Features

  Moscow / AFP Russia’s ubiquitous sheet metal sheds — where tyres are changed, furniture repaired and fish smoked — have become bustling hubs of a shadow economy essential to the livelihoods of the country’s crisis-stricken population. Built in the 1960s and 1970s close to Soviet-era apartment blocks, the clusters of boxy garages today house much more than cars — everything ...

  Hairatan / AFP Some days there is no train at all crossing the bridge to Uzbekistan, yawns a customs officer in Hairatan, formerly a teeming Silk Road border town whose decline is a barometer of economic depression in Afghanistan’s north. “The camel driver is at work; the caravan is being readied,” proclaimed the mystic poet Rumi, born in Balkh ...

  Bloomberg After starving farms across Asia of rainfall, El Nino’s last gasps have infused life into the battered market for diesel fuel in the region.South Asian nations are using more diesel to run irrigation pumps used by farmers in the absence of rainfall to water crops and as dry weather depletes hydropower. That’s contributed to a 65 percent surge ...

  Abu Dhabi / AFP The Middle East’s poetry equivalent of “Pop Idol” is helping to keep alive an age-old tradition using bedouin dialect, which is barely understood outside the Arabian Gulf. Apart from the glory, a Kuwaiti student took home five million dirhams ($1.36 million), the top prize in a television show followed by millions of poetry lovers across ...

  Mainz / DPA Ethical and fashionable at the same time — this is the idea behind Darpdecade, a digital swapping platform for clothes that aims to combine trend awareness with conscience-free consumption.It all started with a gin and tonic and a scarf swapped for a jacket at a flea market in Tallinn some five years ago. University student Robin Balser ...

  Bloomberg Think of it as Mother Nature’s roller-coaster ride: the shift between the weather patterns known as El Nino and La Nina that, at their worst, can cause havoc worldwide. El Nino — spurred on by a warming of the equatorial Pacific — has dried up rice crops across Southeast Asia, cocoa fields in Ghana, coffee in Indonesia and ...

  Bloomberg Frustrated by the difficulty of finding dates while living in London, Dutchman David Vermeulen started InnerCircle, a matchmaking website focused on highly educated singles. Yet rather than set up in Europe’s biggest city, he moved to Amsterdam, home to about 800,000 people and a much smaller pool of potential customers. The city, he says, offered an inexpensive place ...

  SAN FRANCISCO / AP Apple is getting ready to unveil a stylish new product that’s not for sale — a new look for its stores. The iPhone maker is overhauling its nearly 480 stores worldwide, starting with its new two-storey location in San Francisco. Apple provided a glimpse of its revised approach to retailing, the 15th anniversary of the ...

  Los Angeles / AFP Bernard Minor spent 26 years behind bars for murdering a drug dealer who owed him US$400. Now, the ex-con spends his days teaching others to keep their rage in check, one of the swelling ranks of America’s anger therapists. “I was a very angry person,” the 58-year-old said. “I’d been living a violent life. Living ...

  Bologna / DPA A group of Italians stares out onto a market from an office in Bologna where they are discussing plans for a new gourmet amusement park which only Italians could have dreamed up. Although much of the world is familiar with pizza and pasta only, Italians relish a rich-tasting array of meats, exotic vegetables, cheeses and sauces ...