New writer: Daniel Chapman Daniel recently graduated from the University of New Orleans with a degree in urban planning but grew up in the UK. He is currently planning to move to Mexico to teach English before beginning his real…

Thanks to last week’s launch of Google Street View in Canada, our Canadian correspondent Ian has been able to prepare a grand tour of Canada’s Railway Hotels, in 2 parts. Continuing our journey from east to west, looking at Canada’s…

Thanks to this week’s launch of Google Street View in Canada, our Canadian correspondent Ian has been able to prepare a grand tour of Canada’s Railway Hotels, in 2 parts. It is often said that Canada was built on the…

It’s Island Week 4 here at GSS, which means we’ll mostly be posting about Islands. For about a week. GSS Reader Reg Coppicus from Canada thinks Isla San Felix might be “the crappiest posting ever”. Fortunately for us, he’s talking…

High up in the Italian Dolomite mountains, 90km north of Venice, the Vajont Dam was the scene of one of the 20th century’s worst engineering disasters. The tallest dam in the world when it was completed in 1959, at 262m,…

8 years ago today, on 21 September 2001, a huge explosion occurred in the AZF (AZote Fertilisant – nitrogen fertiliser) factory in Toulouse, France. Three hundred tonnes of ammonium nitrates blew up, creating a 200 m wide crater up to…