Wounded soldiers lie prone on the battlefield, but they are not scattered across it as one might expect. They are in a neat line, each facing in the same direction and spaced out at regular intervals. Their injuries follow a pattern too. The first ...
The 7th of November 2010 saw the first 'democratic' election in Burma since 1990. Many had hoped that this would be an historic opportunity for the long suffering Burmese people to put an end to the junta's military dictatorship and herald a new era ...
On November 13th 2010, Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest in Rangoon. Suu Kyi, whose name translates as 'A Bright Collection of Strange Victories', had spent almost 15 of the last 21 years under house arrest. ...
On the 7th of June 2010, the day Afghanistan overtook Vietnam to become the longest war in US history, ten NATO soldiers including seven Americans were killed. One of those was 21-year-old US Army Soldier Brendan Neenan. Pilots and medics from ...
North Korea is the world's last and only hereditary communist dictatorships and has been in the news spotlight for all the wrong reasons over the past decades. It is believed to have torpedoed a South Korean naval vessel in March 2010, killing 46 ...
They may not conform to the western stereotype of a provocative girl band but Myanmar's first all girl pop act, the Me N Ma Girls are certainly pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable in deeply religious and conservative Burmese society. The ...
Ordos City, which derives its name from the Mongolian word for 'palaces', is a gleaming, extravagant urban development on the dusty plains of Inner Mongolia some 570 km from Beijing. It is the very epitome of the image China is trying to project to ...
The winds of change have swept through Burma in the past year as President Thein Sein and his government have introduced reforms that have transformed the mood of the country and caused a geopolitical shift in the region and beyond. The ...
The conflict in Syria continues to drag on and the battle for Aleppo, Syria's commercial capital and second city, has so far failed to create the tipping point that the rebels had hoped would be a precursor to their assault on Damascus. The Assad ...
Burma's Buddhist monks have long stood for non violent resistance to the country's now retired military junta and were at the forefront of a number of protest movements that chipped away at the regime's legitimacy. Since the easing of stringent ...
In a year of extreme weather, the Typhoon that hit the east coast of the Philippines on 7 November 2013 still surprised meteorologists with its sheer ferocity and speed. Typhoon Haiyan, or Yolanda as it was known in the Philippines, was the strongest...
The state of Jharkhand is home to one of the largest Adivasi (tribal) populations in India. It is also the location of an estimated 40% of the country's deposits of coal, iron ore, uranium and other minerals considered essential for India's industrial ...
Rajasthan, one of the poorest and least developed states in India, has the second lowest literacy rate for women in the country, at 44%, and a deeply entrenched caste system. But with the help of non-governmental organisations, women are leading a rural ...
Berlin has stood at the vortex of world history several times in the past century, from the rise and fall of Nazism to the post-war division of Europe into East and West, to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Communism. November 9, 1989 would ...
Photographer Robert Wallis and writer Jennifer Wallace have criss-crossed the 'swing state' of Florida on the eve of the U.S. presidential elections. With its large number of electoral college votes and an almost even split between Democratic and ...
In the West mud is seen as dirt yet in rural west Africa it is the most common of building materials. It has been used for hundreds of years to build sensational structures - houses, mosques, palaces, temples, entire communities - which are repaired and ...
In the fields of Sanlucar la Mayor outside Seville, Europe's first commercial solar power station offers a startling glimpse into a future powered by renewable energy sources. The PS10 plant produces electricity with 624 heliostats (movable mirrors), ...
According to the United Nations, the beginning of 2007 marked a dramatic demographic turning point. For the first time in human history, more than half of humanity is living in cities with millions more moving from the countryside to urban areas ...
Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans risk their lives each year trying to reach the United States. The UN estimates that some 25 million of them have now immigrated to the US. Most migrants these days come from Central America where poverty, lack...
Four trips to North Korea, each with the same official, hour-by-hour itinerary as the previous visit. The birthplace of Kim Il Sung, the Triumphal Arch, the Museum of International Friendship, the Number One Shop, the tower representing 'Juche' ideology ...
Helmand Province has been the setting for some of the heaviest fighting of the Afghan war. As part of the troop surge announced by President Obama at the end of 2009, the number of US soldiers in the province was increased to 20,000 by the summer of ...
Afghanistan is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world.The Soviet occupation of the country from 1979 until the final withdrawal in 1989 saw the urban centres controlled by Soviet troops and Soviet-backed militia, locked in constant ...
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's diminutive president since 2005, is no stranger to controversy. He famously called for the State of Israel to be "wiped off the map" and has shown remarkable truculence in the face of international condemnation of the ...
Somalia has not had a functioning central government since 1991. While northern parts of the country have broken away, setting up de facto proto-states including Puntland and Somaliland, the rump of the country remains perennially riven by fighting ...
Afghanistan used to be a peaceful country, popular with hippies coming from Europe to South East Asia. But things changed dramatically after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The Soviet intervention left two million dead, a third of the ...
The Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world without a nation, numbering over 30 million people with a common language and culture. Kurdish history came to a virtual standstill after World War I, when the region known as Kurdistan was divided ...
Under the brief reign of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the country's women bore the brunt of the suffering.Amnesty International calls Afghanistan under the Taliban 'a humanrightscatastrophe' and many Afghan women who struggled to survive this era ...
Lake Urmia in Iran's far Northwest, close to the border with Turkey, is the largest lake in the Middle East and the third largest salt lake on earth. Much like the much more famous Aral Sea, however, it has been shrinking over the past three decades,...
Before the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran under the Shah had close relations with the United States which saw it as a reliable ally in a volatile region and an important bulwark against the neighbouring Soviet Union. With its vast oil reserves, ...
The Hijab, a headscarf worn by Muslim women in the presence of men they are not closely related to, divides opinion both in Muslim countries and in secular countries which Muslims call home. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, where Shia Islam has ...
Dhaka is the fastest growing megacity in the world and one of the poorest. It is the keeper of strong survivors, restless migrants and climate refugees. If a city is made of dreams and desires then a megacity is made of dreams, desires and fears. ...
MASS LAYOFFS SUMMARY SEPTEMBER 2010 For release 10:00 a.m. (EDT) Friday, October 22, 2010 USDL-10-1452 BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR Employers took 1,486 mass layoff actions in September that resulted in the separation ...
One in four people in Sweden will have personal experiences with mental illness in their lives according to Fountain House, an international mental health charity. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), around 450 million people worldwide ...
Flatlands focuses on Johannesburg's inner city. The work documents people who have moved into this high-rise urban environment; many of them refugees, all of them searching for 'gold' in one form or another. And so it has always been. For over a ...
Brakpan is a small town that lies on the East Rand of Gauteng, sandwiched between Boksburg, Benoni and Springs. A once-prosperous mining community, today there are pawnshops, roadhouses, mechanics, mini casinos and other day-to-day shops lining the ...
It was night. I had cut my hair, shaved my beard, and was dressed in blue overalls, a long sleeve blue shirt, and a blue baseball hat. I was one of them. 'Come here', Cornelius said. He was sitting with his wife in the corner of their dining room ...