Features

AFP Better known for its palm trees and celebrities, Los Angeles is also emerging as a tech hub, with its so-called Silicon Beach area offering a sun-kissed alternative to Silicon Valley. In recent years tech companies large and small, including Facebook, Google and Snapchat, have opened offices in Santa Monica, Venice or Marina del Rey — better known for shirtless ...

Bloomberg The promise of Africa’s biggest economy has turned to peril. Companies drawn to Nigeria by the prospect of a population bigger than Germany and Turkey’s combined are retreating; those staying have publicly criticized the president, a military strongman in the 1980s who came back to power via an election last year; and foreign investors are pulling their money out. ...

Bloomberg For more than a century, Dawson Singletary’s family has grown tobacco, peanuts and cotton on a 530-acre farm amid the coastal flatlands of North Carolina. Now he’s making money from a different crop: solar panels. Singletary has leased 34 acres of his Bladen County farm to Strata Solar LLC for a 7-megawatt array, part of a growing wave of ...

Bloomberg If you were a pile of garbage on the street in India, here’s what might happen to you now: A concerned citizen takes your picture, then sends it by WhatsApp to the smartphone of the garbage police. Khaki-clad cops jump in their vehicles, rush over and order your cleanup. City officials fine the offender and maybe reward the whistle-blower, ...

Bloomberg There’s nothing plain about the vanilla market. The price of the bean used to flavour everything from ice cream and chocolate to cola and pastries more than tripled in the past year as output slipped and quality suffered. That should have been a boon for top producer Madagascar, the island nation off Africa’s southeast coast. Instead, the government is ...

DPA At a factory on the fifth floor of Woodlands Spectrum, a sprawling industrial estate, 10 machines, each about the size of a large cupboard, hum for hours each day as they churn out fully-formed products in metals, plastic, resin, sandstone or wax. Making anything from machinery gears to figurines, the additive manufacturing facility run by Ultra Clean Asia Pacific ...

Bloomberg Everyone is a food photographer these days. So where does that leave Martin Parr, who has been snapping food portraits for 25 years? His new book “Real Food” features more than 200 slates of everyday meals and snacks from 36 countries. Why focus on food when everybody else is doing it and he is known for capturing ordinary people ...

AFP The serenity of Cui Ruzhuo’s ink landscapes is a far cry from the turmoil of China’s contemporary art market. But he can bank on his own status as the country’s best-selling living artist. Cui’s works reflect traditional Chinese forms and subjects, replete with largely monochrome mountains, lakes and trees. Little known in the West, his works fetched a total ...

AFP Stroll around the office or neighborhood six times a day, and earn $1.50 toward your health insurance. Step up activity a bit more and bring the total to $1,400 annually. The catch: you need to wear a special activity tracker that monitors steps taken, “intensity” levels and other physical indicators. That’s the offer in a new insurance product marketed ...

Margaret Zhou / The Diplomat The Mekong Delta is facing its worst drought in recent history, causing food and water shortages for over half a million people. The Chinese government has made headlines amidst the disaster for its decision to release water from upstream dams within China’s borders. Chinese ministry spokesman Lu Kang said in a news briefing that China ...