https://www.benwinston.co.uk/home daily 0.75 2014-10-07 https://www.benwinston.co.uk/portfolio daily 1.0 2017-03-29 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/58331df246c3c4f9f39ee194/1479744753336/ Ben Winston Portfolios https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/58331ecaf5e23136c810fae5/1479745114689/ Ben Winston Portfolios https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/58331fabe6f2e1515605584c/1479401641505/ Ben Winston Portfolios https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/58332000304544e4a74d08fb/1479745536474/ Ben Winston Portfolios https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/5833246ce48aeec1ca6ad188/1479746668914/ Ben Winston Portfolios https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/58db67c32994ca7505d662e4/1479399337216/ Ben Winston Portfolios https://www.benwinston.co.uk/essays daily 0.75 2016-12-08 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/58332c23c534a577df124362/1479748643613/ Ben Winston Essays - The Forgotten Skyscrapers of Bangkok As dusk settles on Bangkok and the city's high-rise towers flicker into light, a series of multi-storey shadows stand out against the sky. These are the ghost towers: the forgotten skyscrapers of Bangkok. Leftovers from the 1997 Asian financial crisis, these dark shells are some of the five hundred high-rise projects put on hold when the economy collapsed. Ranging from five storey offices to 60 storey condominiums, these rotting modern ruins pepper the skyline over ten years after the workmen walked out. In Bangkok, however, one person's disaster is another's opportunity, and the homeless have been swift to recognise the towers' potential. Throughout the capital the poor now inhabit billions of dollars of real estate. In one sixty storey condo situated on prime land beside the Chao Praya river, seven people live in rough houses amidst hardened bags of cement and escalators that have never moved. The luxurious, half lain teak floors and partially installed bathrooms of the upper storeys have been left to a pack of stray and mangy dogs. In the north of the city another abandoned development houses construction workers and Burmese refugees. These enterprising settlers have installed French windows and built sturdy plywood rooms, furnishing them with sofas, carpets and televisions. A communal faucet provides running water and the abandoned swimming pool has been converted into a fish farm. But as international capital begins to flow back into the Thai economy, the abandoned shells have once again begun to attract the interest of developers. Residents are being evicted, builders are returning and investors prepared to take on the structural risks are starting to see substantial returns. As the tide of global finance returns to Thailand's shores, one by one the ghost towers of Bangkok are disappearing. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/58332f12e4fcb5020faa5f7e/1479749394122/ Ben Winston Essays - India's addiction to coal With 10% of global reserves and one of the fastest growing economies in the world, it's no surprise that India is addicted to coal. The fossil fuel is responsible for nearly 70% of the nation's electricity, and Coal India - the world's largest coal miner - cannot produce coke fast enough to meet demand at the nation's steel mills. With coal fuelling its incredible economic growth, India is projected to become the world's third largest emitter of CO2 by 2015, trailing just China and the US. While this is bad news for the world's warming atmosphere, it's catastrophic news for those unfortunate to live on top of India's vast deposits. In Jharkand state, which is home to the country's largest reserves, ill regulated opencast mines have filled the air with carcinogenic dust, polluted water supplies with toxic waste, and turned virgin forest into barren and uninhabitable land. And if that's not challenge enough, for many residents the earth is literally burning away beneath their houses and their feet. Jharkhand has some of the worst subterranean coal fires in the world, raging unchecked through India's primary source of coking coal. Started nearly a century ago by the poor mining practices of the British, the fires release immeasurable quantities of toxic smoke and CO2 through fissures in the ground, causing subsidence which has claimed over 400 lives and a number of villages since 1965. Combined with the country's dire need for more coal, these fires are now precipitating largest population shift in India since partition. But if nearly a century of mining has extracted a heavy toll on the landscape and people of Jharkhand, it could be nothing in the face of the new operations required by skyrocketing demand. More mines and power stations are under construction, and inconvenient townships are being moved out of the way. Yet India badly needs development, and development needs fuel. Ultimately, with two hundred years of viable reserves just beneath the surface, it looks unlikely that India's future will be powered by anything so much as coal. