Features

  Rio de Janeiro / DPA Carlos Saman is a 54-year-old library employee in the city of Nilopolis, not far from Rio de Janeiro, but oftentimes you will find him sifting Copacabana’s sandy beaches, hunting for treasure. Not pirate treasure, but the valuable objects that beach-goers drop. Very early on a recent morning on the beach, Saman and his 31-year-old ...

  Kiel / DPA If the only thing putting you off yachting is the discomfort, Sailing Yacht A, the world’s biggest motor-assisted superyacht, might just be the answer. But you’ll need to be a billionaire to afford it. Work on building A began four years ago in Germany and it is not quite ready yet. According to the magazine Boat International, ...

  Copenhagen / AFP A snow-covered former US army base in Greenland — dubbed “a city under ice” — could leak pollutants into the environment as the climate changes, raising difficult questions over who is responsible for a clean-up. In 1959, US army engineers began constructing a futuristic project in northwestern Greenland that might as well have been lifted from ...

  Bloomberg A neglected waiting area, empty reception and dim lights greet visitors at what used to be the biggest textile factory in the northern industrial area of Pakistan’s economic hub. At its peak Al-Abid Silk Mills Ltd. employed 7,600 employees in Karachi, now only a handful can be seen in the near-abandoned garment workshop. It’s one of hundreds that ...

  Moscow / AFP Kyrgyz migrant worker Belek Asanbekov sits at the kitchen table of his cramped Moscow apartment, scrolling through pictures on his mobile phone of friends killed days earlier in a fire at work. One of his seven flatmates, Gulbara Boobekova, a 45-year-old mother of two, was minutes away from finishing her 12-hour night shift at a Moscow ...

  Favara / DPA Ten years ago, Favara was a sleepy dormitory town of 30,000 in Italy with a crumbling and rapidly depopulating historic centre surrounded by the messy urban sprawl that is common across Italy. It has become an unlikely tourist hotspot, thanks to an enterprising local couple whose buzzing contemporary art centre, Farm Cultural Park, has reawakened civic ...

  Beirut / AFP Lebanese like Hamza al-Sees should have no problem finding a beach to while away the summer in a country stretching along the Mediterranean. But as private developers have gobbled up seafront land and families complain of ever-more polluted waters, many Lebanese say it is cheaper and cleaner to fly abroad than go to the beach at ...

  Emirates Business Acer unveiled and showcased its latest range of products at a highly-anticipated annual Middle East press conference at Dubai’s Westin Mina Siyahi recently. The event also hosted a number of key speakers, including Daniel Trachino, General Manager of Acer Middle East & Africa, John Miedema, Director of Product Management for Acer EMEA and Joumana Karam, Product Business ...

  Emirates Business At IFA 2016, Huawei Consumer Business Group debuted the Huawei nova and the Huawei nova plus, the first smartphones in the new series designed to meet the needs of today’s most dynamic consumers. The new nova series features stunning multi-curve design features, camera advances for more vivid photography and performance updates for enhanced usability. Every feature of ...

  AFP On bakery walls, buildings and roadside sheeting in South Sudan’s capital, Juba, street artists fed up with war are painting for peace as young musicians, actors and artists campaign to end decades of conflict. A mural of a child in a singlet working at a sewing machine reads “the young who are tired are the ones who will ...