More than 120 million people will arrive in the Ganges delta over the next couple of months for the largest human gathering on Earth: Kumbh Mela. The Hindu pilgrimage to bathe in the sacred river water is so well attended, it’s visible from space. But, say David Milledge and Joshua Bunce, sewage pollution from nearby cities poses a serious health risk and building more sewers may actually make the problem worse. 

The New York Times' use of graphic images following the terror attack in Nairobi, Kenya, has been widely criticised. Angry Kenyans who called on the Times to pull down the offending images were met with a lukewarm apology and a refusal to remove the pictures from the newspaper's digital edition. George Ogola explains why the response is symptomatic of the racialised lens through which the Western media views 'distant deaths'.

Drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán allegedly paid $100 million to former Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto and routinely bribed police to smooth operations for his Sinaloa cartel. Those are the latest stunning allegations from El Chapo’s federal trial in Brooklyn, New York. Two months of testimony by trafficker after trafficker has made it quite clear that the drug trade is just too big – and too lucrative – to fail, writes Luis Gómez Romero.