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,...

If I have time on my hands I often choose to walk from my home in Borough, just south of the river Thames, to my office in Old Street in the centre of London. The journey is approximately 2.7 miles, or 4.3 kilometres. Walking in one day, I began to idly ...

In Calea Vacaresti, on the outskirts of Bucharest, four families have made their homes in the dried out basin of an artificial lake. Eking out a living collecting scrap metal to sell to local car wreckers, they build shacks from bricks, plastic and ...

Sicily's shores have been the first landing point for thousands of would-be immigrants to the European Union. Many have been able to continue to Italy's mainland, escaping the attentions of the authorities and dispersing across the continent in pursuit ...

The Greek port of Patras is home to around 3,000 illegal immigrants. Most are Afghans, although there are also significant numbers of Iranians and Uzbeks. From here they try to find passage to other European destinations by hiding in ships, ...

For nearly two hundred years, a small group of women in the town of Cachoeira have joined together in a sisterhood that celebrates freedom from slavery, women's resistance and Afro-Brazilian culture. Irmandade da Boa Morte - Sisterhood of the Good ...

In the tense early days of May, as the Greek government unveiled a raft of harsh austerity measures aimed at tackling the country's crippling debt and dire public finances, Alfredo D'Amato gauged the effect of the crisis on people's day-to-day lives. ...

Kuduro is the soundtrack to life in 21st century Angola, the music that has given back the happiness and the desire to dance to a country emerging from decades of civil war. The streets of the capital, Luanda, are dominated by the sound systems of ...

If it was a bird, Luanda would be a huge parrot, drunk of abyss and blue in colour. If it was a catastrophe, it would be an earthquake: uncontrolled energy that shakes deep down to the earth's foundations. If it was a woman, it would be a mulatta ...

It is early morning. Only the voices of fishermen cleaning their boats in the harbour and the gentle patter of a few people walking along the main road can be heard. As breakfast time approaches the warm smell of pastry floats through the air. ...

In less than a month, ordinary Tunisians from across the social spectrum brought down the cleptocratic 23-year regime of president Zine el Abidine Ben Ali and unleashed an avalanche of popular protest movements that continue to rumble across the ...

Mozambique's vibrant Zion Churches are a specifically African expression of the global Pentecostal movement that is quickly becoming the fastest growing religious denomination in the world with an eight-fold increase in adherents over the past half ...

Kuapa Kokoo, or 'Good Cocoa Farmers Company', is a co-operative that is run by, and works for, Ghanaian cocoa farmers. It was set up in 1993 to protect farmers during the liberalisation of the cocoa market that took place in the early 1990s, and now has ...

Justice is a journey in post-war Sierra Leone. People negotiate and experience the justice system differently according to their means, their gender, their status and even the place they live. The system itself is varied and complex, with many routes...