Read the best world and travel articles from around the internet, or watch the most insightful world videos from platforms like Youtube, Vimeo or leading world publishers like BBC, The New York Times, The Guardian, Atlas Obscura, Washington Post and many more.
Following a period of political instability that affected the progression of infrastructure projects, the country’s government took the decision to construct an entirely new capital in 2015. Located 45 kilometers east of the original Cairo, the as-yet-unnamed city has been under construction ever since.
Nauru, an island in the South Pacific, is known for its high rate of poverty and unemployment. Only a few decades ago, the island was listed among world’s richest countries while it was a major phosphate exporter but as the resources exhausted, the national systems started to fail.
Coober Pedy is at the center of Australia’s opal mining industry. Now the town, where 60% of its residents live underground, is becoming a leader in sustainable living.
Frederick Phiri is the junk-art king of central Africa: At just 22, he’s started to earn an international reputation for being able to make intricate and elegant sculptures from scrap metal found in his community.
The World Health Organization reported last year that 11 of the 12 cities in the world with the most pollution from PM2.5 were in India. A policy to conserve water resources led to the rise of a major source of air pollution, making breathing Delhi’s air as bad as smoking 50 cigarettes.
Steeped in strange symbology, the breath-taking ‘inverted tower’, or initiation well, found at the heart of Sintra’s Quinta da Regaleira celebrates Portugal’s unique historical connection to the mysterious and enigmatic Knights Templar.
As one of the northernmost settlements on earth, the Norwegian hamlet of Longyearbyen has become a magnet for adventurous souls looking to start a new life. But when an unsettling crime happened, it brought home a harsh reality: in the modern world, trouble always finds you.
A short distance from Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, lies a “tank graveyard”—a field littered with thousands of stacked military tanks, rusting trucks, and worn-out cars, remnants of a devastating, three-decade conflict with Ethiopia. A massive military junkyard takes on new meaning.
What is happening on the other side of the barrier? There we find people who respond to state controls with creativity and spunk. While some spend their days trawling cat videos, others create oases of subversion within the reality that they’ve been dealt.
Demand for ‘healing’ crystals is soaring – but many are mined in deadly conditions in one of the world’s poorest countries, like Madagascar. And there is little evidence that this billion-dollar industry is cleaning up its act.
English is everywhere, and everywhere, English dominates. From inauspicious beginnings on the edge of a minor European archipelago, it has grown to vast size and astonishing influence. Almost 400m people speak it as their first language; a billion more know it as a secondary tongue. Is there any point in resisting?
There is always that one country on America’s collective conscious. After looking at 741,681 section front headlines of The New York Times, Russell Goldenberg found out which countries around the world have preoccupied Americans the most each month since 1900.
Old U.S. spy satellite images of the Middle East have unearthed a stunning discovery: the world’s first city, Tell Brak – 4,000 years older than the Great Pyramids. Where Tell Brak lies is an area of the Middle East known as the Fertile Crescent.
Tribal fighting has long been present in the Papua New Guinea highlands, but the influx of modern automatic weaponry in the 1990s turned local disputes into lethal exchanges. Bootleg copies of the American film Rambo circulated in remote communities, becoming a crude tutorial on the use of such weaponry.
The academic town of Akademgorodok in Siberia was created by Russian mathematician Mikhaïl Alekseïevitch Lavrentiev, who wanted to install a safe haven for scientists in the middle of Siberia. Such isolation from Moscow created a fertile scientific and cultural nest away from the influence of the State and its politics.
Steve McCurry has been one of the most iconic voices in contemporary photography for more than thirty years, with scores of magazine and book covers, over a dozen books, and countless exhibitions around the world to his name. These stunning photos were taken during his trip to Afghanistan.
In a valley in the Albanian countryside, a group of celibate Iranian dissidents have built a vast and tightly guarded barracks that few outsiders have ever entered. Depending on whom you ask, the Mujahedeen Khalq, or People’s Jihadists, are either Iran’s replacement government-in-waiting or a duplicitous terrorist cult.
Hagia Sophia has been the ‘apple of discord’ between the Greeks and the Turks, the ‘east’ and the ‘west’ for 567 years, but as history likes to repeat itself we are now witnessing a revival of this old dispute. A museum has been converted to a mosque.
Puolanka, a small town in the centre of Finland, had become famous for its particular brand of pessimism. Recurring themes are town’s declining population and lack of much to do.
