It is quite colourful out there among the animals. It's a matter of glimmering sex, camouflage, deception and warning. Every colour among the physical colour spectrum exists among animals. This feature takes an incredibly detailed look at the sheer variety of colours and textures that exist in the animal kingdom.

In northern Uganda, The Nodding Syndrome - a mysterious illness affects thousands of children of the Acholi tribe, between the ages of 5 to 15 years old, eventually regressing them to an almost infantile stage, before slowly killing them. Today, no one is known to have recovered from the disease. First described in 1963 in neighboring Tanzania, the syndrome drowns its victims, during "epileptic" crisis, in a lethargic state. They appear to “nod off” and lose contact with the world around them, cannot control body movement and are prone to wander off. Over the course of time, children develop severe growth retardation; a 12 year old child appears to be 7. Basic acts of hygiene, feeding, dressing, going to school become impossible. A slow regression starts. As many children require full time care, the parents must cease work and are unable to tend crops and feed their families. FULL TEXT AVAILABLE.

An explosion. Columns of smoke rising up from the bus station in Kano; people killed and injured; terror. The latest in a series of attacks that are wreaking havoc in the north of Nigeria, the country that – after Somalia and Mali - has become the scenario of the most recent attempt to export the jihad to Africa. On the one side, Boko Haram, the fundamentalist group whose armed factions are attempting to create an Islamic faction in the North, waging asymmetrical war on the State; on the other, an entire population, made up of Christians and Muslims, helplessly facing the horror of ambush attacks and car bombs. Checkpoints on every corner, from Kano to Jos, where the battle of the Islamic militia has wormed its way into an existing ethnic and religious conflict driven by the differences in social conditions. Nigeria has thus sunk deep into the horror of a fratricidal massacre in which prayers sharpen up the machetes and load the bullets of the Kalashnikovs. Prayers offered up into God and to Allah: some of them invoking peace, others glorifying death.

The Great Lakes Region of Congo is under siege - there are over 700,000 refugees in the region, the border with Rwanda is closed at night, basic goods are found on the black market, and the prospect of the rebels arriving has terrified civil society to the extent it has imploded into anarchy. Murder is the order of the day. The northern region of Kivu is descending into fratricidal conflict, with the Hutu set against the Tutsi once more; on one side the FARDC, on the other the rebels, and in the middle, a population living in a climate of vulnerability and hysteria, psychosis and terror, with no faith in the government soldiers, who see the M23 movement and the Tutsi minority as the cause of the situation they are in. Once again, this fans the flames of the nightmarish situation that is more a reality than a risk in The Great Lakes Region: racial hatred and ethnic cleansing.

19-year-old Pfc. Kevin Trimble was the youngest of five triple amputee soldiers living at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. His mother, Saralee Trimble, sleeping in the bed next to his, helps him through his morning routine as she did when he was a child, her youngest of four. Surgeries at Brooke Army Medical Center fill Kevin's days since he was injured in an explosion while serving with the Army during a battle in a river valley west of Kandahar, Afghanistan. Several soldiers were killed and injured in the battle. Between 2002 and 2009, six coalition troops flown out of Iraq and Afghanistan had lost three limbs. That number rose to 25 over the next two years, the Army Medical Command reported. In all, 1,500 wounded troops, their family and children live at Fort Sam Houston.

Almost 25 years of photographing animals – we can say this developed into a life theme – it always means encounters with people as well. Some of these meetings were moving, some odd and bizarre, others left us confused or totally incomprehensible. We have seen a lot in our life time and after intensively dealing with this issue, our inner voice was getting louder and louder: What is it that humans are doing here? Some call it love. Millennia-long humans were harassed by an atavistic fear of wild animals and they experienced triumph at the hunt of a rather predominant rival. Later came proudness along with domestication and breeding. Now we are able to obsess over animals and finally have the exert power over the creature. Mythology, religion, culture, philosophy, politic - and political correctness - formed our affairs with animals. To make it short: this intimate relationship is very complicated. In our Western society the phenomenon of animal love has a high moral value. Animals will be rescued, fed, collected, cuddled, lamented, healed and purchased – and all this in an excessive, radical, grotesque, tragicomic and also touching way. In our photo project we want to show varieties of animal love - and these are so different, like humans themselves. All of these people have different reasons, experiences and motivations why their relationship to certain animals is so close and special. However we all think about this behavior and still pose the question: does the animal want to be loved? Or does the animal just want to be an animal? Maybe animal love is a big misunderstanding. It is a one-sided relationship, thus probably rather self-love, or maybe not. With our photographs we don't want to judge, we take every personality and their story seriously...everyone can make up their own mind.

