Roff Smith

The fact that a huge amount of food is wasted each year will be no surprise to anybody in the West. What might come as a surprise is that a large percentage of global food waste occurs in developing countries — primarily because of poor infrastructure and dysfunctional distribution networks.

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"Would like to have seen a photo of the completed hat."

That's what one commenter noted when we ran a story on Aug. 8: "He's Just Woven The World's Finest Panama Hat. But Who Will Buy It?"

Now, we did have a nice photo of the hat weaver himself, Simon ...

Early one morning in June, a Panama hat weaver named Simon Espinal sat down to work at a wooden table in his house in Pile, an obscure village hidden in the hills near Montecristi, in Ecuador's steamy coastal lowlands.

Selecting eight threadlike strands of toquilla straw from a special stock ...

Few places are as rich in cycling lore as the Col du Tourmalet, the brutal 6,939-foot pass in the French Pyrenees that has been a mainstay of the Tour de France since 1910. This is where history is written and legends are made.

Eugene Christophe, for example, famously broke the ...

Your child is sick and requires admission to the hospital. As the clerk tut-tuts over the shortage of beds, he casts a speculative eye over his clipboard. The situation becomes clear: It's time to break out the wallet and cough up a bribe. Again.

Paying bribes for essential health services ...

News that Norway has been rated the best place in the world to live out your old age is hardly a shock. Scandinavian countries always sit at or near the top of surveys of the world's cleanest, richest, safest places.

Nor will it come as a surprise to learn that ...

The media are focused on Sierra Leone this weekend, as the Ebola-embattled nation has set up a three-day lockdown to help control the disease.

Aid will be coming from the United Kingdom, which once ruled the West African nation. But the country also played a painful role in U.S. ...

It's been the social media hit of the summer — some of the world's biggest celebrities dousing themselves with buckets of ice water to raise money for ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), better known as Lou Gehrig's Disease.

Just about everybody who is anybody seems to have done the Ice Bucket ...

Starting Thursday, FXX will air all 552 episodes of The Simpsons in the longest single-series marathon in TV history. Fresh Air listens backs to interviews with the show's creator, wr...

Ask someone to guess the world's two most expensive cities and it's a safe bet that the capitals of Chad and Angola — two of Africa's more impoverished nations — won't leap to mind. Geneva, perhaps, the home of Rolex watches, or one of those moneyed Asian capitals — Hong ...

Ireland is predicted to become the fattest country in Europe by 2030, according to a study released by the World Health Organization and the UK Health Forum.

As many as 90 percent of Irish men and 84 percent of Irish women are projected to be classified as overweight or ...