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 ...
Dhaka is the fastest growing megacity in the world and one of the poorest. It is the keeper of strong survivors, restless migrants and climate refugees. If a city is made of dreams and desires then a megacity is made of dreams, desires and fears. ...
MASS LAYOFFS SUMMARY SEPTEMBER 2010 For release 10:00 a.m. (EDT) Friday, October 22, 2010 USDL-10-1452 BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR Employers took 1,486 mass layoff actions in September that resulted in the separation ...
One in four people in Sweden will have personal experiences with mental illness in their lives according to Fountain House, an international mental health charity. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), around 450 million people worldwide ...
Flatlands focuses on Johannesburg's inner city. The work documents people who have moved into this high-rise urban environment; many of them refugees, all of them searching for 'gold' in one form or another. And so it has always been. For over a ...
Brakpan is a small town that lies on the East Rand of Gauteng, sandwiched between Boksburg, Benoni and Springs. A once-prosperous mining community, today there are pawnshops, roadhouses, mechanics, mini casinos and other day-to-day shops lining the ...
It was night. I had cut my hair, shaved my beard, and was dressed in blue overalls, a long sleeve blue shirt, and a blue baseball hat. I was one of them. 'Come here', Cornelius said. He was sitting with his wife in the corner of their dining room ...
It wasn't clear if they were lovers or just friends. I don't think they even knew. They had a chemistry that radiated from their intertwined bodies and spread over the crowd in tangible waves. Ceci and Meme were like yin and yang. Ceci was a ...
"It's not easy to catch a condor", Americo Waman said. He leaned in closer and his voice fell to a whisper. "You have to pay the Apus (Andean Gods) with incense, a coca seed, and a piece of llama heart. You must ask the mountains if you can borrow the ...
The southern tip of South America, made up of the Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego and thousands of smaller islands, is separated from the continent by the Strait of Magellan, where the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans meet in tempestuous seas, and shared...
Legend has it that mountains used to walk and talk like humans. One of these mountains was Tunupa, a woman who lived with her husband and three children. One of the children died and the husband left, taking another child with him. In her grief, ...
It sounds like a contradiction in terms, and in many ways it is. But Bolivia - completely landlocked and at least 100 miles from the Pacific Ocean at its western-most point - is maintaining, and intensely proud of, its Fuerza Naval Boliviana, or ...
Bolivia is one of several countries in South America which is home to communities of Mennonites, a group of Christian Anabaptists who migrated to the Americas from Eastern Europe in a number of waves from the late 17th century until the 1950s. ...
On their epic 7 month journey from Quito in Ecuador down to Tierra del Fuego at the bottom of the South American subcontinent, Karla Gachet and Ivan Kashinsky encountered myriad different communities, landscapes and experiences. The last foray was to...
"Jallalla maestritos!" - "Jallalla," they all respond. In complete darkness, illuminated only with the lights on our helmets, I was chewing coca leaves with five miners and a devil made of clay, better known as Uncle Lucas. In front of him, coca ...
Richly adorned multi-storey mansions with elaborate turrets, balconies, pillars and adornments from across the history of architecture are not the first thing that springs to mind when one thinks of Roma, or Gypsies as they are disparagingly known ...
The Yasuni National Park in the east of Ecuador, home to the indigenous Waorani and Kichwa groups amongst others, is one of the most biologically diverse places on earth, boasting the world's highest density of amphibian, tree and bat species. The ...
Every May, the small mountain communities of Acatlan and Zitlala in the Mexican state of Guerrero erupt in raucous celebrations during the Catholic Holy week which coincides with the beginning of the spring planting season. The annual celebrations ...
The afternoon sun ignited the dust clouds as silhouettes danced along the mountain path between Salasaca and Pelileo. They passed like a pack of wolves closing in on its prey, with swords in the air and aguardiente (cane alcohol) on their breath, ...
Carmen Rosa works in a restaurant high in the Bolivian Andes. Like many Aymara women, she wears large colourful dresses, several petticoats and a bowler hat tipped slightly to one side. But unlike most Cholitas, Carmen spends her free time leaping from...
It's a painfully familiar story: a huge, ruthless oil company descends on a quiet, rural location, extracts vast quantities of crude oil with total disregard for the environmental pollution caused, then winds down its operation and leaves the ...
The Gringo The handsome Techno-Cumbia star took the Ñusta, an indigenous beauty queen, by the hand. "Are you single", he screamed into the microphone, holding her hand up in the air. "Yes, I'm single, and looking for a man", she yelled out ...
An industrial estate on the outskirts of the Colombian capital Bogota may not be the most romantic association most buyers of elaborate flower bouquets would want to make with their colourful and fragrant expressions of affection. Yet Colombia has ...
Once known as "Little San Francisco" and "The Jewel of the Pacific" for its vibrant atmosphere and hilly seaside setting, the Chilean port city of Valparaiso lost much of its status and trading traffic with the opening of the Panama Canal in the ...
It quickly became known as Camp Esperanza, meaning hope. At first, the makeshift tent city above the San Jose mine in Chile's Atacama desert was home to the relatives of the 33 men trapped 700 metres below. But as the weeks went by and the moment of ...
Edison Pea has been to hell and back and he has the photographs to prove it. Edison, an Elvis fan and fanatical runner, was one of 33 miners trapped 700 metres underground at the San Jose mine in Chile. He ran down pitch-black tunnels on every one ...
Tallaght village is a southern suburb of Dublin, lying on the western foothills of the Dublin Mountains. Once a small settlement, suburban development from the 1970s has pushed the population over the 100,000 mark. The area has suffered from high ...
The Ulster Defence Association (UDA) is the largest loyalist paramilitary organisation in Northern Ireland. For years it undertook a violent armed struggle against Republican movements and Catholic people. Since the Good Friday Agreement peace ...
Adam Patterson began this project in response to media reports on teenage gangs in London. 2008 was a particularly violent and bloody year in the British capital with 29 teenage fatalities as a result of gun and knife crime. In the wake of such ...
Las Vegas is an iconic international city, a glowing neon oasis sprouting from the Nevada desert. It symbolises the extreme end of western capitalism and libertarian values, an adult playground to cater for every vice. Roughly 150,000 people pass ...
Alice Seeley Harris, along with her husband John Harris, was responsible in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for what was probably the first orchestrated multimedia campaign against large scale human rights abuses. Alice Seeley Harris was a ...
Anti-Slavery International, founded in 1839, is the world's oldest international human rights organisation and the only charity in the United Kingdom to work exclusively against slavery and related abuses. These photographs and records are from their ...
Greenland, one of the world's most inaccessible destinations, is quickly becoming one of the last frontiers of the tourist industry, providing people with the chance to witness first-hand the melting polar ice caps. There's something inherently ...