Features

  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 ...

  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 ...

  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 ...

  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 ...

  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 ...

  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 ...

  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 ...

  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 ...

  Emirates Business Moto Mods is taking everyone to the next era of mobile technology. You can now transform your smartphone into exactly what you need it to be, and the possibilities are endless. The Moto Mods family includes the JBL SoundBoost speaker so you can take the party with you, the Insta-Share Projector so you can share content as ...

  DPA Every year thousands of people lose arms and legs after being injured by bombs or land mines, but with an estimated 80 per cent of disabled people living in developing countries, few can afford prosthetic limbs. A German computer scientist has an idea that could change that — he wants to use 3D printing technology to produce cheap, ...