From dawn until dusk they toil amid an alien landscape as their ancestors have done for centuries. The salt lake at Katwe in western Uganda is the most important natural resource in the area, and some 700 men, women and children make a living from it. ...
Western Sahara is Africa's last open file at the United Nations Decolonisation Committee. Morocco invaded the territory in 1975 and forced colonial power Spain to withdraw without holding a UN sanctioned referendum on the future of the state. With Franco...
In 1876 the explorer Henry Morton Stanley came upon the Lualaba River in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Stanley was convinced that the Lualaba was connected to the great Congo River which the Portuguese had first sighted 400 years ...
Gaza has been under Israeli blockade since Hamas took control in June 2007. During this time, much needed construction materials have been prevented from entering the strip, leading to the closure of all of Gaza's concrete and block factories. In...
Yangambi Research Station is the former Belgian headquarters for all major ecological, biological and agricultural research in Africa between the 1930s and 1960. It stretches for 33 km inland from the Congo river and contains 250 residential houses ...
Over half the world's refugees now live in large towns and cities where they are confronted by a unique set of challenges. The traditional image of life in tented, sprawling camps no longer tells the full refugee story. As urbanisation reshapes much ...
Lebanon is teetering on the brink. As the civil war continues unabated in Syria, its smaller neighbour is increasingly being sucked into the chaos raging next door. Long subordinate to Damascus, the tiny nation of some 4 million people is as tense ...
Syria's troubled capital, Damascus, has been under siege from opposition forces since 2012. Almost everyday the sound of artillery fire echoes from the suburbs as government troops pound rebel lines, lines which during July 2012 crossed briefly into the ...
Violent ethnic clashes between the indigenous Uighur and Han Chinese populations rocked the north-western Chinese city of Urumqi in July 2009. At least 197 people were killed and 1,721 injured in what one Chinese official called the 'deadliest riot since...
The war in Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001 and has already lasted longer than both World Wars. With the security situation remaining critical and the country's fledgling democracy tarnished by corruption, future prospects look far from rosy. Adam...
Wounded soldiers lie prone on the battlefield, but they are not scattered across it as one might expect. They are in a neat line, each facing in the same direction and spaced out at regular intervals. Their injuries follow a pattern too. The first ...
The 7th of November 2010 saw the first 'democratic' election in Burma since 1990. Many had hoped that this would be an historic opportunity for the long suffering Burmese people to put an end to the junta's military dictatorship and herald a new era ...
On November 13th 2010, Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest in Rangoon. Suu Kyi, whose name translates as 'A Bright Collection of Strange Victories', had spent almost 15 of the last 21 years under house arrest. ...
On the 7th of June 2010, the day Afghanistan overtook Vietnam to become the longest war in US history, ten NATO soldiers including seven Americans were killed. One of those was 21-year-old US Army Soldier Brendan Neenan. Pilots and medics from ...
North Korea is the world's last and only hereditary communist dictatorships and has been in the news spotlight for all the wrong reasons over the past decades. It is believed to have torpedoed a South Korean naval vessel in March 2010, killing 46 ...
They may not conform to the western stereotype of a provocative girl band but Myanmar's first all girl pop act, the Me N Ma Girls are certainly pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable in deeply religious and conservative Burmese society. The ...
Ordos City, which derives its name from the Mongolian word for 'palaces', is a gleaming, extravagant urban development on the dusty plains of Inner Mongolia some 570 km from Beijing. It is the very epitome of the image China is trying to project to ...
The winds of change have swept through Burma in the past year as President Thein Sein and his government have introduced reforms that have transformed the mood of the country and caused a geopolitical shift in the region and beyond. The ...
The conflict in Syria continues to drag on and the battle for Aleppo, Syria's commercial capital and second city, has so far failed to create the tipping point that the rebels had hoped would be a precursor to their assault on Damascus. The Assad ...
Burma's Buddhist monks have long stood for non violent resistance to the country's now retired military junta and were at the forefront of a number of protest movements that chipped away at the regime's legitimacy. Since the easing of stringent ...
In a year of extreme weather, the Typhoon that hit the east coast of the Philippines on 7 November 2013 still surprised meteorologists with its sheer ferocity and speed. Typhoon Haiyan, or Yolanda as it was known in the Philippines, was the strongest...
The state of Jharkhand is home to one of the largest Adivasi (tribal) populations in India. It is also the location of an estimated 40% of the country's deposits of coal, iron ore, uranium and other minerals considered essential for India's industrial ...
Rajasthan, one of the poorest and least developed states in India, has the second lowest literacy rate for women in the country, at 44%, and a deeply entrenched caste system. But with the help of non-governmental organisations, women are leading a rural ...
Berlin has stood at the vortex of world history several times in the past century, from the rise and fall of Nazism to the post-war division of Europe into East and West, to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Communism. November 9, 1989 would ...
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 ...