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/58332f839f7456a4657c0cec/1479749507101/ Ben Winston Essays - Extreme Birdwatching It was a disgusting December morning in one of Oxford’s more suburban cul-de-sacs; a scene of driving rain, thrashing trees, pebbledash semis, and a postman with his collar up against the storm. It would have been a perfectly normal winter morning in middle England, really, were it not for the hundred cold, shivering men in camouflage clothing. Extreme birdwatching takes many forms, but standing in the rain in pre-dawn Oxford is actually one of its saner manifestations. For decades a little reported army of birdwatchers have been quietly launching expeditions to Himalayan jungles or the war torn rainforests of Colombia, facing snakes, tigers, exotic diseases, armed bandits and Marxist guerrilla movements in the search for rare birds. In any other context this would be a heroic activity, up there with mountaineering or polar travel, but birdwatching is only marginally cooler than train spotting. It’s an image bourn not of overseas adventure, but of the kind of behaviour witnessed that morning in an Oxford cul-de-sac. The crowd had been drawn by the arrival a Baltimore Oriole from the US; a small, starling sized bird that had been blown across the Atlantic by the winter gales. It wasn’t the amazing feat of having crossed the ocean on very small wings that attracted people, however, but the fact that no Baltimore Oriole had appeared on mainland Britain for fifteen years. This made it an ‘extreme rarity’ (better than a ‘rarity’ but not as good as a ‘mega rarity’), and explains why, throughout the latter half of last December, men with telescopes besieged the unsuspecting residents of Northfield Road. Twitching, as travelling to see rare birds is known, is all about lists. Most twitchers have a British list and a life list – although some have county lists, day lists and even garden lists – detailing the number of different species seen within a certain context. It’s a largely male pursuit and it’s intensely competitive, but although there are no prizes beyond peer recognition, those who have seen more than 400 species in the UK are entitled to join the appropriately named ‘UK 400 Club’. For many, the motivation behind the Oxford Oriole was to add one more rare tick to that list. It was an attempt to try and understand that mentality which saw me travelling down the M1 at 3am that December morning with three birders: Roy Taylor, Jim Wardill and Tim Cleeves. Tim is famous in birding circles for finding the first slender-billed curlew ever to be seen in Britain, and the last confirmed sighting anywhere in the world. But he was keen to put birders’ poor public image into perspective. “The image is partly well justified,” he explained, “but most birders are pretty normal and just like watching birds. Maybe they’ll go to a few reserves every year and maybe they’ll travel a few miles if a rarity turns up, but for most, that’s it. As with any pastime, birding has it’s fair share of nerds – some haven’t got any social skills and some can’t speak to the opposite sex, which is why you see more mail-order brides at twitches these days. And then there are the global twitchers who are driven by trying to see all the species in the world. The unifying feature is that everyone is inspired by birds. They absolutely love them.” Jim concurred: “Some of these guys put birds before everything else in their life – wife, relationships, money. I bumped into a mate I used to go birding with but hadn’t seen for years recently and asked him how he was. “I’m divorced,” he said. “Oh, I’m sorry to hear it.” I said. “Well,” he said, “she just couldn’t understand. It was the birds or her…” There were murmurs of agreement in the car. Everyone knew someone like that. Even so, birdwatching in one guise or another is something of a national pastime, and as an industry it’s worth over £200 million each year. With over 1 million members, the RSPB has more paid up support than all the main political parties combined, although most people’s involvement with birds will amount to little more than putting food out in winter. Which is very different to driving through the night and standing for hours in the rain to see an American rarity. As the grey sky grew light I discovered, somewhat unexpectedly, that twitching can incredibly tense. Not quite England-penalty-shoot-out tense, but tense enough for 7am. This was probably because people had driven a long way for the twitch (teachers Jean and Marc had driven from Belgium) and because there were no guarantees that the bird, which should have been in Central America, had not expired from the cold, been taken by a cat or simply