Features

  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 ...

  Rome / AFP The works of Ken Domon, an acclaimed photographer whose images of the aftermath of the Hiroshima bomb shocked 1950s Japan, take centre stage in Rome with the opening of the first exhibition of his pictures outside his home country. Domon, who died in 1990, is venerated in Japan as one of the country’s greatest photographers and a ...

  Daqing / AFP Once the pride of Communist rulers and now hit by a global glut and slowing domestic growth, China’s largest oilfield epitomizes Beijing’s reluctance to cut jobs at loss-making state-run operations. Thousands of oil pumps painted black, yellow and red stretch to the horizon in Daqing, which has produced more than two billion tonnes of the black ...

  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 ...