Features

Abodes of air-shelter remnants

  DPA Martin Heimeier decided to leave the hole in the roof as it was, though it has been capped with some concrete. The cover over the 3.5-metre-wide gap gouged by the bomb — more about that later — has been painted gold and has a spotlight so that Heimeier’s tenants can light up the ceiling recess whenever they want. ...

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Traders cash in on gut feeling

  Bloomberg Traders who are better at listening to the clues their bodies give them about market patterns make more money and survive longer in the industry, according to a study by former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. derivatives trader-turned-neuroscientist John Coates. Coates, whose 2012 book “The Hour Between Dog and Wolf” revealed how traders’ decisions are influenced by biology, wanted ...

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Having a ‘blast’ among the rocks

  DPA Just before the explosion, a warning signal sounds; a few seconds later Bernd Sauter presses the button marked “fire” and thousands of tons of rock come crashing down. Sauter works at a quarry belonging to a construction materials company, HeidelbergCement, and several times a month he gets to explode cliffs of limestone to be made into cement. “It’s ...

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Farm machinery through the lens

  DPA Joern and Tammo Glaeser are out on a shoot – taking still photos, film and drone footage. Judging by their equipment, anyone might think they were making a music video. But the brothers’ cameras are trained not on a pop star, but on a tractor with a short disc harrow. “This is a Fendt 939 Vario, only just ...

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India’s ‘paid labour’ shut down raises concerns

  AFP At a hostel for dozens of pregnant women, impoverished widow Sharmila Mackwan weighs up her decision to carry twins for another couple — her only ticket out of poverty — as the government moves to close India’s multi-million dollar surrogacy industry. She has left her own children at an orphanage for the whole nine months of her pregnancy ...

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Swapping chainsaws for cheap healthcare

  AFP The forest around Manjau in Borneo once reverberated with the scream of chainsaws, as gangs of illegal loggers felled ancient hardwood trees for sale to timber merchants downstream. But many loggers in the remote Indonesian village are hanging up their chainsaws in return for affordable healthcare, through a community incentive scheme that aims to save lives and protect ...

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Secrets from the Stone Age

  AFP When police heard about the frozen corpse up in the Alps in September 1991, they opened a criminal probe. Murder it was, but the crime was rather old — and the ultimate cold case. The dead man, found by hikers 25 years ago this week a snowball’s throw from the Austrian-Italian border and put in a wooden coffin ...

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Doggone days for Oz greyhound racing

  AFP When greyhound owner Zac Kessanis comes to Sydney’s Wentworth Park to watch his much-loved dog race, he’s not so much interested in the prizemoney as in simply seeing her run. “For 30 seconds we’re on top of the world, we’re so proud, no matter what,” he says of watching the black greyhound named Ella Has Class sprint the ...

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Struggling to shake a leg

  AFP For years, Guinea’s main dance company brought glory to the west African state, touring the globe for sell-out performances. Today, ageing and forgotten, it struggles to train a new generation of dancers facing a very uncertain future. “Les Ballets Africains was the biggest cultural institution not just in Guinea but, as their name suggests, in the whole of ...

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Neffos: A blend of tech and style

  Emirates Business TP-Link has launched the latest Neffos series smartphones that establish the company as a serious contender in the mobile space. Created to seamlessly connect people to each other, and to the world around them, the Neffos X1 and the Neffos X1 Max push the boundaries of smartphone design, imaging prowess, mobile security, and processing performance. The product ...

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