moved on. If it didn’t show, a lot of people had gone to a lot of effort for nothing. But that wasn’t to be how this story ended. An arm suddenly went up and pointed to the bushes, there was a collective gasp from the crowd and binoculars were raised as people took first sight of the small brown bird with the golden orange breast. People were transfixed; the atmosphere electric. But then, unnoticed by the crowd, a woman stepped around the corner and shattered it: “Excuse me!” she yelled. Everyone turned to look. There was a pause, and then she dropped the bombshell: “If you want to come into my garden for a better view then you’re welcome. The only thing I ask is that you make a small donation – one or two pounds would be fine – to the cat’s home.” She rattled the coins in the ice cream tub she was carrying and disappeared around the corner. Given the UK’s 8 million domestic cats kill an estimated 55 million birds each year, you could understand some prevarication or ethical anguish. Instead, there was a stampede. The cul-de-sac cleared within seconds. By the time I turned the corner most people were already in and Lyn, the owner of the house, was clutching a fist full of notes and a tub heavy with coins. “It’s not obligatory! Just a pound if you like…” she was chortling, a little stunned by the sudden success of the cat’s home. A man handed her a £10 note. “Here you go love – keep the change. Very good of you to let us in.” In spite of the weather reaching a truly horrendous climax, a spiritual experience was taking place in the back garden. Sodden, shivering men with eyes glued to binoculars bumped into one another, or trundled off into the bushes for a better view. One almost fell into the pond. Other than the constant background of “Can you see it?” “It’s above the branch / twigs / fence”, there seemed to be very little worth saying, although a Brummie accent muttered to no-one in particular: “This is great” with the awed tone of someone having an epiphany. The calm couldn’t last. Once everyone had spotted the bird briefly, tensions began to mount as it became clear which parts of the garden offered a better view. A shout came out: “Oi! Can you move? I can’t see anything!” Tim was right: some twitchers lacked a certain social nous. “If you’d just stop moving around we all might be bloody well able to see something back here!” “I’m not moving. I’ve not been here long!” “You’ve been there bloody ages! Let someone else have a go!” “People are so aggressive these days,” Jim lamented. “It’s just not the same as when I used to twitch regularly. Now it’s more competitive and some people will do anything to get their tick. Who would have ever thought we’d end up with bird rage?” When large numbers of people get desperate to see small birds, rage isn’t as uncommon as you might think. Environmental consultant and author of several books on birding, Dr Joe Tobias has witnessed fights for the last place on a boat in the Scilly Isles, famous for its autumn rarities. “In mid October you can have well over 1000 birders on the Scillies, half of them with walkie-talkies,” he explained. “You’ll be standing in the middle of nowhere and then you’ll hear this noise from inside a bush: “Come in Little Bustard, this is R.B. Fly. Meet me on channel 6…” which means that everyone on channel 8 – which is the kind of communal short wave radio channel – will suddenly switch to channel 6 to hear what’s going on. Then if that person says something like “I’m not sure about it, but think I’ve just seen an Ovenbird at Borough Farm”, all of a sudden all hell breaks loose as everyone tries to get to Tresco. I’ve seen literally hundreds of men running along the beach on St Mary’s trying to get to the first boat to twitch a rarity. It was like the 400m hurdle – fat men in green bouncing along, tripods slung over their shoulders and binoculars bouncing up and down, trying to hurdle the guy lines tying the boats up at low tide. A couple of them tripped up and crashed face down into the sand: it was hysterical.” Mega rarities do of course inspire the most extreme behaviour. A senior associate with a Bristol law firm, Paul Chapman occasionally hires light aircraft to twitch them, as he did last October when he flew from Blackpool to the Shetland Islands to see only the third Savannah Sparrow ever recorded in Britain. Two days later a Siberian Rubythroat turned up on the same island. “Fortunately I’d already seen the Rubythroat eight years earlier,” he said, “but otherwise I would have gone back. There were some people who did end up flying from Blackpool twice in the space of four days.” Whether flying or driving, the RSPB estimates birders spend around £25 million each year on UK travel alone. By definition rarities don’t come along very often, which is why these days more birders are going to the bird. As world travel has become cheaper and more accessible, exotic