Features

  Yangon / AFP With turquoise columns propping up a pink and yellow portico, Myanmar’s art deco style Thwin cinema is a rare relic from a golden age of movie-making that dazzled audiences more than half a century ago. Myanmar’s film industry, once the most vibrant and prolific in the region, shrivelled under a military regime that smothered the arts ...

  Rumangabo / AFP A powerful combination of love and guns is helping rebuild an endangered gorilla community in the jungles of war-torn eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Threatened with extinction, some of the world’s last remaining mountain gorillas live on either side of the border between Rwanda and DR Congo, as well as in Uganda. On the Rwandan side, ...

  Amsterdam / AFP Seals peep from Amsterdam’s famous canals, while rare bats huddle in the eaves of houses, next to nesting birds. Wildlife — of the animal kind — is on the rise in the teeming Dutch capital. More than 10,000 different animal species roam the city’s nooks and crannies, sharing space already packed with around 800,000 Amsterdamers and ...

  Frankfurt / DPA With the help of a CT scan, Monica Solorzano Kraemer has discovered an ancient fly encased in a piece of amber from France. “Some ambers are too cloudy for a microscope,” says the scientist from Germany’s Senckenberg Society for Natural History. “With a CT scan I can look right through the stone.” A 3D computer programme ...

Bloomberg After disease ravaged his cocoa farm, Philippe Zongo walked into one of West Africa’s last remaining rainforests to hack out new acreage. Like thousands of young men from Ivory Coast and more arid neighboring countries, Zongo set out to find the best soil to plant new cocoa trees. He found it in the western Cavally forest, an area bigger ...

  Panama City / DPA Residents of Panama City are unlikely to say anything good about Henry Morgan, the well-known pirate who planned to stage his biggest raid there in 1671. With 1,800 men, he went from the mouth of the Chagres River, in the Caribbean, to Panama City on the Pacific Ocean, hoping to steal the gold and silver ...

  Pontianak / AFP A striking bird with monochrome plumage and a formidable “beak”, the helmeted hornbill is being hunted to extinction, one of the latest victims of a thriving global trade in exotic wildlife. For decades poachers in Borneo’s western forests focused on capturing orangutans and sun bears, but in the past few years a surge in demand for ...

  Harare / AFP They sleep outside banks, skimp on meals and sell flowers in hospitals. After long years of work, Zimbabwe’s pensioners are struggling to survive old age as the country’s economy collapses. With banks short of cash to pay out pensions, 80-year-old Gift Kaondera-Shava, a former truck driver, bus conductor and factory supervisor, now scrambles to feed himself ...

  Bloomberg The future of job interviews might horrify you. It horrified Jake Rosen. A recent graduate of UCLA, Rosen was applying to be a page at NBC (yes, yes, just like Kenneth) when he learned he wouldn’t be going to an office to talk to a human being about his skills. Instead, he interviewed by webcam, on a laptop. ...

  El-Jadida / AFP The equestrian art of tbourida, inspired by the historical charges of the feared cavalrymen of Morocco, fascinated Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix two centuries ago and still draws enthusiastic crowds today. At this week’s “Salon du Cheval” show in El-Jadida, western Morocco, thousands have been enthralled by the spectacle of groups of riders in colourful traditional dress ...