel laureates will travel to Oslo for the Peace Prize ceremony at Oslo's City Hall. On 11 ...

On a thin mattress by the wall sits Rana Alkassem Alkhaled with her children. She lost her husband in the deadly conflict in Syria, and fled to safer grounds accross the border in Lebanon. She is not alone. According to the UNHCR, of the more than 30,000...

Alphonsine Banyanga was nine when the militia kidnapped her and started using her as a sex slave. Two years later, they left her under a tree, pregnant. The men had tried to cut out the foetus using machetes, scissors and gun barrels. When she was ...

Tough Guy claims to be the world's most demanding one-day survival ordeal and it has been widely described as 'the toughest race in the world', with up to one-third of the starters failing to finish in a typical year. It markets itself as 'the safest...

As part of a long term project looking at masculinity in its various forms, Espen Rasmussen met some of the competitors at two extreme sport events in the minutes after they finished and photographed them and their feet. The first race, Den Store ...

Greenland's vast natural resources, ranging from oil and gas to uranium, rare earth and iron ore, have remained largely inaccessible under thick layers of ice, making them too difficult and expensive to extract. But with a receding ice sheet and new ...

Since November 2013, Ukraine has been gripped by the most serious political crisis since its independence in 1991. What started as public demonstrations protesting against a decision by the government of Viktor Yanukovych, the president, to pull out ...

When does the pain start? Norwegian runner Bernt Arne Tvedt (34) starts to feel it 3 km into gruelling 254 km Amazon Jungle Marathon in Brazil. It starts with a cramp in one leg, then cramps in the other. By the time he is able to stop and stretch, ...

The Norseman xtreme triathlon is an annual endurance race which starts at the Hardangerfjord south of Bergen. Limited to 250 participants for safety reasons, the race is regarded as one of the toughest in the world. The runners are 'unsupported' so ...

Five year old Jonathan Yala died of malaria, not because of a lack of medicine or equipment but because neither of the two health workers at his local clinic had the training necessary to diagnose and treat his illness in time.The sad story of Jonathan's...

For centuries, Europe's Romani people have traversed the continent, sometimes taking root and becoming sedentary, at other times staying on the move, true to their peripatetic tradition. Rarely socially integrated, usually ostracised and viewed with ...

Although Yemen is a very conservative country, women have more rights than in any other country in the region. Unlike their neighbours in Saudi Arabia, Yemeni women are allowed to drive and vote, while many work in the professions as teachers, nurses, ...

There is another side to the Land of Smiles. In Thailand's deep south, only 150 miles from its tourist-filled beaches, 1.8 million people are living under martial law. Bombs, disappearances, torture and murder are everyday events. The Thai government now...

The shocking, hidden lives of refused asylum seekers whose bids for sanctuary have been rejected by the British government are revealed in a new exhibition and multimedia presentation commissioned by Panos Pictures.Abbie Trayler-Smith has photographed ...

Tinginaput is an ordinary village in remote rural India: two rows of neat mud houses, a couple of water pumps, a mango tree where people gather to talk. But there is something very modern perched on the tiles of each roof: a solar panel the size of a ...

Working on assignment for an NGO in Kabul this summer, I found out what it means to work under the auspices of a security-conscious international organisation in times of conflict and unrest. My task was to document the lives of a number of inspiring ...

The Afghan Women's Boxing Club - the only such organisation in the country - boasts 20 members, mostly girls in their late teens, who share a passion for a sport that even in less conservative countries might be deemed inappropriate for young women....

What do Adele, Leona Lewis, Katie Melua and the late Amy Winehouse have in common other than their talent and extraordinary success over the past years? They're all alumni of the London School for Performing Arts & Technology, more commonly known as ...

Charities try to help people in less affluent parts of the world with a variety of donations, from food and monetary payments to sending their staff to care for people without access to medical services. But Oxfam's latest campaign - "The Big Bra ...

Like much of the Sahel, Chad's Guera region is experiencing another bout of an all too familiar phenomenon: severe drought, food shortages, hunger and chronic malnutrition. Up to 18 million people across the Sahel are facing a severe food crisis and ...

Despite the fact that they were in the vanguard of the revolution which toppled the country's long serving strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh in February 2012, Yemen's women have yet to see any meaningful improvement in their daily lives. Not only are a ...

The Rev George Buannie is a powerfully built man, with a voice to match. And in the dirt-poor village of Binkolo, in northern Sierra Leone, he's talking serious stuff to a local farmer. Not about how tough it is to survive in one of the poorest ...

'We are not going to give up our country because of a mere X. How can a ballpoint pen fight with a gun?' Robert Mugabe, June 2008. Zimbabwe's electoral commission, derided for its procrastination following the first round of the presidential election in ...

Basamae The last thing Basamae Maombi would see was the face of the man raping her. She had recognised him and called out his name, hoping the pain and indignity of the attack would stop. But it only made things worse. He held her down, pulled out his...

Zimbabweans are facing a ferocious cholera epidemic which has affected more than 90,000 people since August 2008 and killed at least 4,100. In April 2009 the charity Merlin reported that the situation remained grave: 'The scarcity of trained health ...

A bloody denouement to 26 years of civil war has left Sri Lanka's minority Tamil population facing an uncertain future. Following the defeat of the Tamil Tigers, up to 270,000 Tamils were held in camps under the control of victorious government forces. ...