Since the end of Apartheid in South Africa in 1994, around three million black South Africans have risen into the country's middle class. Until recently, the middle class was almost exclusively white but demographics have rapidly altered this ...

In the far reaches of North Dakota, close to the Canadian border, a remote and inhospitable landscape has turned into an El Dorado for oil companies forever searching for new reserves and for thousands of victims of the credit crunch. The result is ...

In the ever shifting web of alliances, offensives and counter offensives that have characterised Syria's brutal civil war, the People's Protection Units (or YPG by their Kurdish acronym) have been a consistent force in the far northeast of the ...

In the 70th year after nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and 100 years after chemical weapons were used at the Battle of Ypres during the First World War, we are experiencing one of the most insecure periods in decades. The ...

As the Syrian Civil War draws to the end of its fourth lethal year, Panos photographer Teun Voeten and Dutch journalist Robert Dulmers made their way to Syria, taking the official, government sanctioned route and travelling with the Syrian Army. ...

For decades now the United States has been Israel's staunchest Western ally and its most generous foreign benefactor. With annual grants of between $ 1 and $ 3 billion since 1985, three quarters of which Israel is required to spend on American goods ...

9 November 2014 is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The 3.6 metre high concrete embodiment of the division of Europe into a democratic, US-focused West and a Communist, Moscow-dominated East, ran through the heart of one of ...

Enthusiasm for the European Union (EU) is at a historical low and radical anti-EU parties are polling high in European and national elections. Amongst the many complaints coming from citizens of the 28-member club are the lack of transparency of ...

The history of Poland is filled with tales of foreign invasion, partition and occupation. In the period between 1795, when the country was carved up between Tsarist Russia, Austria-Hungary and Prussia for the third time in a generation, and 1918 when...

The North Parade Bingo Club in Skegness, a fading seaside resort on the northeastern coast of Britain, is one of the few remaining dinosaurs of the heyday of Bingo, that hearkens back to a bygone era. As the Bingo industry in general has gone into ...

This essay focuses on young South Africans who were born after the end of apartheid. Twenty years after the beginning of democracy in South Africa the 2014 national elections marked the first occasion in which a new generation of youngsters born into...

Along the Jamuna River, one of the three main waterways that flow south through Bangladesh, regular flooding and heavy rains have led to levels of erosion along the riverbanks that even concerted efforts by the government to reinforce them with ...

'I grew up with my ancestors having orange beards or hair. It is so common in our culture that I hardly took any notice of it. As time went on, however, I found out that dying hair with henna has a special place in Muslim culture. I was curious to ...

After yet another rickety craft packed with migrants heading for Europe sank in the Mediterraneon on 3 October 2013 with a loss of 368 lives, the Italian government decided to put together a flotilla of five warships that would patrol the sea and ...

As the sky brightens, fresh gusts of air sweep along the empty streets where a few 'pexeiras' (fish sellers) are preparing their trays filled with that morning's catch which they carry on their heads from door to door. People jog along Cabral Canela ...

Straddling the equator in the gulf of Guinea lies the island nation of Sao Tome and Principe, the second smallest African nation and the smallest among Portuguese speaking countries. Previously uninhabited, it was discovered around 1470 by Portuguese...

From the early 16th century onwards, Portuguese settlers who had come to the new colony of Sao Tome and Principe started importing slave labour from the African mainland to work on the sugar plantations (or rocas) that were spreading across the lush ...

On 25 April 2015 a devastating earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale struck Nepal, killing over 8,000 people and injuring almost twice that number, destroying or damaging more than 700,000 houses, and displacing 2.8 million people. The ...

In some of Thailand's toughest prisons, where murderers and rapists rub shoulder with career criminals of all stripes, an ancient combat sport has become an unusual means of encouraging inmates to reform themselves, potentially working toward an ...

On 20 July 2015, Chad's former dictator Hissene Habre, who ruled the country from 1982 until 1990, will stand before a court in Senegal, accused of crimes against humanity, torture and war crimes. The court that is prosecuting him, the Extraordinary ...

Almost 200 years after the death of the famous writer, Jane Austen continues to enthral enthusiasts from around the world who flock in their thousands to the many locations, both real and fictional, that are forever linked to Austen and her works. ...

Rice is the second most produced grain in the world. Around 480 million tonnes were produced in 2013. At 70 million tonnes, Indonesia is the third largest producer, behind China and India. Indonesian have a multitude of words for 'rice' and even ...

Life is tough in Makoko, a sprawling slum of some 100,000 inhabitants, built on stilts into the putrid waters of Lagos Lagoon in Nigeria. The fish in the lagoon are dying, there is no electricity or running water and raw sewage laps at the floors of ...

Even though levels of violent crime in Chicago are down from their epidemically high rates of the early 70s and 90s, the city is battling a consistent scourge of violence that has seen it in the top three US cities with the most murders every year ...

Even though the spread of the deadly Ebola virus, which started in Guinea in the spring of 2014 and spread light wildfire across a number of West African countries, has markedly slowed, countries such as Sierra Leone are still struggling to contain ...

They used to be found in every village and whistle stop. Everyone knew who they were. People often laughed at them but more often than not they laughed with them. At other times people were afraid of their strange ways - afraid of the village ...

On 27 January 1945 the most notorious of Nazi Germany's concentration camps in the small Polish town of Oświęcm, hereafter seared into the collective memory as Auschwitz, was liberated by advancing Soviet forces. It is estimated that ...

6 July 2015 marks the 600th anniversary of the martyrdom of Jan Hus in Konstanz on the shores of Lake Constance in southern Germany. A century before Martin Luther and two hundred years before the split between Catholicism and Protestantism was to ...

On 7 July 2014, following weeks of growing tensions over the tit-for-tat murders of three young Israeli students and a Palestinian teenager from East Jerusalem and rockets being fired out of Gaza, the Israeli army launched a large scale military ...

Somaliland, a self-declared independent state covering the northern third of Somalia, is not known as an economic powerhouse with the fourth lowest GDP in the world. Once a year, however, it becomes the scene of the biggest movement of livestock ...

Despite changes in the law and increased tolerance in many parts of the world, the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people in some regions are still blighted by persecution and the denial of basic human rights. In 76 ...

In the dense forrest of North Kivu, a series of gruesome massacres in villages around the town of Beni have left hundreds of people dead and the local population petrified, wondering why UN peacekeepers and members of the national army (FARDC) ...

Robotica is a series of short stories exploring different ways robots are changing the way we conduct our daily lives. They are at the cutting edge of technology, innovation that could potentially alter the way we live. Autonomous machines. ...

Before the fall of the communist government in Mongolia in 1990 the population of Ulan Bator (or Ulaanbaatar as it is now known) was around 200,000. Nowadays, the city has mushroomed to almost 1.4 million, a third of population of the country. The ...

According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) we have lost 97% of wild tigers in just over a century. There are now only about 3,200 of the big cats left in the wild, three quarters of them in India. And while India's tiger population has increased by ...

Malawi has one cancer specialist for 16 million people and no radiotherapy facility. In Africa, cancer rates are expected to grow 400% over the next 50 years and a survey across the continent found 45% of the countries had no hospice or palliative ...