Page 68 - Penh Post News Today

In the age of Covid, Jordanian mechanical engineer Saliba Taimeh pondered how to deal with one contaminated everyday surface: the handrails of escalators in shopping malls and transport hubs.

At least 100 new species – from monkeys to mussels – were found in Myanmar in a decade, according to conservationists who said discoveries during the country’s fleeting period of openness revealed “astonishing biodiversity”.

The Australian Centre for Education (ACE) last Wednesday held the official opening ceremony for its Tuol Kork Campus, with representatives from government, embassies, NGOs and multinational organisations, both public and private, in attendance.

The petals of various flowers in red, yellow and pink hover suspended in translucent plastic moulded into various shapes to make key chains, necklaces and combs with a fresh look and design brought to you by Afina – a Cambodian woman who was brought up in Malaysia.

With wooden spinning wheels and hand-drawn looms, Bangladesh is painstakingly resurrecting a fabric once worn by Marie Antoinette and Jane Austen but long thought forever lost to history. Dhaka muslin was stitched from threads so fine that popular folklore in European parlours held that a change in the light or a sudden rain shower would render its wearer apparently naked.

In a busy district of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, there is little to distinguish the faded brick building, except for a Hebrew inscription above the entrance. Iraq’s Jewish community was once one of the largest in the Middle East but its members have dwindled to a handful, outside of the autonomous Kurdistan region.

When Toun Socheat was about 10-years-old he took a keen interest in the “sastravuth” or metal weapons he saw and read about in his grandfather’s martial arts books. They fired his imagination and his attention was fixed to the photos of them on the books’ pages.

International sanctions against Russia over its military offensive in Ukraine could have wide-ranging impacts on its Latin American allies such as Cuba, experts say. Since the coronavirus pandemic, Russian tourists have become the single largest group of visitors to the island nation but events in their homeland have left many eager to return home.

Newspaper sellers were once a dime a dozen on Cairo’s bustling streets, but now the vendors hawking hot-off-the-press editions have fallen almost silent. As elsewhere in the world, Egypt’s print media has been in sharp decline as news has moved mostly online and readers tend to stay up-to-date via their smartphones.

Provocative Italian filmmaker and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini had no shortage of enemies, but half a century after his brutal murder on a beach, his death remains a mystery. Italy marks the 100th anniversary on March 5 of the birth of one of its leading left-wing intellectuals, while a retrospective of his estimated two dozen movies is planned in Los Angeles.