Features

  Bloomberg For more than a century, buyers and sellers shouted out orders for Darjeeling tea at auctions in India before they were shipped to high-end purveyors in Europe, Japan and the US. Now, the prized black tea is poised to enter the digital age, with Darjeeling trade moving online from June. India harvested 1.19 billion kilograms of leaves in ...

  Bloomberg Time is running out for the 70 acres of sugar cane and fruit that Balasaheb Pandharinath Shende farms in India’s Maharashtra state. After two years of drought, his fields are parched and his wells have dried up. Monsoon rains that usually arrive this time of year should help, but the government says they will be at least a ...

  Jakarta / AFP When HeniKarmila sought to find a doctor for her ailing mother using Indonesia’s new healthcare system, she faced a nine-hour wait in a line outside a crowded public hospital in Jakarta. “The queue at the hospital is always very long, packed with young and old people, pregnant women, people who have had accidents, those in need ...

  Caracas / AFP Julio Ribas suffers from high blood pressure. If only Venezuela’s currency were as high, he might be able to afford some medicine for it.Venezuela is short of drugs, and to buy some from abroad, Ribas needs dollars — but those are in desperately short supply too. Ribas is just one of the countless casual victims of ...

  Tel Aviv / DPA A young woman sits at a long wooden table in front of her laptop, headphones on, absorbed in her work.She’s got a single space in the sleek co-working office Mindspace, located in the centre of Tel Aviv. The Israeli business has been very successful — its co-working office fills three storeys of two buildings on ...

  Obagaji / AFP Anyebe Peter has only recently returned to his farm in central Nigeria, nearly three months after attacks by Fulani herdsmen killed seven villagers, destroyed 250 homes and forced survivors to flee. “Nothing is left for us either on our farm or in our village after the attack,” he said in Adagbo, a stone’s throw from the ...

  Yangon / AFP Gripping a monkey-faced chess piece, TheinZaw swipes his hand across the chequerboard and topples an advancing demon, demonstrating an ancient form of the game that Myanmar traditionalists are battling to revive. Sittuyin, as Myanmar’s unique chess is called, is similar to the modern game but has distinctive pieces as well as moves that echo a time ...

  The Hague / AFP Nameless migrants laid to rest in unmarked scrubland, murder victims dumped in mass graves, desperate searches for the missing after natural disasters. Around the world, millions of families wait in vain to bury their dead. “You cannot close the book on the life of a loved one if you do not know the truth, or ...

  San Francisco / AFP In a Silicon Valley culture known for brilliant ideas boiling up in coffee shops, Gaurav Chawla is pouring his heart into chai. Chawla was on a break from his job as an engineering manager at San Francisco-based cloud-computing star Salesforce when he began lamenting how tough it was to find a cup of chai as ...

  Kostel / AFP In Slovenia’s southeastern BelaKrajina region, where the crystal-clear Kolpariver marks the border with Croatia, a forlorn barbed wire fence reminds locals of the migrants that never came. Instead of keeping refugees out, the barrier cutting through lush forests and gently swaying fields all along this pristine waterway is now chasing away tourists.Its razor-sharp coil has also ...