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MECHELEN / AMSTERDAM - Venturing off the beaten track and discovering things that no one has ever described before. This seems to be the dream of every investigative journalist. In this book, Luuk Sengers explores every stage of the investigative journalism process, from the initial idea to the finished story.

MUMBAI - With financial support from the Fonds Pascal Decroos, Nick Meynen followed carbon credit money flowing from Belgium to India, where he discovered a desert full of mirages. Part from the fraud and abuse, he also noticed the difference in approach between Flanders and Belgium, the buyers of carbon credits.

TARINKOT - How does a man with only a motorbike, a satellite phone and a small group of confidants become President of Afghanistan? In Expedition Uruzgan, Bette Dam reveals how Hamid Karzai liberated the province of Uruzgan from the Taliban after 11 September 2001. This was a crucial moment in Afghan history.

BUDAPEST - One year ago, the Belgian government purchased two million tonnes of CO₂ emission rights from Hungary. This €26 million investment is intended to help the country meet its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce emissions by 7.5 per cent by 2012 compared to 1990 levels.

SALÉ - On 27 July, Abdelkader Belliraj was sentenced to life imprisonment by the court in Salé. The Moroccan judicial authorities found that Belliraj had committed six murders in Belgium, smuggled weapons into Morocco, laundered money, and led a terrorist network.

BAMAKO - The river Niger, Mali's vein of life, is in danger. Photographer Raymond Dakoua shows the great economic, social, human and ecological importance of Africa's third longest river. 'Le Djoliba' means 'the river' in the Bambara language.

DUBAI – Thanks to its strategic location, booming real estate market and especially high concentration of extremely wealthy individuals, Dubai emerged last year as the most important non-European destination for Belgian business travellers. Journalist Filip Michiels and photographer Isabel Pousset travelled to the small emirate on behalf of Vacature magazine, discovering that Dubai has a great deal more to offer the weary business traveller in the form of prostitutes.

BEIJING / NEW DELHI - ‘Economic globalisation has made many countries, particularly in Asia, richer. However, income inequality has also increased in most countries. Companies are constantly looking for the cheapest and least protected labour. Moreover, the internet has given them access to a virtual global factory floor. They can now break work down into small tasks and outsource them through their global agency network more easily than ever before. Consequently, the proportion of wages in the economy is falling almost everywhere, putting workers under pressure in all sorts of ways. Can things be improved?

HAVANA - Everyone has an opinion about Cuba, but in 'Cuba after Castro' Lode Delputte shows what is really at stake. Cuba's future is inextricably linked to its self-proclaimed glorious past. No reasonable person would doubt that Fidel Castro's time is long gone. Even the political elite in Havana have come to understand that today's revolution is but a glimpse of what it used to be.

KABUL - There will soon be 100,000 Western troops in Afghanistan, including 400 Belgians. Yet year after year, the insurgents are gaining ground.

BRUSSELS - 'Gypsies. Sinti and Roma under the swastika' is the first Dutch-language overview book on the fate of Sinti and Roma in Europe during the Nazi era, from 1933 to 1945. Like the Jews, the so-called 'Gypsies' were persecuted because, according to Nazi ideology, they were an inferior race.

BRUSSELS - Can we expect pill manufacturers to provide objective information? This is the first in a series of articles on the influence of the pharmaceutical industry in Europe.

PANKOVKA - Now aged 83, Oswald Van Ooteghem has lived many lives. When he was 16, he volunteered to join the Flemish Legion and fight alongside the Waffen-SS on the Eastern Front in Russia.

BRUSSELS - In recent years, the European Union has emerged at a dizzying pace as a global military player. Since 2003, Brussels has deployed soldiers to troubled regions while London, Paris and Berlin have charted the course, albeit without agreeing on the direction to take. Could a fully-fledged European army be in the making?

ANTWERP – Theatre director and journalist Michaël De Cock set out to explore his own city, seeking answers to a question that has been troubling him: just how divided is Antwerp?

