On 20 July 2015, Chad's former dictator Hissene Habre, who ruled the country from 1982 until 1990, will stand before a court in Senegal, accused of crimes against humanity, torture and war crimes. The court that is prosecuting him, the Extraordinary ...

Almost 200 years after the death of the famous writer, Jane Austen continues to enthral enthusiasts from around the world who flock in their thousands to the many locations, both real and fictional, that are forever linked to Austen and her works. ...

Rice is the second most produced grain in the world. Around 480 million tonnes were produced in 2013. At 70 million tonnes, Indonesia is the third largest producer, behind China and India. Indonesian have a multitude of words for 'rice' and even ...

Life is tough in Makoko, a sprawling slum of some 100,000 inhabitants, built on stilts into the putrid waters of Lagos Lagoon in Nigeria. The fish in the lagoon are dying, there is no electricity or running water and raw sewage laps at the floors of ...

Even though levels of violent crime in Chicago are down from their epidemically high rates of the early 70s and 90s, the city is battling a consistent scourge of violence that has seen it in the top three US cities with the most murders every year ...

Even though the spread of the deadly Ebola virus, which started in Guinea in the spring of 2014 and spread light wildfire across a number of West African countries, has markedly slowed, countries such as Sierra Leone are still struggling to contain ...

They used to be found in every village and whistle stop. Everyone knew who they were. People often laughed at them but more often than not they laughed with them. At other times people were afraid of their strange ways - afraid of the village ...

On 27 January 1945 the most notorious of Nazi Germany's concentration camps in the small Polish town of Oświęcm, hereafter seared into the collective memory as Auschwitz, was liberated by advancing Soviet forces. It is estimated that ...

6 July 2015 marks the 600th anniversary of the martyrdom of Jan Hus in Konstanz on the shores of Lake Constance in southern Germany. A century before Martin Luther and two hundred years before the split between Catholicism and Protestantism was to ...

On 7 July 2014, following weeks of growing tensions over the tit-for-tat murders of three young Israeli students and a Palestinian teenager from East Jerusalem and rockets being fired out of Gaza, the Israeli army launched a large scale military ...

Somaliland, a self-declared independent state covering the northern third of Somalia, is not known as an economic powerhouse with the fourth lowest GDP in the world. Once a year, however, it becomes the scene of the biggest movement of livestock ...

Despite changes in the law and increased tolerance in many parts of the world, the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people in some regions are still blighted by persecution and the denial of basic human rights. In 76 ...

In the dense forrest of North Kivu, a series of gruesome massacres in villages around the town of Beni have left hundreds of people dead and the local population petrified, wondering why UN peacekeepers and members of the national army (FARDC) ...

Robotica is a series of short stories exploring different ways robots are changing the way we conduct our daily lives. They are at the cutting edge of technology, innovation that could potentially alter the way we live. Autonomous machines. ...

Before the fall of the communist government in Mongolia in 1990 the population of Ulan Bator (or Ulaanbaatar as it is now known) was around 200,000. Nowadays, the city has mushroomed to almost 1.4 million, a third of population of the country. The ...

According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) we have lost 97% of wild tigers in just over a century. There are now only about 3,200 of the big cats left in the wild, three quarters of them in India. And while India's tiger population has increased by ...