In the age of universal mobile phone coverage, Facebook and Lonely Planet guides there are still a few countries which tightly restrict independent tourism. North Korea takes great pains to ensure that foreign visitors only get to see the socialist ...

Like many of the cities that were built and populated against all odds in the days of the Soviet Union's breakneck development of the 1930s and 40s, Norilsk doubled up as a prison camp, part of the vast network of forced labour colonies that became ...

The Kupol ('Dome') Gold Mine in Russia's far northeastern Chukotka Autonomous Okrug is a fully functioning self-contained mini-city of 1,200 workers who live on the remote station in shifts around the year. For three months of the year - between ...

Russia's Taimyr region, stretching far into the arctic ocean, high above the arctic circle, is home to almost two thirds of the world's wild reindeer population. The local indigenous groups - Nenets, Dolgans and Nganasans - are famous for their ...

Since the end of Apartheid in South Africa in 1994, around three million black South Africans have risen into the country's middle class. Until recently, the middle class was almost exclusively white but demographics have rapidly altered this ...

In the far reaches of North Dakota, close to the Canadian border, a remote and inhospitable landscape has turned into an El Dorado for oil companies forever searching for new reserves and for thousands of victims of the credit crunch. The result is ...

In the ever shifting web of alliances, offensives and counter offensives that have characterised Syria's brutal civil war, the People's Protection Units (or YPG by their Kurdish acronym) have been a consistent force in the far northeast of the ...

In the 70th year after nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and 100 years after chemical weapons were used at the Battle of Ypres during the First World War, we are experiencing one of the most insecure periods in decades. The ...

As the Syrian Civil War draws to the end of its fourth lethal year, Panos photographer Teun Voeten and Dutch journalist Robert Dulmers made their way to Syria, taking the official, government sanctioned route and travelling with the Syrian Army. ...

For decades now the United States has been Israel's staunchest Western ally and its most generous foreign benefactor. With annual grants of between $ 1 and $ 3 billion since 1985, three quarters of which Israel is required to spend on American goods ...

9 November 2014 is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The 3.6 metre high concrete embodiment of the division of Europe into a democratic, US-focused West and a Communist, Moscow-dominated East, ran through the heart of one of ...

Enthusiasm for the European Union (EU) is at a historical low and radical anti-EU parties are polling high in European and national elections. Amongst the many complaints coming from citizens of the 28-member club are the lack of transparency of ...

The history of Poland is filled with tales of foreign invasion, partition and occupation. In the period between 1795, when the country was carved up between Tsarist Russia, Austria-Hungary and Prussia for the third time in a generation, and 1918 when...

The North Parade Bingo Club in Skegness, a fading seaside resort on the northeastern coast of Britain, is one of the few remaining dinosaurs of the heyday of Bingo, that hearkens back to a bygone era. As the Bingo industry in general has gone into ...

This essay focuses on young South Africans who were born after the end of apartheid. Twenty years after the beginning of democracy in South Africa the 2014 national elections marked the first occasion in which a new generation of youngsters born into...

Along the Jamuna River, one of the three main waterways that flow south through Bangladesh, regular flooding and heavy rains have led to levels of erosion along the riverbanks that even concerted efforts by the government to reinforce them with ...