twitching holidays have grown into a £10 million business, spawning numerous specialist birding companies keen to take twitchers to some of the most exciting ecosystems on the planet. But with exciting ecosystems come exotic dangers. In 1990 Tim Andrews and Mike Entwistle were twitching in Peru in what has become one of birdwatching’s most widely reported tragedies. The pair were searching for Oilbirds when they were captured by the Marxist rebel movement known as the Shining Path: one was then shot while trying to escape and the other was taken for interrogation before also being shot. What they probably hadn’t heard were rumours of undercover US intelligence agents in the region having disguised themselves as birdwatchers. Dr Nat Seddon, a research fellow at Newnham College Cambridge who spends much of her time in the Amazon, had more luck in another part of Peru in 1994, but only marginally so. Her research camp was attacked by armed bandits who demanded $40,000 or claimed they would take a hostage, so she and her colleagues sought shelter in a nearby village. “We spent three terrified days in the back room of the Mayor’s house guarded by twenty guys armed with sticks and machetes in case they came after us.” She recalls. “It was like a scene from some western”. And although they escaped without harm, losing only two backpack’s of clothes and equipment, she was later mugged for her binoculars on a beach in south Peru. Gunpoint robbery and hostage taking may rank amongst the more sensational threats to extreme birders, but as David Hunt discovered rather dramatically on 23 February 1985, the natural world presents its own dangers. He was leading a wildlife holiday in northern India when a Spotted Owlet flew across their path. Unwilling to let such a prize disappear, he descended from the elephant and followed it into the jungle. When they retrieved his body and later developed his final film, they discovered a unique sequence of images of a charging tiger. So what is it that drives extreme birders to risk so much for what is, to most people, a bundle of feathers? Jim Wardill knows because in the mid 90s he was part of a team that set out in to try and rediscover the Cerulean Paradise Flycatcher on the small Indonesian island of Sangihe, which at the time was thought to be extinct. The only record of the species was a stuffed specimen collected in 1874 and now resident in a German museum drawer, and despite efforts by Victorian collectors, no scientist had ever seen one alive. They launched two expeditions, each of which took a year to organise and cost around £15,000, but on the second, after spending three months living on a ridge deep in the rainforest, they finally found what they were looking for. “It was pretty exciting setting off on an expedition not knowing whether the bird still exists or not,” Jim recalled, “so when we actually saw the thing I was in tears. It was definitely one of the most beautiful moments of my life. But although the bird was the main purpose of the expedition and actually seeing it was such a rush, it was also about the adventure. The places you go on expeditions are places people just don’t go to. It’s not easy or comfortable, but it is a magical experience.” Birdlife International’s Dr Jonathan Ekstrom agrees: “I spent large parts of my PhD living in a mud hut in a remote Madagascan village where I learned at least as much about the indigenous people and their beliefs as I did parrots. For me birding isn’t just about the birds; it’s about the whole experience.” Back in Oxford, Lyn didn’t really care what motivated the crowd in her garden because as far as she was concerned, they were mad. We sat in her kitchen which smelled strongly of cats and talked as birders dropped pound coins in through the cat flap, and she confessed that she was living in dread: “Four of my cats are too fat and sleepy to go for anything, but the other’s a real killer. I’m worried that it’ll get the poor little bugger and I’ll have some twitcher around here with an air rifle.” If neighbour Mick Winters didn’t get there first, that was. Within the previous month he had picked up the carcasses of 2 goldfinches, a collared dove and a woodpigeon – a sore point for a man who spent £300 a year on bird feed. Nevertheless, by Saturday even he was fed up with the Oriole frequenting his garden. “It’s been madness here all week,” he said. “You hear their mobile phones going off at 6.30 and them hollering: “I’m in Oxford…Headingly…” I’ve not had a moment’s peace. I’ve even taken all my feeders in. I wish the bloody thing would just go away.” Eventually the crowds did disperse and, a few weeks later, the Baltimore Oriole disappeared. No-one really knows the final fate of the long distance migrant that inspired so many twitchers on their pilgrimage, a bird that had survived a transatlantic crossing and the UK’s foul winter weather, but many say it was taken by a cat. Whose cat, however, remains open to speculation. