Features

  New York / DPA Tourists Rob and Mary Ann Gorlin are delighted. Ignoring the many attractions that New York City is famous for, they have come early to 72nd Street Station, the newly opened subway station on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “It’s immaculate and beautiful inside,” says Mary Ann, who hails from Detroit. After inspecting the new network diagram ...

  Geneva / DPA For more than 60 years, scientists from all over the world have been coming to CERN, the high-tech laboratory that straddles the Franco-Swiss border. You might not know this, but studious CERN is also a kind of playground for brainy people who work hard and play hard. The fun side makes it easier for particle physicists ...

  Wellington / DPA New Zealand’s alpine parrots live life at full throttle, perching on car roofs as they surf down mountain highways, hanging out at ski-field cafes and vandalizing cars just for fun. But the same keen intelligence that has enabled the kea to survive in the extreme environment of the Southern Alps is placing them in danger. Many ...

  Jungingen / DPA Low-stress cattle consultant Phillip Wenz doesn’t care for the label “cow whisperer.” “That would imply that I whisper,” he says. In fact, Wenz, 47, communicates with cows by entirely silent means, walking beside them very calmly, his mouth shut, hands in his pockets. “Fidgeting around makes the animals nervous,” he says. Wenz is an expert in ...

  Frankfurt / DPA It’s too soon to sound the all clear, but international conservation organizations have recorded a modest rise in the number of mountain gorillas in the volcanic mountains of central Africa. Estimates put the number in Congo, Rwanda and Uganda at 800. This means that they are still highly endangered, but the population has risen from just ...

  Cologne / DPA Dietmar is one of the bestsellers today. The youths listen spellbound as he tells them how 35 years ago he robbed a bank — because he needed money so he could marry his girlfriend. He almost got away with it, escaping for a whole year before he was arrested, charged and sentenced to four years in ...

  Havana / DPA When Cuban boxer Julio Cesar de la Cruz bit into his gold medal as he celebrated his triumph at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics earlier this year, Namibia Flores watched enviously on television at home in Cuba. Even though Cuba is a boxing powerhouse and has won more Olympic gold medals than any other country, competitive ...

  Berlin / DPA Isaiah Lopaz lets his photos speaks for themselves. “And when do you go back?” reads one of the plain white T-shirts the 36-year-old American wears for his portrait series. “Where do you really come from?” is another. It’s a question the Afro-American hears all the time in his everyday life in his adopted home city of ...

  Dresden / DPA When his royal palace in Dresden was badly damaged by fire in 1701, the Elector of Saxony and King of Poland seized his chance: Out with the original romanesque architecture and in with a glamourous new-fangled style: baroque. Over the next three decades, August II (1670-1733) oversaw a major refurbishing of the Dresden Royal Palace, creating ...

  Tokyo / DPA Otochika Ichikawa is a friendly, elderly man, who smiles and is good at making eye-contact as he speaks. The 70-year-old Japanese enjoys conversation. He knows, from bitter experience, how important social contact is. “When my daughter was 14 she refused to go to school,” Ichikawa says. His daughter spent hours leafing through the pages of all ...