Bloomberg Mass transit, the lifeblood of cities worldwide, is under threat from the biggest innovation in automotive technology since Henry Ford’s assembly line first flooded streets with cars. The self-driving vehicles being pioneered by Tesla Motors Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and others are poised to dramatically lower the cost of taxis, potentially making them cheaper than buses or subways, …

  Nairobi / DPA Sewing machines clatter and fumes from charcoal-burning irons fill the narrow aisles hung about with lengths of fabric in the Gikomba Market in Nairobi, one of the largest second-hand clothing markets in Africa. It is 7 am, and traders are already heaving large wooden carts fully laden with second-hand clothes pressed into plastic-covered packs weighing some …

  Gross Pampau / DPA Amateur palaeontologist Wolfgang Hoepfner painstakingly removed all the dirt surrounding some fossilized bones, gradually revealing the skeleton of a 6-metre baleen whale, 11 million years after it had died in the North Sea. “For a palaeontologist like me, it was almost like winning the lottery,” he later explained with pride. Fossil hunting is a hobby …