Features

‘Sliding into catastrophe’

  AWEIL / AP Two months after the world’s youngest nation declared a famine amid its civil war, hunger has become more widespread than expected, aid workers say. South Sudan’s Northern Bahr el Ghazal region is on the brink of starvation, with 290,000 people at risk of dying without sustained food assistance. Humanitarian workers say conditions will only deteriorate as the ...

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Collateral damage from war zones

  KHAZER / AP Six-year-old Mustafa suffers nightmares, cries at the sound of airplanes and occasionally wets himself, symptoms that worsened last year when an explosion in Mosul killed his cousin and wounded his father before his eyes. He was a young witness to more than two years of IS rule and months of heavy fighting aimed at driving the extremists ...

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A ‘royal’ reunion!

  DALLAS / AP A Faberge egg and the jeweled elephant designed to fit inside it are being reunited for the first time in almost a century thanks to a loan from Queen Elizabeth II to a Texas museum. A gallery that opens on Monday at the Houston Museum of Natural Science features the elephant, which only recently was discovered to ...

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Where funeral is a predatory business

  PORT-AU-PRINCE / AP Aspasie Tanis lives hand-to-mouth on the edge of eviction in the best of times, scraping out a living selling packets of spaghetti and cookies outside her low-slung concrete shack in Haiti’s capital. Now the death of her father by stroke threatens to send her into a lifetime of debt. The distraught single mother is frantically seeking loans ...

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Aging-in-place!

  NEW YORK / AP If you build it, they will stay. The small businesses that dominate the home remodeling industry are expecting robust growth in the next few years, thanks partly to baby boomers who want to remain in their homes. Home remodelers say they’ve had a pickup in projects from boomers who are in or approaching retirement and are ...

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Still chained to their dark past

  SEOSAN / AP Chung Young-chul takes a drag on his cigarette and watches as wild ducks fly across rice fields and land on a reservoir in this remote farming village. He’s among nearly 2,000 people — ex-gangsters, ex-convicts, orphans — who were once held here, forced to work without pay for years and are now largely forgotten. “Some died after ...

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Helping women in distress!

  PESHAWAR / AP When Durdana married for a second time and to a man of her own choosing, her parents threatened to kill her if she tried to see her new husband. They imprisoned her in their home, but she still had her mobile phone and had learned that a helpline for women had been set up. She noted the ...

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It’s curtains down at India’s decades-old theatre!

  NEW DELHI / AP From Bollywood superstars to political heavyweights, the Regal theater hosted some of India’s biggest names over more than eight decades. But with nostalgic theater-goers singing their way to the exits after a final showing of a Bollywood classic, the iconic New Delhi theater has closed its doors to make way for a multiplex. “It’s the end ...

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Agriculture of tomorrow!

  ROME / Reuters With scorching summer temperatures and little rainfall, the barren scrublands around the port of Aqaba in Jordan, one of the world’s most arid countries, might seem ill suited to cultivating cucumbers. Yet a Norwegian company is planning to set up a solar-powered, 20 hectare (50 acre) facility that promises to grow a variety of vegetables without ...

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Living by the sword!

  NEW HAMPTON, NY / AP Through smoke and sparks and staccato banging from his anvil, John Lundemo forges swooping swords that look like they should be pulled from a stone, swung by a samurai or thrust on “Game of Thrones.” The 60-year-old has carved out a niche making pricey blades that are inspired by history but liberally mix in elements ...

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