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/58332fe49f7456a4657c149f/1479749604931/ Ben Winston Essays - Medical tourism At one of Thailand's premier beach resorts on the tropical island of Phuket, Mancunian Janis Fennel lies beneath the shade of a palm tree, recovering in a hammock. Just ten days ago she was lying on a Bangkok operating table, undergoing a six hour breast reduction operation beneath the careful knife of Dr Kasem. Now, with the money she saved by flying to Asia for her surgery, she's treating herself and her family to a little luxury. So in about forty minutes she will be pampered in the on-site Angsana Spa. Then this evening, it's off for a candlelit dinner of porcini mushroom gnocchi in a light truffle cream sauce - accompanied by a chilled bottle of Les Pierrs Blanches Sancerre - served on the private dining boat that cruises the hotel lagoon. "I can't think of any finer way to recover," she says. As UK private hospitals begin to look overpriced on the global marketplace, a growing number of patients are discovering the cheap, world class healthcare available in Thailand. Partly thanks to an overcapacity in Thailand's private hospitals, and partly because western trained Thai surgeons are finding a better quality of life at home, face lifts, liposuction, breast augmentation, hip replacements and even sex change operations now cost patients between half and a third of what they would pay in the west. It's a combination of low prices, quality treatment and idyllic tropical getaways that puts Thailand in firm competition with South Africa, India and China for medical tourism's top spot. Note - some of the images in this collection show operating theatre scenes and nudity. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/58499045ff7c50d55a8102bb/1481216069181/ Ben Winston Essays - Cluster bombs During the Vietnam war, the US dropped more bombs on neighbouring Laos than they did worldwide during the second world war. Up to a third of them failed to explode. Now, over 30 years since the conflict ended, unexploded ordnance contaminates over half the land and kills around 200 people each year, helping keep Laos amongst the world’s least developed countries. Ben Winston reports. In 1993, nine year old Phonsay was playing in the fields when a friend found a ball and threw it his way. Fortunately, Phonsay missed the catch. He doesn’t remember much of what happened next because the cluster bomb his friend had mistaken for a ball exploded, sending out a spray of burning shrapnel that tore a hole in his skull and left him in a coma. He was lucky to survive. When he came around twenty five days later, he discovered that brain damage had left him hemiplegic – he had lost the use of his entire left hand side. And although he can now talk and is just about able to walk, he still has difficulty comprehending why he is a casualty of a war which ended long before he was born. The reasons are twofold. Firstly, like all of the cluster bombs trialled during the Indochina war, the BLU26 cluster bomblet (the most common in Laos and the one most likely involved in Phonsay’s accident) is a sophisticated device. About the size of a child’s fist, it contains 100g of high explosive and an intricate, precision engineered arming mechanism. This complicated mechanism frequently fails, leaving unexploded bomblets scattered across the countryside in what are, ultimately, de-facto minefields. In Laos where an estimated 90 million of these things were dropped, failure rates of the BLU26 stand at around 30%. Which means today there are anything up to 27 million bomblets waiting for people like Phonsay. The second reason for Phonsay’s accident is that Laos remains, per capita, the most heavily bombed country in the history of warfare. This is because between 1964 and 1973, the Vietnamese ran the Ho Chi Minh trail through Laos in direct contravention to the Geneva accords which had earlier recognised Laos’ neutrality. When the US began it’s subsequent carpet bombing of the trail, they too contravened the accords in what was to become their most expensive military venture ever, costing $2 million per day for the best part of nine years. The result of this ‘Secret War’ was that by the end of 1973, more than 2 million tonnes of ordnance had been dropped on Laos, which is roughly 10 tonnes of bombs for every square kilometre, or over half a tonne for every man, woman and child. This is why 21 year old Phonsay now ranks among over 11,000 people to have been killed or injured by unexploded ordnance (UXO) since the end of hostilities (although a recent UN Development Program study suggests the true number of victims could be more than double that). It is also why over half the country’s arable land is too contaminated to be safely farmed, and why almost 60% of