Feature

A few years ago, Greg Platt, an electric vehicle salesperson in Portland, Oregon, was having extraordinary success with a particular type of customer: foreigners. For a $250 fee, he’d ship cars north, where they usually crossed to western Canada by ferry. Other interested buyers would fly in from Europe. Platt...

Deep in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, members of the National Youth Service tirelessly swing machetes to clear dense shrubs obscuring railway tracks more than a century old. It’s a distinctly low-tech phase for China’s Belt and Road drive in Africa to create the trade highways of the future. There’s not...

‘Brainy bunch’ family in the US has mastered home schooling, with all 10 children starting university the same year they became teenagers. High school sweethearts Monalisa and Kit Harding, both 53, have made a name for themselves as home schooling experts after getting their 10 children through high school and...

In recent years, researchers in California have learned that hedges can actually be financially worthwhile. Rather than attracting starlings, which prefer open, treeless habitats, hedgerows of native shrubs and herbaceous plants can attract beneficial bird species that eat pest insects, as well as lure flies and wasps that feast on...

At a busy market in a poor township outside Harare this week, Nyasha Ndou kept his mask in his pocket, as hundreds of other people, mostly unmasked, jostled to buy and sell fruit and vegetables displayed on wooden tables and plastic sheets. As in much of Zimbabwe, here the coronavirus...

Many of the Iraqi refugees who have attempted to reach the European Union through from Belarus are from the Kurdish ethnic group that makes up the majority of the population in the north of the country. Along with people of other nationalities taking the route, many saw it as an...

For weeks, a fast-evolving showdown between the European Union and Belarus has been fuelling a humanitarian crisis on Europe’s eastern border, with thousands of asylum seekers and migrants being used as pawns in a geopolitical dispute. Tension escalated last week as somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 asylum seekers and migrants...

Although pastoralism is the bedrock of the economy in the arid and semi-arid lands (ASAL), the potential of commercialisation is blunted by a weak value-chain – from a lack of abattoirs and market access to only limited production of hides and skins, which effectively relegates pastoralism to a subsistence level....

Kargi is an isolated settlement, two-hours’ drive from the northern Kenyan town of Marsabit, across an ancient volcanic plain of jagged scree and basalt rock. As inhospitable as the terrain seems, Kargi does have a borehole, and that makes it something of an oasis for pastoralists trying to get their...