Features

  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. ...

  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 ...

  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, ...

  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 ...

  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 ...

  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 ...

  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 ...

  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 ...

  DPA Tadashi Sakamoto yanks a sweet potato out of the loose soil. Dark earth trickles through the farmer’s hands. “Volcanic ash is ideal for growing sweet potatoes,” says the 57-year-old, squinting in the sunlight towards the nearby Kaimondake volcano. The 924-metre-high volcano, which last erupted in the late 9th century, rises majestically from the surrounding fields in Kagoshima Prefecture. ...

  Nairobi / AFP When Rose Kariuki first felt a lump on her left breast, the spectre of cancer — a disease she had only heard of on television — was the last thing on her mind. “To me, cancer was nowhere near us. It was shocking, I feared death, I feared so many things,” the 46-year-old Kenyan school teacher said. ...