The al Qaeda terrorist attacks in Madrid on the 11th of March 2004 killed almost 200 people. In an unprecedented expression of unity and grief, 8 million Spaniards took to the streets to protest against terrorism. Many improvised shrines to the dead ...

The metamorphosis of Beijing's urban landscape is so shattering that maps become obsolete in a matter of days. The old hutongs, traditional districts with ground floor houses, are being swept aside by skyscrapers and their inhabitants face an enforced ...

In Mali, drought is a familiar and regular feature of daily life. The country's northern half is an arid desert, sparsely populated and currently in a state of secession following a rebellion by Tuareg fighters aligned with Ansar Dine, an islamist ...

After the fall of the Soviet Union, its enormous fishing fleet - ships and crews - were abandoned in different ports around the world. The largest chunk of the fleet ended up in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands. The ships. often ...

The leftward shift sweeping Latin America represents the most significant economic and social development in the region since a wave of leftist and populist governments were overthrown in the 1970s. Since 1998, eight states have elected leftist leaders ...

A boy tenderly cradles his younger sibling. A minibus driver leans on his window and watches the world go by. A man has his toenails clipped in the street. Women pay the equivalent of four cents to walk across a wooden bridge, avoiding the piles of ...

One of the many consequences of the war in Iraq is the creation of the world's biggest refugee crisis. There are an estimated four million displaced Iraqis, two million of whom are refugees mainly in neighbouring middle eastern countries. Of those who ...

They visit diners at a prodigious rate, but rarely stop to eat. They breeze through small towns - the high school, the country store, the town hall, perhaps the church or the gun shop - at times literally following in each other's footsteps. Everywhere ...

To understand the changes in India's economy and society, Jacob Silberberg decided to look at what its people eat. As a consumer culture takes hold and the nation's eating habits are transformed, the agricultural and food industries are changing in ...

Lucha Libre - Spanish for 'Free Fight' - is a style of wrestling which started in Mexico in 1933. It is a spectacular conflagration of art, sport and theatre. The luchadors, dressed in leotards and often distinguished by their superhero-style masks, ...

Harlot Fevah, Kitty Twister, Pussy Venom, Malicen Thunderland, Anna WrecksYa, General Lee Feisty, Triple Deck-Her. These are the pseudonyms adopted by some of the girls from the Boston Derby Dames, a team who compete in an all-female roller derby league ...

Welcome to 'Naija', or better still, '9ja'. This is what the followers of Nigeria's ever-growing hip hop community call their country, which now has one of the largest rap industries in the world. With strong connections to American music brought back by...

Bologna's Lowlands are changing rapidly. During the last twenty years, the so called Bassa ('Lowlands') has experienced a population growth never seen before in its long history. During this period, the population has doubled and its identity is ...

In 2002, peace broke out in Sri Lanka after two decades of conflict between government and secessionist rebels. 250,000 displaced people returned to their homes in the contested north of the island and another 750,000 were expected to follow. Clearing ...

A voice from the radio counts down: Neung! Song! Sam! A huge reverberating explosion shakes the ground and echoes off the surrounding mountains followed by a rush of air. A 1000lb guided bomb has just exploded nearby. The two hundred people of Phanop, a ...

Lebanon's civil war, which wracked the country from 1975 until 1990, and Hezbollah's war with Israel in 2006 have left the country with a deadly legacy of unexploded munitions, especially cluster bombs, and landmines. The Mines Advisory Group (MAG), ...

In Honduras, somebody dies a violent death every 74 minutes. The country has a murder rate more than four times that of Mexico, notorious for its mass abductions, summary executions and brutal intimidation by drug gangs. According to a UN Office of ...

Typhoon Haiyan made landfall on November 8th 2013 and was the deadliest Philippine typhoon on record, killing more than 6,000 people. Haiyan, known locally as Yolanda, had sustained winds of 315 km/h making it the strongest typhoon ever to reach ...

When the Deepwater Horizon oil spill washed ashore along the US Gulf coast in April 2010, it was against a backdrop of an existing crisis in the wetlands of Louisiana that was also largely fuelled by the oil and gas industries. Kael Alford's long-term ...

Kusum is 35 years old, and from the village of Pachapur, a remote spot in the Sangli district of the state of Maharashtra in western India. She is a widow living with HIV. Her husband died of AIDS-related causes in 2005. One of her children is HIV ...

In many families affected by AIDS elderly women are left to bring up their grandchildren. In Sangli, western India, Atul Loke often found that grandfathers took no part in looking after children, and the women were left to cope alone. As part of a wider ...

'That day, the 26th of November, will be etched in my memory. Like any other Mumbaikar, I was not prepared for the enormity of the events that unfolded over a long and gruelling 59 hours.I was at home watching the television when the news came. At first ...

By the mid 1960s, Charlie Chaplin - the man George Bernard Shaw called 'the only genius to come out of the movie industry' - was well into the twilight of his 75 year career. Having directed, produced, acted, edited and written sound scores for hundreds ...

India has never played in the Football World Cup and the sport struggles to attract anything even remotely similar to the enthusiasm which cricket, the national obsession is universally greeted with across the country. Yet every four years Kolkata, a...

To abolish child labour you first have to make it visible.Child labour has been forbidden in Bangladesh since 1992. 13 years later I visited a garment factory in Narayanganj, which is the centre of the country's textile industry. I took a picture of the ...

At least 275 people have been killed and millions have been displaced by cyclone Aila, which hit parts of coastal Bangladesh and eastern India on May 25th 2009. GMB Akash travelled to Shyamnagar Upazila, an area of Bangladesh's Satkhira district that has...

The funeral rites for the world's largest ships are read on the beaches of the Indian subcontinent. When a super tanker or a cargo vessel reaches the end of its useful life, it generally limps towards Chittagong in Bangladesh, Alang in India or ...

Nearly three thousand kilometres of railway track crisscross the delta lowlands of Bangladesh, connecting Dhaka, the capital, with Chittagong to the south-east and Calcutta to the south-west. The system was built largely by the British and began ...

The Tazreen Fashion textile factory on the outskirts of Dhaka in Bangladesh produced cheap fashion for a number of major European retailers including C&A. On 25 November 2012 it went up in flames, leaving 117 people dead and hundreds more scarred...

In one of India's poorest districts in Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state, a remarkable movement of women has evolved over the past seven years which is challenging engrained power structures and bringing the concerns of some of the country's ...

Bangladesh lies squarely in the middle of the waterlogged floodplains of some of Asia's largest rivers and relies on water transportation to ship huge quantities of goods and vast numbers of people up and down the watery arteries that traverse the ...

When search teams scouring the collapsed Rana Plaza in Savar on the outskirts of Dhaka in Bangladesh ended their efforts to find survivors among the rubble of the former shopping centre and factory complex, a shocking 1,127 had been confirmed dead in...

In a country where less than a quarter of the population uses the internet and where access is both slow and expensive, Bangladesh's 'Info Ladies' offer a series of vital services to people living in remote, rural parts of the country. Launched by ...

The catastrophic collapse of the Rana Plaza shopping centre and factory complex in Savar on the outskirts of Dhaka in Bangladesh in April 2014 claimed the lives of over 1,100 people, mainly factory workers employed in one of the numerous garment ...

Bangladesh's leather industry is worth over $ 1 billion a year and around 20,000 people are employed in the hundreds of tanneries operating along the banks of the Buriganga River in the southwest of Dhaka, the capital. Yet while this industry ...

In the Spanish province of Murcia massive building developments are being thrown up along with water guzzling 18 hole golf courses. At the same time Spain has experienced its worst droughts since 1947, river and reservoir levels have been at record lows,...