A project about the variation of goods that can be found for sale on the roadsides of Devon and Suffolk.

Rajesh Kumar Sharma (40) began to teach under privileged children in Delhi sixteen years ago in 1997. Now in its third incarnation and location the makeshift school is located under a metro bridge with blackboards painted onto the walls. Five days a week, he takes out two hours to teach when his younger brother replaces him at his general store in Shakarpur. His students are children of labourers, rickshaw-pullers, market gardeners and farm workers.

The young women stride out along the dusty street which cuts through the Madiyav slum. Their bright red uniforms glow in the late afternoon sun and there is no mistaking their air of confidence. The men loitering around the market move aside warily, like a pack of wolves who have just discovered that the sheep are armed. They have good reason to be nervous: this is the Red Brigade, intelligent and sassy young Indian women who have had enough of being groped, gawped at and much, much worse. Enough, they have said: we are fighting back and reclaiming the streets. And so the Red Brigade was born. They went out, bought red kameez and black salwarand started to plan the fightback. “We chose red because it means danger and black for protest,” says Usha. They have plenty to protest about. Violence against women is on the rise in India, fueled by a surplus of frustrated young men with little education, little prospect of finding a wife, ready access to pornography and attitudes towards women that seem woefully out of place in the 21st century.

Calaba Town is one of the poorest areas of Freetown, Sierra Leone - the state where back in 1991, one of the cruelest civil wars of last century began. In this suburb, tourism is non-existent, and it’s rare to meet a “white man”. This is the context where doctor Sulaiman Kabba, the most important exponent of the so-called “traditional medicine” works. He’s a 45 years old kind and elegant man and the last survivor of three twins. The deep scars near his intense eyes marked him as a member of the Mende tribe. What in Europe is considered witchcraft and in Africa is a real alternative to Western medicine. The so-called “witch doctors” are respected and feared. They are asked not only for cures, but also to cause bad luck, misfortune, and sometimes death. The tool used to kill people is the “witch gun”, a sort of talisman made with parts of sacrificed animals. Another sort of “weapon” often used is a cursed mirror where the person to injure reflected himself/herself. “The problem” Dr. Kabba says “is that people in Africa is really envious, often asking the intervention of a witch doctor just to steal a friend’s husband or to damage a particularly odious employer. My aim is inverting this tendency by changing killers in healers”. The night of 6th of January 2013, Dr. Kabba was going home when he was attacked by a group of people armed with stones, bottles, cudgels, and acid. Since that day he always goes out escorted by armed soldiers paid by him.

What does it feel like to find the city’s edges, to explore its hidden tunnels and scale its skyscrapers? Place hacking, also known as urban exploration and infiltration, is the practice of accessing off-limits spaces in the city, seeing what you are not supposed to see. From the lost underground stations of London to abandoned cold war bunkers and ruins in Eastern Europe to the tallest construction projects in Paris, Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit and Las Vegas, place hackers exploit holes in urban security to reveal the hidden world. The photos from these adventures are both documentation of secret space and a political statement about our rights to the city. Bradley L. Garrett, the photographer, is a writer, explorer and researcher at the University of Oxford. His new book, Explore Everything: Place Hacking the City will be released by Verso in October 2013.

Simon Roberts spends 48 hours with UK Prime Minister David Cameron as his Conservative party flounder in the polls and prepare to fight the local elections on 2nd May. Will he fight back and get off the ropes?