In the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein became obsessed with the Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar. Saddam saw himself as a modern reincarnation of Nebuchadnezzar, and to prove it, he spent millions building a massive reconstruction of Babylon.
Even with all our technology and knowledge of the dangers of Antarctica, it can remain deadly for anyone who goes there. Inland, temperatures can plummet to nearly -90C (-130F). Beneath layers of snow and ice on the world’s coldest continent, there may be hundreds of people buried forever.
Italian artist and filmmaker Yuri Ancarani captures the otherworldly landscape of Carrara’s marble quarries in the Apuan Alps, Northwest Italy, as Il Capo (The Chief) guides his men through the extraction process in this excerpt by Yuri Ancarani.
Despite horrific sandstorms and arid soil, Han Meifei is among those seeking to rejuvenate the land. His innovative procedures have developed ways of growing plants without water, preventing the dry desert from spreading, and preserving the seeds of plants close to extinction for a greener future.
Six members of the Lykov family lived in the Siberian taiga for more than 40 years—utterly isolated and more than 150 miles from the nearest human settlement. In 1978, Soviet geologists prospecting in the wilds of Siberia discovered them.
Authorities believe the STS-50 operated illegally for 10 years or so and looted up to $50-million worth of the fish. Interpol had issued a purple notice for the vessel. But the vessel’s owners and captain had been evading authorities for years with a typical bag of tricks
Mauritania’s Train du Desert is one of the longest and heaviest trains in the world. Completed in 1963, the train operates daily between Nouadhibou on the Atlantic coast and the iron ore mines in Zouerat, in the middle of the country—a journey of around 450 miles that takes about 13 hours each way.
The MV Alta drifted without a soul on board in the Atlantic ocean for 18 months, before crashing into the coast of Ireland. Tracking and current data give us intriguing clues about its final, fateful voyage.
Cultural norms, complex religious influences and friendly neighbourhood police officers make losing something in Japan no big deal. But does this tell the whole picture about Japan’s relationship with honesty?
Head to medieval Basse-Ville, caught between the German- and French-speaking divisions of Fribourg, and you’ll find yourself in a no-man’s land where the two languages have become one: le Bolze.
Dubai – perhaps the best-known city of the United Arab Emirates, with a reputation for attracting the glamorous and the wealthy. Less than 5% of its GDP comes from oil, but it essentially has made its success through diversifying into property real estate, aviation, trade, banking and finance. But what’s going on beneath the surface?
The unique Arctic Bath hotel, which was first announced in 2018, comprises a floating circular main building designed by architects Bertil Harström and Johan Kauppi to resemble a bird’s nest, accompanied by a series floating and land cabins around it.
Science fiction obsessed Victor Vescovo wanted to be the first person to reach the deepest points of all five oceans – but first he had to build a submarine that was up to it.
Hong Kong has more ultra-rich people than any other country, yet 1 in 5 people still live in poverty. SBS Dateline’s Marc Fennell asks why the gap between rich and poor is so extreme.
When LAX offered me the opportunity to work with its TSA and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) teams, I couldn’t say no. From dead bodies in the security line to a cobra in a Pringles can, you wouldn’t believe the crazy things that happen at America’s busiest airport of origin.
We were listening to air escaping up through water. We were so close to the ice that this ancient fizz was surprisingly loud. Though we humans never hear it above the surface, this is the sound the Antarctic makes every summer. And as the planet heats, the sound is getting louder.
It’s a utopian fantasy, discover a ghost town and rebuild it in line with your ideals, but in Spain where there are nearly 3000 abandoned villages, some big dreamers have spent the past 3 decades doing just that. One of the first towns to be rediscovered was a tiny hamlet in the mountains of northern Navarra.
In 2001, a smugglers’ yacht washed up in the Azores and disgorged its contents. The island of São Miguel was quickly flooded with high-grade cocaine – and nearly 20 years on, it is still feeling the effects.
Jachymov, a small uranium mining town in the northwest of the Czech Republic, has been key in the field of radioactivity research. More than a century ago, Marie and Pierre Curie based their revolutionary work on radioactivity on material brought from there.
As the first generation of Ukrainians born after the Chernobyl tragedy comes of age, a small subculture of them is now doing the unthinkable: defying government prohibitions and illegally entering the highly radioactive Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, or “Dead Zone”—for fun.
In 1989, Mauro Morandi’s boat docked on Budelli Island off the northern coast of Sardinia, Italy. Discovering that the island’s caretaker was retiring within the next two days, Mauro decided to extend his stay indefinitely and step into the role himself.
