In Japan, where eating is taken very seriously and fish forms a major part of the national diet 'fugu', or pufferfish, is in a league of its own. Not only is it one of the most expensive delicacies on the Japanese menu but it also carries the extra ...

I'm in Nikolai Smetanin's office where he is talking me through a series of photographs of mangled reindeer carcasses. Nikolai is the head of Yakutia's government-run hunting department. With a landmass comparable to India, Yakutia is by far the ...

In the late 1970s, Soviet geologists discovered large uranium deposits near Mardai River in the Dornod province of Eastern Mongolia. The governments of the USSR and Mongolia signed a secret agreement to open a uranium mine in 1981 and Mardai town ...

The Buddha's first sermon, the Dharmachakrapravartana ('Turning of the Wheel of Law') which put forth the Middle Path, The Four Noble Truths and The Eightfold Path after his enlightenment marked the formal beginning of Buddhism in the Indian ...

The Inca were originally a small tribe in the southern highlands of Peru. In less than a century, during the 1400s, they built one of the largest, most organised and tightly controlled empires the world had seen. Their skill in government was ...

Around the Braj region of India which is most closely associated with the festival of Holi, revellers gather at the Shriji Temple (Laadli Sarkar Mahal) in Barsana during Lath mar Holi which usually falls around March. They throw coloured powder at ...

Travelling on an urban subway system is normally a chore, but on Moscow's Metro eight decades of Russian and Soviet history unfold as you hop from station to station. The Moscow Metro opened on 15 May 1935 beginning eight decades of development. As ...

As West Africa's ebola crisis enters its second grim year and with a death toll nearing 7,000 it is easy to lose sight of the fear, sorrow and tragedy of each infection, each silent and painful death in towns and villages across the countries worst ...

On 25 April 2015 a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck central Nepal with Gorkha District at the epicentre, causing widespread destruction of property and infrastructure. A powerful aftershock on 13 May 2015 caused further damage and loss of life. Many ...

The toilet a small but fundamental part of every-day life, wherever you live in the world. Seldom do we pause and think how much we rely on having access to a decent toilet how it enables us to go to school, work, rest and play; how it preserves ...

Each evening the sleek commuter trains pulling into Bucharest's Gara de Nord make way for a relative from an earlier era. The Bucharest to Chisinau night train is an iron behemoth; uniformed attendants stand by each doorway scrutinising tickets and ...

After a week of covering the highs and lows, anger and false hopes of debt-ridden Athens, through it's Bailout Referendum and amongst its patiently exasperated ATM queues, I decided to travel out from the capital to Greece's second largest city, ...

A new gold fever has struck California - but this time it's almonds, not nuggets. On a surface area twice the size of Belgium in the state's central valley a huge agricultural zone produces around 82% of the world's almonds, an industry worth ...

Global shipping is in flux, with Europe staring recession in the face and China's stratospheric growth of years gone by now slowing markedly. Even before the current slowdown, ships that were sailing from China to Europe filled to the brim would ...

'Work Hard, Play Hard' - it's the maxim of many a stock broker and company executive. Yet a growing number of young high flyers in London and other cities around the world are taking this notion to another level. After slogging through long days at ...

In the Arabian desert, the camel is highly prized for its endurance in extreme temperatures and its ability to go for days without a drink of water. For centuries, however, it has also been a popular racing animal, able to reach speeds of up to 65 km...