In Mexico, over the past months, the increasing wave of violence and the lack of police pledging for people’s safety are causing the constitution of self-defense squads, especially in small rural towns. Self-defense squads are becoming a national issue, the epicenter being a few towns in the State of Guerrero, where 17 years ago the first self-defense squads organized themselves to battle violence. These local organizations are prepared to fight for defending their communities and territories from the organized crime and, sometimes, also from corrupt state institutions. They only use as weapons old shotguns, machetes, and cudgels, as most of the people taking part to the squads are either peasants or breeders. Self-defense squads organize roadblocks, night and day patrols, and they react to every single emergency endangering the community. Some of the squads also have their own penitentiary system, with imprisonment places, where aggressors are judged according to a local penal code and a community court returns verdicts. In some towns, the self-defense squads have almost completely replaced the local police, often accused of corruption and concussion with the organized crime, by laying themselves as an alternative to the abandonment from the State.

On the 16th of March 1988, an Iraqi military strike hit the Kurdish town of Halabja with the greatest attack of chemical weapons ever used against a civilian population. The weapons used were a "cocktail" of mustard gas and the nerve agents sarin, tabun and VX. These chemicals drenched the skin and clothes of the targeted people, affected their respiratory tracts and eyes and contaminated their water and food. But a generation later, the strike on Halabja is still killing people. An increasing number of children are dying each year of leukemia and lymphomas. The cancers are more frequent in children and teenagers in Halabja than elsewhere in Iraqi Kurdistan, and many people have aggressive tumors. No chemotherapy or radiotherapy is available in this region. The attack has left thousands people wounded physiologically too. Some statues and monument in Halabja are based on the pictures taken on the day of the attack and often show dying people instead of triumphant men in a context of greatness. The entire city carries this legacy on its shoulders.

Two years after NASA ended the three-decade-long U.S. space shuttle program, thousands of engineers and other staff who worked at the Kennedy Space Center are still struggling to find jobs to replace the careers that flourished when shuttles took off from Florida's 'Space Coast.' When the Space Shuttle program ended in 2011, 8,000 people lost their jobs, and the town born from the space-race began to fall into decline.

Acatama desert in Chile is the place where to go to find the biggest telescopes in the world. Astronomers from world wide meet regularly there and share their observations. USA, Japan and Europe have united their forces to raise the money to built a new one, planed for 2018. It will be the largest mirror in the world, 42 meters wide.

In modern Haiti more than 300000 children are victims of domestic slavery. In Haitian Creole they are called "Restavek". Many parents, who live in poverty, are unable to feed their children, and give them away to more affluent families, hoping that their child will live in better conditions and will be able to get an education. But, with few exceptions, restavek children become slaves, working in the homes of their “owners” from early morning till night. They fetch dozens of litres of water a day, cook, wash clothes, clean yards and all other household chores. They are not allowed to sleep on the bed, eat at the table, with the rest of the host-family or play with other children. Most of the restaveks are not permitted to go to school and constantly exposed to domestic and sexual violence. After the earthquake of 2010, the situation in Haiti deteriorated significantly, a lot of children lost their homes and parents. A big number of those kids became restaveks. FULL TEXT AVAILABLE.

In Papua New Guinea many innocent people become victims of police brutality. PNG’s police force is under-resourced, underpaid and under-trained. Often, when policemen search for perpetrators, they arrest random people as suspects and shoot their legs off. Later if there is no proof that those people are involved in crime, police release them, but the victims become invalids for life. It is almost impossible to open cases in court against the police. Corrupt policemen threaten the lives of lawyers and cases are usually dropped. In most prison cells of PNG police stations there are many innocent people tortured every day, forced to admit that they are involved in crimes they never committed. It is not uncommon for children to get arrested and get treated the same way as adults with no access to lawyers and parental visits.

Sudan is the world's largest reservoir of guinea worm disease. People swallow guinea worm larvae in infested water. The worms grow for a year, then emerge through the skin so painfully that the victim seeks relief by plunging it into cool water. The worm then ejects its eggs, continuing the cycle.