BEIJING - China is everywhere. Yet we know little or nothing about the country and its people. What we mainly notice is that there are more and more Chinese people around. Today, there are around 1.3 billion of them. They are people with dreams, aspirations and hopes. Lots of hopes. This book is about ordinary Chinese people. The similarities between them and us Westerners are greater than the differences.

COPENHAGEN - Danish police are investigating the inner workings of the 'Nonstop Bio Cinerotic' porn cinema, which rents out rooms to Nigerian sex slaves in Copenhagen's red light district. Until very recently, one of the directors of the cinema was Guy Paquot, a Belgian knight and top executive of the Belgian listed holding company Compagnie du Bois Sauvage NV.

JOHANNESBURG - South Africa attracts a large number of migrants and refugees from across the African continent. However, the country lacks the institutions required to manage or accommodate this steady influx.

BRUSSELS - Belgium is a magnet for foreign intelligence services. The mere presence of the European institutions and NATO on Belgian soil attracts a large number of spies. European leaders are bugged, and secret NATO files are passed on to the enemy. But that is not all. Foreign spies are infiltrating companies and universities to gather technological know-how. Hard drives packed with sensitive information are disappearing without trace from leading Belgian companies.

LUSAKA - Elections will be held in Zambia on 28 September 2006. President Mwanawasa hopes that voters will reward his efforts to combat corruption, but the likelihood of this is low. This is because Mwanawasa himself appears to have anything but clean hands. Meanwhile, Zambia and the rest of the world are still far from resolving the enormous looting network of former president Frederick Chiluba.

ADDIS ABEBA - The Nile is vital for the survival of 160 million people in its ten basin countries. Egypt, for instance, has virtually no other source of water. Ninety per cent of its population lives in the narrow, fertile Nile Valley. In Ethiopia, as a result of a 1929 agreement, farmers are unable to use Nile water to improve their agriculture.

BRUSSELS/TARGIA - Asbestos is the perfect model of a substance mined, industrially exploited and widely marketed as a miracle material without proper research into its long-term effects on health. Indeed, it went on being promoted long after it was recognised as dangerous.

KUKËS - The Kukes Prefecture, located in north-eastern Albania near the border with Kosovo, is one of the poorest regions in the country. It has a population of almost 120,000, 75% of whom live in rural areas.

KIGALI - Emma Dardenne, a widow living alone in Brussels (Belgium), was born in Rwanda in 1908 from a Rwandan mother and captain Heinrich von Bethe, a German officer on post in the German colony at that time. Despite the age of 95 and accompanied by her daughter Paulette and her grandson Manu she decides to revisit Rwanda to finally give them clear proof of her childhood stories.

BRUSSELS – Drinking water is arguably one of the most strictly regulated foodstuffs. After all, it is vital for life and consumed in large quantities every day. The water that European water companies pump through their pipes is clean. But what about the water that comes out at the other end of the pipe?

NEW DELHI - Grensloos India (India without frontiers) is a collection of critical travel essays with political depth. The book is a combination of travelogue, reflection and reportage on various facets of modern India: globalisation, the computer industry, religion and politics, poverty and exclusion, political extremism, tourism and the rise of the Indian middle class.

BRUSSELS - Belgium is home to countless international organisations, as well as a large number of politically active refugees and migrants. This makes our country attractive to espionage and foreign intelligence services.

SURAT - Once upon a time, Antwerp was the world's centre for diamond trading and cutting. As of 2005, the trade is still present, but Antwerp's renowned diamond industry is in decline. In an increasingly globalised world, diamond processing here has become too labour-intensive and expensive.

BEIJING - China has been on a spectacular economic rise for several years. It threatens to overtake Europe and the US as a global power. Is it a bubble that is about to burst, or should the West really fear the "yellow peril"? Who are China's modern-day gold-diggers, and are Chinese workers being exploited?

TEHERAN - What is it like to get by day to day with religious guidelines but no money? For the September issue of MO*magazine, David Nollet travelled to Iran with Gie Goris. This article provides an analysis and photographs of a young population living under enormous pressure.