Rio gets UNESCO world heritage status

Rio de Janeiro, nicknamed the Marvelous City, officially entered the UN's list of world heritage sites Tuesday in recognition of its soaring granite cliffs, urban rainforest and beaches.

Afghan cave dwellers brace against a shifting landscape

Marzia and her husband Qadeer thought themselves lucky when they moved into a 1,700-year-old Buddhist cave hand-carved into the side of a mountain in Afghanistan's central highlands—it was clean and dry, warm in the winter, ...

Madagascar hillsides stripped bare as locals seek land

"Last time, I burnt a section about that big," says Mihareta Laivoa, pointing to a parcel of land about the size of a football field, as the farmer admitted to having destroyed forest to make way for his crops.

Quake damages scores of Myanmar's heritage Bagan temples

It was a time of conquest and conversions. Above all, it was a time of construction, on a scale never seen before. Over 250 years, from the 11th century onwards, the rulers of Bagan built more than 10,000 magnificent religious ...

Not all is green in Mexico City's Aztec garden district

Colorful gondolas lazily ferry tourists around the floating gardens of Mexico City's Xochimilco district, but not all is green in this idyllic vestige of the Aztec empire increasingly choked by urbanization.

Persian leopard cubs born in Russian reintroduction centre

Triplets have been born to a captive Persian leopard in a Russian breeding centre. The cubs are in good health and may one day be reintroduced to the wild as part of a reintroduction programme supported by WWF, Russian authorities ...

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