by Victoria Aitken
-UK-

The social networking world is an odd one – you see your friends less, but know more about them - and real catching up has been replaced with the dubious substitute of half a dozen status updates on your newsfeed each day. But the upside is the strange tide of news about semi-strangers that drifts across your screen. Alexander Fiske-Harrison is one of those.

Xander, as he is known, a writer and actor, kept popping up on my screen with pictures of him doing one of the strangest and most controversial pastimes left in the western world – bullfighting.

by Victoria Aitken
-UK-

The Sinai desert has a new underground radio station - the only one to escape a ban on live radio transmissions - and it is breaking records for a radio station of its size. Radio Sharm’s secret location in the Sinai desert and its Disc Jockey’s code names like “The Mad Monk,” “The Girl with No Name,” and “Little Miss Slumdog” add mystique and character to Sharm el-Sheikh’s only live radio station.

I visited this holiday location on the Red Sea famous for its picturesque beaches, coral reefs, and year-round sunny weather; and discovered Radio Sharm. Who has ever heard of a secret radio station in the desert? Just the inhospitable location was intriguing enough to want to discover more about the radio station.

by Victoria Aitken / photography by Piera Constantini Scala
- UK -

Inspired by her friend Piera's lost heritage, writer Victoria Aitken traveled to Western Sahara to understand more about the plight of a people ousted from their land.

The mineral-rich region of Western Sahara, on the northwest coast of Africa between Morocco and Mauritania, was occupied by Morocco (and initially, by Mauritania) after the Spanish, her original colonizers, left. Despite the International Court of Justice’s ruling in 1975 that Western Sahara should not be immune to the rules of decolonization, no other country has stood up to Morocco or tried to make her back out of Western Sahara, or even denounced the construction of a 1500-kilometre fortified wall. No one talks about a wall that divides every Saharawi refugee family from their relatives and friends in the occupied parts of Western Sahara.