the population suffer malnutrition. But this contamination doesn’t just hold back the cultivation of food – it inhibits the building of roads, schools, bridges, hydro-power, irrigation schemes and other development projects that might otherwise help the country lift itself from poverty. In the heavily contaminated Xieng Khouang province, the village of Houi Dok Kham is a good example. It has an ample 118 acres of cultivable land, but three UXO deaths and widespread contamination have left the villagers too scared to cultivate more than 5 of those acres. The Asian Development Bank also funded irrigation scheme in 1995 that would have allowed the village to cultivate two rice harvests per year, but contractors had to stop work after discovering high numbers of cluster bombs, mortars, grenades and other explosives beneath the surface. Boun Seah, the village’s 52 year old chief, sits in the shade between the stilts of his raised house and explains: “When Savan and Khampan were killed, many people stopped using the large area of fertile fields beneath our village. These days we cannot grow enough rice for everyone and often go hungry. We would cultivate the land if we knew where the bombs were buried… but we don’t. I would say that UXO is definitely the biggest problem facing our village today.” But in spite of its contamination, Houi Dok Kham is lucky. The British based Mines Advisory Group (MAG) and national de-mining agency UXO Lao are busy clearing the village land for direct agriculture and to enable progress with the irrigation scheme. The result is that for the first time since 1964, villagers can soon look forward to feeding themselves properly. Out in the fields the MAG teams scan metal detectors back and forth across the earth, listening for the bleep of buried metal. It’s 35 degrees and the sun and humidity make this hot, painstaking work, yet each and every positive reading has to be marked. Then, once the detectors are clear of the area, technicians delicately excavate what in most cases turns out to be a harmless bomb fragment. Over two days the teams uncover nearly forty kilos of scrap metal, a handful of bullets… and five BLU26 cluster bombs. During this clearance MAG’s perfect safety record was nearly devastated in an incident which highlights the ignorance surrounding UXO. Hearing that bomb disposal experts were in the area, a seven year old boy brought the team two live BLU26s, one in either hand. “Do you want to buy these?” he asked team leader Somphong Chanthavong. The BLU26 has a kill zone of 10-15 metres and Somphong knew that if either bomb went off, the boy, himself and a number of his staff would be killed. “I told him to be very still,” Somphong said, “then dug a pit, backed off and told him to put the bombs into it very gently.” The boy did as he was told and, thankfully, neither detonated. “He had learned in school about the dangers of bombies,” Somphong said, “but he just didn’t make the link. He thought he could make a bit of money.” According to 2000 figures, children under the age of 15 constitute 44% of all UXO victims in Laos. “The trouble is that kids are curious,” explains Mick Hayes, MAG’s director of operations in Laos. “You hear it so often – stories of children getting arms or heads blown off while playing with what they think are toys.” The problem is so acute that the Lao national curriculum now includes an hour of UXO awareness lessons each week, but what a child learns in school may be contradicted the ubiquity of UXO at home. The material poverty of Laos has led to a startling proliferation of recycled war scrap – BLU3 bombies are frequently dismantled and made into lamps, while the casings of larger 500lb and 1,000lb bombs make excellent plant pots, fence posts, or the stilts for a house. Many Lao spoons are fashioned from aluminium salvaged from downed US aircraft, and retrieved explosives are apparently good for fishing. But although many bombs are successfully recycled, amateur bomb disposal is phenomenally high risk. In the central province of Khammouane, Mr Bounhome tells of how his elderly father was tempted to dismantle a BLU24 cluster bomb unit after scrap metal traders offered him 5,000 kip (about 28 pence) per kilo of aluminium.. “My Dad knew it was dangerous and had explosive bombies packed inside. But he was a bit of a drinker and his judgement was probably clouded by how much money he thought he could get for a chunk of metal that big.” Bounhome told researchers. The bomb went off. “My Dad didn’t have a chance,” he said. “But somehow I survived the explosion with only heavy shrapnel wounds to my legs.” Bounhome’s story is not exceptional. In Kammouane in 2002 a large bomb killed the eight men who were trying to defuse it. Then in 2003 in Xieng Khouang province, a farmer tried to defuse a 500lb bomb and blew up three houses, himself, six of his family, and six of his neighbours. Yet