A thick layer of grey ash covers the surface of the roads leading to an industrial site. The air in the city is acrid and thick. Steel plants, coking plants and cement factories loom out of the haze and disappear once more as one travels beyond the city....
The writer J.G. Ballard died on April 19th 2009 at the age of 78. He had lived in a semi-detached house in Shepperton, a commuter town outside London, for most of his life.'I came to live in Shepperton in 1960' he told an interviewer in 2008. 'I ...
Beijing has undergone enormous change in the space of a few years. Although the political regime remains the same, the loosening of economic policies and regulations is the main driver of this change. As a result investment in real estate in Beijing and ...
The Three Gorges Dam project, first conceived by Mao in the 1970s and due for completion in 2006, is an extraordinary feat of engineering. The dam is 185 metres tall and 2,309 metres long. Behind its vast walls, a reservoir will stretch over 650 ...
It's almost midnight in Dalston, an up and coming area of East London, as we arrive at Die Freche Muse, a neo-burlesque club night that describes itself as 'irreverent, decadent, sexually ambivalent and dissolute'. The location had been kept secret ...
This project explores the industrial hinterlands of four remote provinces in northern China: Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Shanxi and Shaanxi. In the past three decades the rapid process of industrialisation has transformed their formerly bucolic ...
This project is a road trip around the coastal regions of England, Wales and Scotland, which together make up an island that is the largest in Europe and the ninth largest in the world. My intention is to explore aspects of Britain's identity by ...
Every day, busloads of Russians cross into Chinese border towns like Suifenhe and Dongning to buy cheap Chinese goods. They are entrepreneurs, here for business. The items available range from textiles to timber to scrap metal. However, behind this ...
Even by the standards of hermit regimes, Burma lives in a world of its own, a shadow of the country that was once the world's largest rice producer. Rangoon, once so alive with diversity and people from across the region is today a place of ...
With golf courses, marinas, hotel complexes and amusement parks mushrooming out of the ground and the waters along the the Straits of Johor, Malaysia's watery border with Singapore, the area is being transformed into an Eldorado for the region's ...
For centuries, ships following the trade winds ventured into the Straits of Malacca, a narrow 805 km stretch of water between peninsular Malaysia and the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Today, from an economic perspective, it remains one of the most ...
The Black Sea - mysterious, menacing and mythical - is at the heart of centuries of warfare, turmoil and historical drama. A mixture of totalitarian regimes and young democracies, a melting pot of ethnic minorities, the Black Sea region is a point of...
At the end of its nearly 2,900 km course, the Danube, Europe's longest river, spreads out into countless tentacles over a huge, watery plain along the border between Romania and Ukraine. The Danube Delta, Europe's second largest after the great ...
Known to its multi-ethnic populations by different names, Transylvania, now a part of modern Romania, has long enchanted and enthralled foreign visitors and writers including Bram Stoker who captured the imagination of his Western audiences with his ...
During Soviet Times, the small Caucasian Soviet Republic of Abkhazia was part of Soviet Georgia and Joseph Stalin's favourite holiday destination where he would hold court at one of his numerous dachas in the mountains overlooking the Black Sea. As ...
'Janjaweed' is said to translate as 'devils on horseback'. Since 2003, the people of Darfur have faced a reign of terror waged by the Arab militia group, which is backed by the Sudanese government. At least 200,000 people have been killed, and over two ...
On a hilltop near the small Latvian town of Piltinkalns, around a hundred people gather each Midsummer's Eve. The women carry herbs collected from the forest, most prized of which is the mythical blooming fern, said to only flower on this day and to ...
The earthquake in Kashmir on October 8th 2005 killed more than 73,000 people, and up to five million lost their homes. Three months after the massive quake, the survivors were struggling to stay alive in the cold weather. Millions were living in tents ...
Three million people have been displaced by the violent conflict in Colombia. Yet after 40 years of civil war and with the second highest number of IDPs (internally displaced persons) in the world after Sudan, the conflict hardly merits a mention in the ...
Five years into the war in Iraq, almost five million of its citizens remained displaced. The two countries that led the invasion have largely avoided taking responsibility for the human fallout. Around 20,000 Iraqi refugees live in the US, and slightly ...
The Yangtze river supplies water to one in twelve people on the planet and supports 200 cities along its length including Chongqing, the biggest municipality in the world with 31 million residents. Mao famously swam in the river at Wuhan in July 1966, at...
They have been described as the frozen conflicts: those messy, unresolved territorial issues left over from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Early in August of 2008, two of these conflicts experienced a sudden melting.South Ossetia is home to just ...
The war in DR Congo is the most deadly conflict to have taken place anywhere on earth since World War II. Bewildering in its complexity, the war officially came to an end in 2003. And yet the killing goes on. At the beginning of 2008, as a ceasefire was ...
It's a journey of horrors, the kind you would only make if you were truly desperate. But in the failed state of Somalia there are a lot of desperate people. Up to a quarter of a million Somalis are now living in Yemen after undertaking the harrowing boat...
Strictly Come Dancing is the most watched television programme in the world, according to figures released by industry magazine Television Business International in November 2008. The show, which began in the UK in 1949, has spawned more international ...
Iran is a country divided. Following the disputed election held in June 2009, that division was symbolised by a single street: Vali asr Avenue, the spine of Tehran. At one end, supporters of incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have rallied in his ...
Standing in mud that reaches up to their knees, hundreds of men form a human chain that snakes to the horizon. They are trying to rebuild a flood barrier with their bare hands. There are no excavators or trucks, no cement or iron. Everything here is ...
A stricken oil tanker sits in a slick of 200 tons of diesel, 100 miles south of Norway's capital city, Oslo. The usually picturesque landscapes of Sastein and Langesund, site of wildlife sanctuaries and tourist beaches, saw thousands of birds slaughtered...
The smell gets in your clothes and stays. The sun barely shines through the windows. Walls that were once white are now black. The streets are covered in a dirty layer of ash, and the horizon is dominated by factory chimneys and slag heaps that are ...
For close to 8 millennia, the cobbled streets of Aleppo have echoed with the footfall of traders and shoppers. The narrow alleyways of its souks, marked by 2000 years of continuous construction, sell much the same wares now as they did centuries ago, ...
'This work is about people on the run. For almost seven years I have followed in their footsteps - marked by war and unbearable anxieties, but also by hopes and aspirations. This pursuit has taken me to a refugee camp in Congo, to an earthen hut ...
Six months after Japan was rocked by a huge earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, two Panos photographers - William Daniels and Espen Rasmussen - travelled back to the devastated areas to document the continuing reconstruction. William Daniels, ...
After 3 decades of sham elections which saw Egypt's former president Hosni Mubarak re-elected on four occasions with ludicrously large majorities, the country is now entering a new era with an eagerly awaited election that is to start on 28 November....
The Nobel Peace Prize this year has been awarded to three women - Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson and Leymah Gbowee from Liberia and Tawakkul Karman from Yemen. The Nobel laureates will travel to Oslo for the Peace Prize ceremony at Oslo's City Hall. On 11 ...
On a thin mattress by the wall sits Rana Alkassem Alkhaled with her children. She lost her husband in the deadly conflict in Syria, and fled to safer grounds accross the border in Lebanon. She is not alone. According to the UNHCR, of the more than 30,000...
Alphonsine Banyanga was nine when the militia kidnapped her and started using her as a sex slave. Two years later, they left her under a tree, pregnant. The men had tried to cut out the foetus using machetes, scissors and gun barrels. When she was ...