Near Mosul’s war-ravaged historic heart, Maher Al-Nejmawi watches a worker repainting his long-abandoned stall. Residents of Iraq’s second city are trying to put their lives back together after months of fighting. “Here, a car bomb exploded. Over there, a rocket hit the building,” says Nejmawi, a 29-year-old car battery and tyre salesman dressed in a … Read more
In a formerly rebel-held district of Syria’s Aleppo, factory owner Karam allows himself a small smile as he watches his machines back in action, churning out plastic goods. Six months after Syria’s army captured the country’s one-time economic powerhouse, dozens of manufacturers with small and medium-sized factories are cautiously returning to the city’s east, once … Read more
What was once Bentiu, the gateway to South Sudan’s oil fields, is now a cluster of bullet-riddled buildings and piles of scrap metal, its ghostly avenues abandoned. Residents of the town have long since decamped to a well-ordered grid of mud dwellings ringed by sewage, where they live in wretched limbo after three years of … Read more
Superheroes are coming to the rescue of Thailand’s temples, where monks have commissioned giant statues of comic book icons and toy robots to entertain children while parents donate to their coffers. Instead of the traditional tranquil Buddhas and mythical beasts that adorn most monasteries in the land, the shimmering Wat Ta Kien temple outside Bangkok … Read more
It’s only when the thick smog of humidity and pollution lifts that the size of Lagos becomes clear: from above, the megacity of some 20 million people seems to stretch out to infinity. Not even the Atlantic Ocean appears to be able to stop its exponential growth, a tide of multi-storey apartments and shacks stretching … Read more
The Kufuor administration sold Ghana’s railway lines to Indians as scrap metal, former Minister of Trade and Industry Ekwow Spio-Garbrah has said. According to him, that practice affected Ghana’s railway sector during the Kufuor administration and so wondered why the Akufo-Addo government of the same New Patriotic Party (NPP) would improve the lot of the … Read more
Three World War II shipwrecks off the coast of Malaysia — the final resting place of dozens of seamen — have almost disappeared, local divers say, with the finger pointing at possible scrap metal scavengers. The Japanese cargo vessels, which went down with their crews off the coast of Sabah in 1944, had become popular … Read more
Fire yesterday swept through the Sikkens Scrap Line, near Agbogbloshie in Accra, razing down some shops and destroying valuables running into thousands of Ghana cedis. It took the swift response of personnel from the Ghana National Fire Service (GNFS) to prevent the fire from spreading beyond the area. No life was lost, but some structures … Read more
The victims of last Saturday’s disaster at Sentuo Ghana Limited, a steel manufacturing company in Tema, were conveyed to the Tema General Hospital in a tipper truck, after they had been left unattended to for a long time, The Chronicle has gathered. Prior to their departure to the health facility, the flesh of the deceased, … Read more
In the heart of Accra lies Agbobloshie, a sprawling scrapyard once tagged as one of most toxic places on earth. A former wetland, Agbobloshie has become a dumpsite for electronic waste products from around the globe. The scrapyard is also inhabited by some 10,000-20,000 youth who sift through the scrap metal to salvage mostly copper … Read more
He was always laughing about his White Man at Church, a German with long nose and sharp eyes observing all steps and words of his to learn from him eagerly to come out, over time, better than him in many ways while always respecting him as his Spiritual Father, having only Classic Cars on his … Read more