while these stories do deter some, there are still plenty of men like Boulapha resident Cha Kai who make their living from scrap metal. He roams the fields with a cheap Vietnamese metal detector, selling his finds to Khun Ma Mat, the local metal merchant, for just 6000 kip (33 pence) per kilo of aluminium, and 600 kip (3 pence) for each kilo of steel. At these prices, a dismantled BLU26 is worth just under a penny. In spite of the low prices and high risks, scrap metal is a growth industry in Laos, as the sharp 2004 rise in UXO accidents attests. Vietnamese traders are increasingly collecting from across the border, and a huge new incinerator in Xieng Khouang is already surrounded by thousands of tonnes of rusting car wrecks, cluster bomb casings and tank turrets. In addition, tourists are now adding to the death toll as they buy dismantled cluster bombs for souvenirs. Sadly, the problem of UXO in Laos looks set to get worse before it gets better: population growth is increasing the pressure on land and the price of scrap metal is rising. The best estimates quote decades rather than years for the clear up operation, and that is dependent on a constant flow of funds. Meanwhile, more boys like Phonsay – indeed, more children not yet been born – will continue to suffer from the devastating legacy of cluster bombs and other remnants of a secret war they had nothing to do with. Resources Co-laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), MAG can be contacted on tel. 0161 236 4311. For more information on MAG’s operations worldwide or to make donations, visit: www.magclearsmines.org. For more information on the campaign to ban landmines and explosive remnants of war visit: www.icbl.org For more information on the situation in Laos, visit the national de-mining agency’s website: www.uxolao.org https://www.benwinston.co.uk/blog daily 0.75 2016-11-21 https://www.benwinston.co.uk/blog/2016/11/21/huy8hp3f77cpyq4jmqjizwx8iq8ifc monthly 0.5 2016-11-22 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/58333b96cd0f68455490715f/1479752611503/ Blog - End of the Ende https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/58333fd98419c209d6be1006/1479753702406/ Blog - End of the Ende https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/583339b420099e2b2518670b/1479752134587/ Blog - End of the Ende https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/58334070d2b857c868b1b70a/1479753859557/ Blog - End of the Ende https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/583342df37c581cf7d268ec8/1479754472688/ Blog - End of the Ende https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/5833417fe6f2e10b89bf13bd/1479754123058/ Blog - End of the Ende https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/583340f2b8a79b7de9346eae/1479753976722/ Blog - End of the Ende https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/58333f006b8f5bfa77ba8120/1479753484209/ Blog - End of the Ende https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/583340b7bebafb52bb789cd8/1479753922188/ Blog - End of the Ende https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/58333df115d5dbc084e2a1c1/1479753216557/ Blog - End of the Ende https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/58334029f7e0ab143db5de86/1479753789529/ Blog - End of the Ende https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/583341382994ca3616890073/1479754056483/ Blog - End of the Ende https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/58333ac1ebbd1aa5f7539a73/1479752396831/ Blog - End of the Ende https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/58333e53d2b857127404ecd6/1479753308403/ Blog - End of the Ende https://www.benwinston.co.uk/videos daily 0.75 2016-12-08 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/5849738df5e231de59f956c3/1480498818491/ Ben Winston Videos - Go Wild https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/583333a3197aea260fdbc81d/583e9e78c534a59807d5d3b3/1480498818491/ Ben Winston Videos - Go Wild https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/583333a3197aea260fdbc81d/583333ba197aea260fdbc983/1479750755325/ Ben Winston Videos - The Hardest Line https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/583333a3197aea260fdbc81d/58333430414fb5073f61e660/1479751585208/ Ben Winston Videos - If only they knew https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/583333a3197aea260fdbc81d/583334551dd454677c1cb993/1479750598368/ Ben Winston Videos - The Hardest Line https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/583333a3197aea260fdbc81d/584971ea440243554c5c984e/1481208717772/ Ben Winston Videos - Zamberlan 85th Anniversary https://www.benwinston.co.uk/about daily 0.75 2016-12-08 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582ca4986b8f5b767626aff5/t/582dbcff03596ef74084effb/1481208974538/Screen+Shot+2016-11-17+at+14.17.50.png Ben Winston 1976-2105