According to statistics, in Papua New Guinea two thirds of women are constantly exposed to domestic violence and about 50% of women become victims of sexual assaults. Local men don’t respect their meris (meri in Pidgin means woman), constantly beating them, often using bush knives and axes. While in traditional villages such attitudes toward women can be attributed to tribal culture, today in Port Moresby violence against women shocks modern society. The main danger comes from the Raskol gangs that rule the settlements in the capital city. Every day most of the dozens of crimes are reported to be against women from Port Moresby slum areas. According to the words of Peter Umba Moses, a leader of the “Dirty Dons 585” Raskol gang, raping women is a must for the young members of the gang. In most Papua tribes, when a boy wants to become a man, he should go to an enemy’s village and kill a pig. After that, his community will accept him as an adult. In industrial Port Moresby women have replaced pigs. First young gang members should steal something, and he will be admitted to the gang. After that he must prove that his intentions are serious and pass through some kind of initiation – rape a woman. And it is better if a boy kills her afterwards, there will be less problems with the police, says Moses, who had raped more than 30 women himself. FULL TEXT AVAILABLE.

Thailand has long been known as the sex capital of Asia, and according to a survey in 2004, there are approximately 800000 underage prostitutes in Thailand and the money being traded at 4.3 billion per year, or three percent of Thai economy. This alarming number has put Thailand on the top of the list of underage sexual exploitation according to the UN. Underage is a photographic documentation aimed at understanding the minds of these underage male prostitutes in the most candid and visceral way. I want the process to uncover a bit of their life, choice, and consequences that these young boys are experiencing. Underage prostitution results from several reasons, from being molested by family members and/or relatives, poverty, being a runaway, and drug addiction. ADDITIONAL TEXT AND INDIVIDUAL CAPTION INFO AVAILABLE.

All of India's uranium comes from a few miles around Jadugoda, a tribal district of East Singbhum, is the site of the oldest uranium mine in the country. Jadugoda is estimated to have more than a third of India's total mineral wealth. For years, the local population has suffered from the extensive environmental degradation caused by the mining operations, responsible for the high frequency of radiation related sicknesses and developmental disorders found in the area. Increases in miscarriages, impotency, infant mortality, Down's syndrome, skeletal deformities, thalassemia have been reported. With raw radioactive 'yellow-cake production to increase and more than 100,000 tons of radio-active waste stored at Jadugoda the threat to the environment and the local tribal communities is set to continue.

Ten years after the war launched by the USA and the fall of Saddam Hussein baathist regime, Iraq is still struggling to heal its many wounds. The infrastructures lay in very bad condition, the city is congested by multiple check points which are mostly useless to prevent sectarian bursts of violence.

Life around the Kiev Sea is a documentary story about the human dreams and the changed reality both originated in and stimulated partly by the Slavic self-consciousness, the soil of Eastern Orthodoxy people and the tragical Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986 in Ukraine. It is a story about the reconnection between people and nature and in particular the reconnection between the local people and the water from the Kiev Sea. FULL TEXT AVAILABLE.

Less than a month after 9/11, the US organized a coalition of armed forces and invaded Afghanistan in October 2001. What began as a “modest war” changed into a long lasting and costly operation, called Operation Enduring Freedom. Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians have lost their lives in the war. Now, the US military is left with less than two years to complete its new top-mission in Afghanistan. These so-called retrograde operations entail the logistical mission of sorting, consolidating and moving equipment out of the country that has accumulated during eleven years of American combat operations. At Bagram Airbase, military equipment is brought in from bases in eastern Afghanistan. Thousands of pieces of equipment, including cables, repair parts and just simple junk are stacked in yards with many thousands more scattered among other bases. An estimated equivalent of 90,000 twenty-foot containers of equipment is spread throughout the country, and much of it will have to be shipped back to the U.S. or other logistical hubs throughout the world. Meanwhile, troops who have completed combat tours in eastern Afghanistan are flown back to the United States. U.S. troops have to be out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

2013 marks the 40th anniversary of the cessation on bombing on Laos during the Vietnam War. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. dropped more than two million tons of ordnance over Laos, including more than 270 million cluster bomb sub-munitions. An estimated 30 per cent of these ‘bombies’, as they are known locally, failed to detonate. More than 50,000 people have been killed and injured as a result of UXO incidents between 1964 and 2011. At least 20,000 of them since the war ended. It remains a key cause of poverty and is one of the prime factors limiting the country’s long-term development, preventing people from using land and denying access to basic services. Each day, these women do a dangerous “male” job in a country where females traditionally stay at home; the team was specially created to offer women a chance to work together. They head out into the field armed with metal detectors. When the signal goes off, the technician digs down and assesses whether it’s UXO or merely scrap metal. Demolitions occur at the end of each day; teams work three weeks in a row, then rest for one. FULL TEXT AVAILABLE.

