Every year, the Swiss canton of Valais plays host to a series of unusual sporting events when the combats de reines (or 'queen fights') draw tens of thousands of spectators who watch massive Herens breed cows push and shove each other across a small ...

In what has been described as Africa's world war, three million people died in the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 1998 and 2003. Following the signing of a peace treaty and formation of a transitional government last year, a ...

For the last 22 years, Teun Voeten has been covering wars and conflicts worldwide and has seen the whole gamut of barbaric acts humans are capable of inflicting on each other. But according to him, nothing compares to the recent drug violence in...

It was 1998, and the civil war in Sierra Leone had been raging for seven years. I had been given what I thought would be a standard assignment on child soldiers, some of whom were said to be as young as seven. No sooner had I arrived in the town ...

I first heard about New York's tunnel people in 1992 when I met Terry Williams, an ethnographer specialising in urban issues. Williams described them as 'a new class of people who have been rejected by society and became in fact invisible.' ...

Political caricature has been used for centuries by people wanting to poke fun at or discredit a maligned leader or political party. As freedom of expression has grown in rebel-controlled Libya, so too has the use of cartoon and caricature - most often ...

The readers of De Volkskrant, a Dutch daily newspaper, once voted Charleroi "the ugliest city in Europe". The town of 200,000 just 40 miles south of Brussels is notorious for its dreary housing complexes and defunct industries and is struggling with ...

In the last 25 years 4.9 million people have been forcibly displaced in Colombia's civil conflict. At the root of the violence and displacement is control - control of the local population, control of territory, control of natural resources, and ...

'Thank you for generating employment with your visit' reads a handwritten notice in blue marker pen at the exit to the big top. Not many have read that notice lately. After several weeks of rain, public apathy and just plain bad luck Mario Salazar ...

'It is very Jewish to be a shepherd', says Shaltiel, a young settler in Tekoa in the West Bank. 'When I'm with the herd, I sing and pray in order to lift myself above the animal level. When staying too long with animals, you could easily start to behave ...

In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a single house can become an important symbol. In December 2008, a building in Hebron became the focal point for the most bitter clash between settlers and the Israeli government for more than two years.The Israeli ...

The State of Israel, built by immigrants and on the principle of encouraging immigration of Jews from all over the world, is facing a serious crisis of conscience. Since 2006, an estimated 60,000 people, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, have ...

The Eritrean capital, Asmara, is a showcase of 1930s Italian Art Deco architecture. Initially created by colonial-era Italians, the style flourished into the '60s as local architects carried on the tradition. There was no modernization in Asmara for 30 ...

In Flanders fields the poppies blowBetween the crosses, row on row The opening lines of John McCrae's poem 'In Flanders Fields', written in 1915 on a scrap of paper upon the back of a fellow Canadian soldier.In the area around Ypres in western ...

Twenty years on, little is left of the Berlin Wall. Most of the structure was dismantled in the immediate aftermath of its opening in November 1989. Those parts that remained became a magnet for souvenir hunters, and chunks of its concrete are now ...

Southern Street in Salford, Greater Manchester was a row of Victorian terraced houses typical of those built in this former industrial heartland of Britain. Over time its inhabitants were made to leave through a combination of alleged social ...