La Chureca in Nicaragua is one of the Western worlds biggest open garbage dumps. Even the briefest visit is a considerable challenge. Nevertheless it is home to far over a thousand people. Most deaths on the dump are due to a lung disease, that is known there as ‘lead’. For children growing up around La Chureca, it’s the standard course of events.

Marten Persiel and Xabier Garay’s Chureca project is a documentary film as well as an active participation in one of Spains most ambitious foreign aid projects to date: the complete clean-up of La Chureca, the construction of recycling facilities and an entire village, including a school, a hospital and community service projects. One of these projects is a skate park, which aims at getting Chureca kids in touch with other young people, whose world doesn’t consist of nothing but trash.

Apart from claiming the lives of hundreds of people and wreaking enormous property damage, Chile’s massive earthquake has likely altered the distribution of the Earth’s overall mass, scientists from NASA say.

As a result, the length of a day is now a little shorter (1.26 microseconds) than it was before Saturday’s magnitude 8.8 earthquake.

A movie about the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky.

In southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, thousands of American, Afghan and British troops entered Marja in the biggest offensive of the war, with the goal of destroying the Taliban’s largest haven.

The picture of the series “War Is Personal”, winner in the category “Contemporary Issues Stories” by Eugene Richards shows Sgt. José Pequeño and his mother. Pequeño suffered a devastating brain injury from a grenade tossed into his Humvee in March 2006 in Iraq. Helped by a grant from National Geographic Magazine, Richards was traveling around the U.S. in 2009 to work on a series of stories mainly about veterans and their families.

Using smuggled footage, this documentary tells the story of the 2007 protests in Burma by thousands of monks.

The Chernobyl nuclear disaster on April 26, 1986, forced the immediate evacuation of more than 116.000 people from that part of the Ukraine, which was subsequently declared unfit for human habitation. In March 2009, photographer Timm Suess spent two days in the Chernobyl zone of exclusion.

Use your mouse to click and drag around the video to change the view. You can also zoom in and out. The video was shot on Sunday, January 17, at 3:53 p.m. EST in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Via

Haiti remains a place of profound need, anguish, desperation and danger, with a few glimmers of hope and slowly growing capabilities to receive and distribute the international aid now flowing in. Sporadic looting, sometimes violent, was met with force by security oficials and ordinary citizens, resulting in a number of further deaths and injuries.

Two days after the magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck beneath Port-au-Prince, Haiti, some of the massive damage is becoming more apparent. Rescue teams are arriving, aid groups are trying their best to battle huge logistical challenges, bodies are being identified, and some medical care is being given. Rescue teams from all over the world have joined the recovery effort, the Red Cross ventured an estimate of up to 50,000 deaths, as bodies at the local morgues overflowed into the streets.

An interactive portfolio of portraits of world leaders, with audio commentary by photographer Platon. Via

The illicit drug market worldwide has become a $320 billion-per-year industry. As drug-related violence in Mexico appears to continue unabated, new efforts are also being made worldwide in methods of enforcement and treatment of recovering addicts.

How the planet will recover from us. Via

A prisoner is walked into the center of a group of officers and posed by the police so that he is down in front on both knees. The officer who is taking the photograph is wearing a white shirt. In New York City this would mean that he is a supervisor. Via

Eddie Adams photographed 13 wars, 6 American Presidents, and virtually every cultural and historical figure of the last 50 years. History would be changed through his lens. But the photo that made Eddie famous would haunt him for his entire life.