​Vitali Vitaliev visits the Westman Islands off the southern coast of Iceland to find out how the islanders, and Icelanders in general, have learned to live on top of nature's own powder barrel "Flowers are immortal, you cut them in autumn and they grow again in spring – somewhere." /Halldor Laxness, Icelandic writer, winner of the Nobel Prize for ...

​Vitali Vitaliev discovers a reclusive Jurassic-Park-style community of Russian Old Believers in Alaska She was sitting on the pavement (or, as they say in America, "sidewalk"), next to a "Paws for Coffee" coffee-shop for dogs, in a wind-swept suburb of Anchorage, Alaska's biggest city. Her slanting Inupiaq eyes stared straight in front of her...

I came to Las Vegas in the very end of my 6-month-long American journey. In a way, I liked the place for its boisterous and unadulterated kitsch (Las Vegas' euphemism for culture, spelt with a capital 'K') and for its total lack of pretence, as if the city was constantly taking the mickey out of itself. Mechanic on duty. Free aspirin and tender sym...