Features

Exiled Paraguay’s Ache people want land

  Puerto Barra / AFP Forced from their ancestral forests by the arrival of big agriculture in eastern Paraguay, the Ache people gave up the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that had sustained them for centuries. Now they have taken up farming themselves — and they want their old land back. The Ache’s homeland was remade in the 1970s by the mass arrival ...

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Where oranges even grow on streets!

  Valencia i / DPA When winter descends on Europe, Valencia’s famous oranges appear in supermarkets everywhere. While many are cheap, Spaniard Gonzalo Urculo advises orange-lovers to be on their guard. “The really cheap ones don’t taste of anything, they’re neither sweet nor juicy,” he says. Six years ago, together with his older brother Gabriel, the 30-year-old took over his ...

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Undersea spies ready to nab oyster bed raiders

  Boufféré / AFP Electronic spies come in all shapes and sizes, but none is as funny looking as an oyster impersonator called the Flex Spy now infiltrating the waters off western France. Looking for all the world like the bivalves it is protecting, the plastic imposter is fitted with a circuit board that allows it to snitch on thieves. ...

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In search of a better future

  Belgrade / AFP Aleksa Konstantinov was one the brightest maths students in Serbia this year but like many Balkan youngsters he immediately left for a US university after finishing school. Bosnian neurologist Sanina Babic Ribic was either laughed at or told she needed “political or some other support” to get a job after she graduated. She moved to Germany ...

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Huge solar plant beams power, hope to rural Uganda

  Soroti / AFP When power goes out in the rural town of Soroti in eastern Uganda, store manager Hussein Samsudin can only hope it won’t go on so long it spoils his fresh goods. Another shop owner, Richard Otekat, 37, has to pay a neighbour hourly to use his generator during blackouts as he can’t afford to buy one himself, ...

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Waiting to pursue a sweet future!

  Mbau / AFP Antoine Kakule Kihumuledi longs for a car to transport his cocoa crop and, like fellow residents in the Beni region in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, he wants peace so he can pursue his dreams. Kakule, 51, is a pioneer in cultivating cocoa in this area of Nord Kivu province, which has been ravaged by war ...

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What’s it like to win Spain’s bountiful lottery!

  Madrid / DPA Two years ago, a district in Madrid got lucky in Spain’s hugely popular Christmas lottery, with people working or living there winning prizes of between 120,000 and 3.0 million euros. As Spaniards gear up for the next windfall from the world’s richest lottery known as el “Gordo”, or the “Fat One”, AFP asked the 2014 winners ...

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Hunger for reading!

  DPA Donald Trump costs just 3 dollars, complete with a film of street dust that comes with every book purchased at Norman Maina’s stall tucked between a supermarket and a bus stop. Displayed on metal mesh a few centimetres off the ground, Maina’s second-hand book range includes Robert Ludlum thrillers and the success stories of the new US president ...

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Soaring in the sky among migrating swans

  DPA Biologist Sacha Dench recently took to the skies in a powered paraglider to follow flights of swans on their 7,000-kilometre winter migration. The number of Bewick’s swans migrating from the Russian tundra to north-western Europe fell by over a third between 1995 and 2010. The Flight of the Swans project by the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) aims ...

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In digital age, postcards refuse to die

  DPA When Andrea Thode was on holiday at the German seaside on the Baltic coast, she headed straight for a relic of a bygone era: a rack of postcards on sale at a souvenir shop. Postcards may be a phenomenon of the century before digital communication, but for Thode and her husband, Dirk, sending postcards to her kids, neighbours ...

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