In 2003, shortly after the start of the Iraq war, photographer Bruno Stevens travelled there to photograph some of it's people. Now, 10 years later, he goes back to Iraq to find the same people he had originally photographed in 2003. They old their stories, their memories, and explain how their lives have been affected by the war.

A photo essay on China's Three-Gorges-Project. It shows the Transformation of the 600km long reservoir downstream the Yangtze River between Chongqing and Yichang. The living space of around 4 million people was flooded by the Three-Gorges-Project, causing mass migration due to the loss of homeland and growing unemployment. Reshaping the whole territory created mono-cultural urbanisation and central planned urban landscapes. The dominance of grey in-between a low contrast and soft landscape in permanent mist, development-zones built on the ground of erased history, half sunken villages and not yet completed cities draw an image of a society, whose gateway between past and future is covered by a grey haze. This photo essay focuses on this not completely torn down nor ready rebuilt world, what is left in the houses after the people moved out, the recapturing of lost land by improvised urban gardening, how the individuals appear in the foreground of this huge scaled, surrealistic landscape.

According to government figures, there were 47,515 drug-related killings in Mexico between late 2006 and late 2012, though many experts put the death toll much higher. Every aspect of Mexican life is affected by organized crime and its endless struggle for control of the distribution of drugs, most are destined for the United States and Canada. In just one month, photographer Louie Palu covered more than 110 murders in Mexico. There's no way of knowing how many of those deaths involved people who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. As long as its justice system allows criminals to operate with impunity Mexico will continue to be rocked by the drug trade and its violence, no matter what economic gains the country makes. This is one photographer's view of the deadly U.S.-Mexico frontier. This project was supported with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Jambai Village, Tamil Nadu, India. Female religious devotees and other followers block a national highway in Tamil Nadu as they enact ritual body piercing through their cheeks with long metal rods during the 'Kaliamman' festival in honour of the Hindu goddess Kali on the 3rd April 2013.

A griot is a West African historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet and/or musician. The griot is a repository of oral tradition, and is also often seen as something of a societal leader due to his traditional position as an adviser to royal personages. While the writing doesn't exist yet, some families take pride in passing on the customs, the history and the genealogies of their people, usually with music. The griots castes carry on from generation to generation, all sexes merge. Even in 2013, while the country is in war, this practice remains fundamental in western Africa.

FOR REFERENCE ONLY - FULL TEXT AVAILABLE - The world’s oldest and biggest leech farm – located in a small town outside Moscow – breeds up to three million ‘hirudo medicinalis’ leeches a year from the hermaphrodite creatures for use in treating medical disorders including high and low blood pressure, varicose veins, thrombosis and haemorrhoids. Others are freeze-dried in the farm’s on-site factory for use in cosmetics that range from basic shampoos and skins creams costing a few pounds each to two preparations – a day facial cream and a night cream - based on leech embryos that sell for £950 and £730 per 30ml pot respectively.

Rebels fighting Bashar al-Assad, conquered this liberated area, here, but it doesn't mean the area is safe Because this is a land of missiles - they fall randomly, every single day: the only anti-aircraft systems, here, are poor weather and mist. Missiles and Islamists: they came from Libya, from Iraq from Afghanistan, without them the regime would have already tamed every revolt. But nobody knows what their real objectives are. They are feared and invisible. A few AK47s, - it feels like everyday life, but everywhere is in anarchy: it is a dry wind: dense with light and fear. The province of Jabal al-Zawiya; Syria is controlled by the rebels, a rebel at the entrance of a sanctuary, to get inside the tombs, you need to go through uneven tunnel openings in the mud.

Acid violence is a vicious and damaging form of assault in Bangladesh where acid is thrown in people’s faces - the overwhelming majority of the victims are women. These attacks are often the result of family and land dispute, dowry demands or a desire for revenge. The victims are attacked in some cases because a young girl or women has spurned the sexual advances of a male or either she or her parents have rejected a proposal of marriage. The scars left by acid are not just skin deep. In addition to psychological trauma, survivors face social isolation that further damages self-esteem and seriously undermines their professional and personal futures. Globally, at least 1500 people in 20 countries are attacked in this way yearly, 80% of whom are female and many under 18 years of age.

