Features

  Bursa / DPA Ercan Aksakal carefully picks up the coloured shadow puppet and examines the workmanship with an expert’s eye. It is a model for Karagoz, or “Black-Eye,” the protagonist and crowd-pleaser in Turkish shadow theatre. A coarse, crafty and forthright exemplar of the common people, Karagoz was also a favourite target of Ottoman censors in centuries past. Now ...

  BEIJING / AP Beijing residents concerned about breathing the capital’s thick gray air are adapting, inventing and even creating businesses to protect the health of their families and others. Some of their efforts could help people around the world. Already this year, the smog-shrouded capital has suffered particularly hazardous bouts of pollution caused mainly by coal burning and vehicle ...

  Duisburg / DPA Outside it may be grey and dusty, but in Wolfgang Mueller’s studio, the paintings of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) glow bright. That’s because they are all fresh. In the former upholsterer’s workshop in the German city of Duisburg, Mueller sits at a white grand piano and plays his own romantic compositions in an ode to his ...

  Wuppertal /DPA If you love riding trains, you’ve got to ride this one before you die: It’s the world’s only mass-transit rail system which has its wheels on the roof and a yawning gulf under the floor. Is it an aerial cableway or a rollercoaster? Neither. It’s a stately suspended monorail that carries 24 million passengers a year through ...

  NEW DELHI / AP The end is coming, though admittedly it may not look that way at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, when dozens of young Indians have arrived for morning classes at Anand Type, Shorthand and Keypunch College, and every battered Remington is clattering away. Looking around the cramped classrooms, you might think that the typewriter still ...

  Mainz / AP A terminally ill woman’s dearest wish was to see her favourite soccer team play one last time. The woman, in her mid-50s, had suffered a heart attack and an infection of the abdominal cavity. Her hospice room was covered in football scarves and posters of German club FC Kaiserslautern. Thanks to the Workers’ Samaritan Federation (ASB), ...

  Munster / DPA This mummy has probably had a more eventful afterlife than anything in the three-decade lifespan of the Egyptian man who died and was embalmed and wound in bandages 2,700 years ago. Somewhere along the way the body lost its head, and it may have attended high-school parties in the role of a spook. Apart from lacking ...

  Chichigalpa / DPA Death lurks in the sugarcane fields. He reaps the strong young men, sometimes before they’ve even turned 30. The ones who get away are marked for life, sick and unfit for work. “We’re the walking dead,” says former sugarcane cutter Juan Salgado. There’s a mysterious illness making its way around Central America. It has already claimed ...

  Hamburg / DPA Many bookworms baulked when singer-songwriter Bob Dylan was recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. But the highbrow position traditionally occupied by authors is now also being encroached upon by computer games designers, who are challenging traditional forms of storytelling and breaking the boundaries of narrative. One of these is Jan Mueller-Michalis, also known as Poki, ...

  Honiara / DPA Robert Satu has spent his whole life in a community near Honiara in the Solomon Islands, a South Pacific nation where steep hills often leave little space for settlements. “From the main road to the sea was more than 120 metres,” the village elder says in a documentary about the effects of climate change. “It’s now 55 ...