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 ...

'I grew up with my ancestors having orange beards or hair. It is so common in our culture that I hardly took any notice of it. As time went on, however, I found out that dying hair with henna has a special place in Muslim culture. I was curious to ...

After yet another rickety craft packed with migrants heading for Europe sank in the Mediterraneon on 3 October 2013 with a loss of 368 lives, the Italian government decided to put together a flotilla of five warships that would patrol the sea and ...

As the sky brightens, fresh gusts of air sweep along the empty streets where a few 'pexeiras' (fish sellers) are preparing their trays filled with that morning's catch which they carry on their heads from door to door. People jog along Cabral Canela ...

Straddling the equator in the gulf of Guinea lies the island nation of Sao Tome and Principe, the second smallest African nation and the smallest among Portuguese speaking countries. Previously uninhabited, it was discovered around 1470 by Portuguese...

From the early 16th century onwards, Portuguese settlers who had come to the new colony of Sao Tome and Principe started importing slave labour from the African mainland to work on the sugar plantations (or rocas) that were spreading across the lush ...

On 25 April 2015 a devastating earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale struck Nepal, killing over 8,000 people and injuring almost twice that number, destroying or damaging more than 700,000 houses, and displacing 2.8 million people. The ...

In some of Thailand's toughest prisons, where murderers and rapists rub shoulder with career criminals of all stripes, an ancient combat sport has become an unusual means of encouraging inmates to reform themselves, potentially working toward an ...