Operation Serval is an ongoing French military operation in Mali. The aim of the operation is to oust Islamic militants in the north of Mali, who had begun a push into the center of Mali. Operation Serval follows the UN Security Council Resolution 2085 of 20 December 2012. The operation is named after the medium-sized African wild cat species Serval.

The story of Liemba, formerly the Graf Goetzen or Graf von Goetzen built by the Kaiser Wilhelm II as a war ship, experienced many adventures which inspired John Huston for his film "The African Queen" starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. Nowadays, she is the only merchant ship to travel across the Tanganyika lake. Once a month people and goods are crammed onboard into what looks like an indescribable pandemonium. The Liemba operates between the ports of Kigoma, Tanzania and Mpulungu, Zambia with numerous stops to pick up and set down passengers in between.

The Amish are known for their plain dress and shunning of technology. Amish women and married and Amish men do not cut their hair or beards because they consider them symbols of living a religious life. Amish believe the Bible instructs women to let their hair grow long and men to grow beards once they marry. Cutting it would be offensive to Amish. This is the same dissident Amish sect where leader Samuel Mullet was sentenced last month to 15 years in federal prison for his role in leading hair and beard-cutting attacks on members of other Amish communities in 2011.

This competition, organized by Swiss journalist Christoph Zuerche is happening for the third time this year and takes place above the Bamiyan buddha's empty niches up in the Hindu Kush mountains. People come from all over the world to be part of the competition. There is no ski lift meaning you have to climb up the mountain by foot for about half an hour before skiing down. The whole purpose of the competition is to attract tourists. Local people are now training to be guides and a few guest houses have been built, but as of yet there is no money to build ski lifts or other commodities for such a resort.

Mongolia is one of the world’s fastest growing economies. Driven by a boom in mining revenues, the impact of this growth is clearly visible in Mongolia’s capital city, Ulaanbaatar. Expensive office high rises, modern apartment buildings, and luxury stores are now common sights. The capital’s wealthy inhabitants are enjoying the benefits of this boom, however more than half of the city’s population are still living without access to basic public services in the tented areas that are spread around the city. The center of the city is surrounded by round, felt tents (that house migrants coming from the countryside) that have been part of the traditional Mongolian nomadic lifestyle for centuries. They are attracted here to seek better jobs, education and services. About 50% of Mongolia's population live in Ulaanbaator.

FOR REFERENCE ONLY - The Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array is an array of radio telescopes in the Atacama desert of northern Chile. Since a high and dry site is crucial to millimeter wavelength operations, the array has been constructed on the Chajnantor plateau at 5000m altitude. Consisting of 66 12m and 7m diameter radio telescopes observing at millimeter and sub-millimeter wavelengths, ALMA is expected to provide insight on star birth during the early universe and detailed imaging of local star and planet formation. ALMA is an international partnership between Europe, the US, Canada, East Asia and the Republic of Chile. Costing more than a $1 billion, it is the most expensive ground-based telescope in operation. ALMA began scientific observations in the second half of 2011, has been operational since March 2013.

Nestling high up in the Chilean Anden, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile, is the largest astronomical project in existence. Now, nearing completion, ALMA will definitely change mankinds knowledge about outer space – astrologists call it the largest step within their scientific discipline, designed for deepening the understanding of universe. The single telescope of revolutionary design is composed of 66 high precision antennas located on the Chajnantor plateau, 5000 meters altitude in northern Chile – an odd and apparently uninhabitable scenery with moonlike ambience on its own.

Guevara, the female sniper, at the frontline of Salah Addeen, Aleppo, Syria. Fatima, a 37 year old former English teacher, joined the FSA as a sniper after an airstrike killed her two children ages 7 and 10. Named "Guevara" by the other rebel fighters , Fatima and her husband, with others, formed a rebel katiba, fighting on the Sallah Addeen front. "I will never forget my children's blood" says Guevara. "Al Wa'ad", is a young and new katiba, consisting of 35 members. Most of the members are between 16 and 19 years old. "Because of their young age they have not experienced the fear for the regime has the older generation, under Bashar Al Assad regime, or his father before him".