Features

  Tokyo / Bloomberg As the average age of farmers globally creeps higher and retirement looms, Japan has a solution: Robots and driver-less tractors. The Group-of-Seven agriculture ministers met in Japan’s northern prefecture of Niigata for the first time in seven years to discuss how to meet increasing food demand as aging farmers retire without successors. With the average age ...

New Mexico / DPA While Spaceport America, which claims to be the world’s first commercial spaceport, hasn’t yet launched any tourists into space, ordinary mortals can already tour the site. The futuristic building designed by rockstar architect Norman Foster is located in the middle of the desert in the US state of New Mexico. Here, it is hoped, rich tourists ...

  Natendorf, Germany / DPA Two polar bears, Nanuq and Sprinter, play in their zoo enclosure: Using their powerful teeth and enormous claws, they press a white ball under the water and then let it shoot up again to the surface. The bears, both males weighing around 500 kilograms and measuring 3 metres in length, are comparable to teenaged human boys ...

  New York / AP Walking through most doors at the Tribeca Film Festival means taking a seat in a theater full of chattering moviegoers. But there are also darkened, cloth-wrapped chambers — like old carnival booths promising never-before-seen wonders — that offer nothing but a headset, headphones and perhaps some advice, like: “Watch for the dragon.” Virtual reality has steadily ...

  London / AFP A plaque was unveiled in central London on Thursday, marking the place where William Shakespeare lodged in the city, in time for the 400th anniversary of the playwriter’s death. Actress Fiona Shaw read out Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 55”, while hand bell ringers and a children’s choir performed. “William Shakespeare had lodgings near here in 1604, at the house ...

Johannesburg / AFP Hundreds of coffee lovers queued early Thursday in an upmarket Johannesburg shopping centre as international chain Starbucks opened its first cafe in sub-Saharan Africa. The US-based global brand plans to open 12-15 more stores in South Africa over the next two years, with a long term plan of up to 150 outlets. “The timing is right. We are ...

  Doni, Ethiopia / AFP Outside a small store on a dirt track in the remote Ethiopian town of Doni, long queues wait for government cash handouts by the most modern of methods — mobile phone. Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country and one of its fastest growing economies, is pushing a new electronic payment service by phone — called M-Birr, ...

  London / AFP The 200th anniversary of the birth of Charlotte Bronte, whose intense and passionate vision of rural life in “Jane Eyre” has haunted generations of readers, was marked in Britain. Fans hosted a birthday party in the house in northern England where Charlotte and her sisters Emily and Anne grew up and wrote their books. The anniversary highlights ...

  Priboj / AFP Deep in a western Serbian valley, the town of Priboj despairs at the decline of a truck factory that was once its lifeblood — and is now symbolic of the country’s failing state-owned companies. A thriving manufacturer employing thousands under communist Yugoslavia, Fabrika automobila Priboj (FAP) is today one of Serbia’s loss-making enterprises whose future hangs in ...

  Tan-Tan / DPA Abdallah has been sitting drinking tea since dawn; the wind blows unrelentingly against his Bedouin tent, a protective layer between him and the vast, inhospitable Sahara Desert. He and his camel caravan have travelled from the Atlas Mountains to do business in Tan-Tan, a desert city in southern Morocco. By selling a small camel, he can make ...