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 ...

Hoyerswerda was once a boom-town - a model vision of GDR socialism, built around a large coal and gas plant. Between 1955 and 1981, the industrialisation of this medium-sized East German town took the population up to 71,000. A New Town had to be built ...

Manchester as the birthplace of the industrial revolution has always been a symbol for radical change. After decades of heavy decline and neglect, Manchester has of late been widely hailed as a model for urban regeneration. With gleaming architectural...

In its short history, Eritrea - the Land of the Red Sea - has seen its fair share of upheaval and violence. The country was born out of a protracted War of Independence from Ethiopia that rumbled on for three decades, variously involving the Soviet ...

A fitting monument to Germany's ill-fated colonial ambitions at the beginning of the 20th century, the former mining town of Kolmanskop, a few kilometres inland from the colonial-era trading post of Lüderitz, is being swallowed by the ...

Amongst Berliners, the burning issue at the moment is the creeping, and seemingly unstoppable, gentrification of their city. Rising rents, now incomparable to unusually cheap rates in the early 1990s, and a huge tourist boom in Berlin are driving up ...

On 22 September 2013, Germans cast their votes to determine their next government. The outcome of this election, however, has consequences for people far beyond the borders of Germany. Early polls suggest that the leading Christian Democratic Union ...