The City boomed and now the City is bust. Until the final quarter of 2008, the British economy had seen over ten years of continuous expansion led by an unfettered financial services sector. Deregulation encouraged 479 foreign banks to set up offices in ...
I remember from my childhood the glory days of the Peace Race, a popular cycling event in which socialist Poland competed against our neighbouring friendly states. Each year the towns would empty as everybody found a television to watch our brave ...
Jacek Serkiew has been a postman for 40 years. As he makes his daily journey around the Polish town of Piaseczno, he is among friends. Meeting people is the best part of the job, he says. Every morning he carefully sorts through the letters in his ...
Ziemowit Howadek - Ziemek to his friends - lives a pretty ordinary life. He works as an IT specialist for a bank in Poznan, attends church and drives a Lada. But each year, in the week before Easter, Ziemek is nailed to a cross and crucified in front ...
Public House An establishment providing alcoholic beverages to be consumed on the premises. The traditional pub is an establishment found primarily in Britain and regions of British influence. English common law early imposed social responsibilities ...
Ireland is famous for its love of horses and the thoroughbreds raised on its verdant hills. During the boom years, when high-tech companies flocked to the "Celtic Tiger" and the construction industry overdosed on cheap loans, pet horses became a ...
A date has been set for the beatification of Pope John Paul II, who died in 2005 after an almost 27-year-long papacy. Vast crowds of pilgrims are expected in Rome on 1 May 2011 to witness the ceremony, performed by the current pope Benedict XVI, ...
In America, meat is big business. The meat and poultry industry is the largest sector of US agriculture, grossing an impressive US $ 155 billion in 2009 and employing a total of some 6.2 million people in companies involved in meat production along with ...
Call centre consultants are like doctors - they need to get under the client's skin to find out the most effective way of selling a product or getting valuable feedback. Call centre work is readily available and in most cases doesn't require any ...
Wika Szmyt is not your typical grandmother. 'Maturity has its charm' she says, smiling elegantly but a little reserved. 'Some people already know what they want when they are 20 while others grow up for longer. I think that I am in the second ...
About half a million people commute into Warsaw, the Polish capital, from surrounding towns and villages every day. For a city of 1.7 million, this constitutes a huge daily ebb and flow of workers, some of whom have to rise in the early hours to ...
During the Tour de France, the roads and byways of the country are lined with thousands of keen spectators. But it's not necessarily the riders they have come to see. The so-called Caravan Pubicitaire is the main draw for approximately 39% of all ...
Ekon Association in Warsaw is a recycling plant that provides jobs for people with learning difficulties or mental health issues who would otherwise find it difficult to get work.Some people working at Ekon have disabilities which they were born ...
It may not be everyone's taste in popular music but in Poland, Disco Polo is filling the clubs, blaring out of countless sound-systems up and down the country and drawing even some of the most ambivalent revellers onto the dance floor as the night ...
Every day, over half a million people commute into 'The City', London's traditional financial district, and Canary Wharf, its second business hub in East London. London generates almost a quarter of the UK's GDP, mainly through financial services. ...
Almost three years after his beatification, former pope John Paul II will be made a saint by Pope Francis on 27 April 2014 along with his predecessor, Pope John XXIII. John Paul II, revered by many Catholics, and nowhere more than in Poland, died in ...
Glasgow may well be the most passionate football city on earth. Its two mighty teams, Celtic and Rangers, are known collectively as the 'Old Firm', a sobriquet which hints at the stranglehold they have had on Scottish football for over 100 years. The ...
The 1992 famine in Somalia was, in common with many famines, as much the result of the civil war as the climatic conditions. In 1991 President Barre was overthrown by opposing clans, but they failed to agree on a replacement and plunged the country into ...
On 29th August 1949 the first Russian plutonium bomb was exploded at the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site, which came to be known as 'The Polygon'. This first detonation was followed by more than 500 nuclear explosions, both atmospheric and underground. ...
During the four year conflict in Bosnia more than 200,000 citizens were killed. Most of these were Muslim civilians murdered by paramilitaries during the ethnic cleansing of eastern and western Bosnia. Towns like Priedor, Banja Luka, Foca, Zepa and of ...
From the beginning of the Bosnian conflict in 1992, Paul Lowe takes us on a journey through Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Gorazde and Mostar - places that back then reverberated in the daily headlines much as Fallujah and Basra have done in more recent times. ...
It has a peculiar beauty, a concrete monolith winding across the landscape like a modernist snake in featureless grey concrete. Forty years after a war in which the Israeli military easily defeated the armies of three Arab nations and trebled its ...
For the players of FC Nepean Stars, a First Division Sierra Leonean football club, conditions could barely contrast more with the pampered lifestyle of their counterparts in Europe. Their squad of 18 players journey to matches in a single Toyota ...
'Are we protected in Pakistan?' asks graffiti on the wall of a burned-out shop in Shanti Nagar in the country's wheat belt. It provides its own stark answer: 'No'. Pakistan's three million Christians are nervous. They have been at the bottom of the ...
Graeme Williams began his photographic career as a photojournalist documenting the struggle to end apartheid. He never intended to become a photojournalist but as the clamour for Nelson Mandela's release grew in the late 1980s and the violence broke ...
Since 2010, Graeme Williams has been working on his project charting the transformation of South Africa's society since the end of minority rule. I began this project 16 years after the end of apartheid rule in South Africa. As a photographer, I ...
The humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan has left at least 200,000 people dead and an estimated two million displaced. The conflict has spread to neighbouring Chad and the Central African Republic, with up to four and a half million people ...
Sleeping sickness, once thought almost eradicated through vigorous colonial control programmes in the first half of the 20th century, was for a while relegated to historical footnotes in medical textbooks. Now it's making a come back in a big way. The ...
The humanitarian situation in Goma remains desperate. Over a million people are displaced, and many of those have fled their homes for the second, third or even fourth time because of conflict. Sven Torfinn reports from the Kibati camp, where Medecins ...
When peace finally came, the daunting task of building a new country could begin. There were only ten kilometres of tarmacked road in Southern Sudan, which covers an area the size of Spain and Portugal combined. An estimated six million people, more than...
In 2006, a motorcycle-riding suicide bomber rode into a crowd at a wrestling match in the town of Spin Boldak, killing at least twenty people. But Afghans are serious about sport, and have not allowed such incidents to put them off. In October 2009, ...
Vincent left Ghana at the age of 16. His journey was long and arduous, and his eventual success in reaching Europe was down to a combination of luck and his extraordinary determination. When I met him five years later he was living in Amsterdam. He ...
Every spring, out here on this endless sheet of yellow grass, two million wildebeest, zebras, gazelles and other grazers march north in search of greener pastures, with lions and hyenas stalking them and vultures circling above. It is called the ...
Joseph Gatyoung Khan made a vow, uttered in the back seat of a Land Cruiser on a very bumpy road, as he headed home for the first time in 22 years: I will not cry. He had not seen his parents for two decades. He had not set foot in his village since...
The glitzy shopping malls of London, Berlin and Shanghai, where mobile phones and other electronic gadgets are sold as must-have life-style choices, may seem a long way from the muddy jungles of Central Africa. The two are, however, inextricably ...
When Agnes Lunkembesa gave birth to her ninth child, she decided enough was enough. But although she knew perfectly well how babies were made, she had no idea how to stop them being made. Then she met Seraphine Lumfuankenda, a voluntary community health...