Features

  New Delhi / AFP At one end of a backstreet in downtown Delhi a group of women hold a vigil to demand rapists be executed, while at the other acolytes of a spiritual leader arrested for sexual assault demand his release. Anyone seeking a glimpse of the bewildering range of issues animating voters in the world’s largest democracy should ...

  PATE ISLAND / AFP Ahmed Ali Mohamed snorkels over sea grass and coral, keeping an eye out for different fish species darting through the waters below him. But his job is not to catch the fish — as his family has done for generations — instead he only counts them. Mohamed is one of the first former fishermen to ...

  Soga / AFP The vivid red wound at the base of Gina’s ankle has remained open for three months and refuses to heal, leaving the Guinea-Bissau islander in constant pain. “I thought it was from a piece of wood,” she said, recalling the day when a snake sunk its fangs into her leg. “They had to carry me back ...

  Nagano / AFP Rising silently before dawn to slip on his monastic robes and begin the solemn duties of a Buddhist monk, Kazuki Yazawa is not your average Olympic athlete. Bowing his shaved head in prayer five times a day as part at the ancient Zenkoji Daikanjin Temple, Yazawa is so committed to his faith very few people would ...

Harriersand / DPA Claus Hartmann works with enormous logs of up to 4 metres in length. First he traces out his design on the wood and then he takes a chainsaw and begins to cut out the head and shoulders of a figurehead for a ship. After a week of work in his garden on the river island of Harriersand ...

  Barcelona / AFP Pedro and Mohamed await every utility bill with much angst. To reduce the money they have to pay, they live in the dark, without heating, or shower just once a week — victims like millions in Spain of energy poverty. Welfare associations have for years warned against this situation, but the death earlier this month of 81-year-old ...

  Ravensburg / DPA Once upon a time, we lived in a world where not even a public library reference desk could get you up-to-date biographical data about famous living people like politicians and tycoons. A century ago, before the internet had even been dreamed of, a German came up with the bright idea of compiling all that information from ...

  Copenhagen / AFP It may be past its sell-by date, but for many Danes it’s a tasty proposition: A supermarket in Copenhagen selling surplus food has proved to be so popular it recently opened a second store. After launching in the gritty inner city district of Amager earlier this year, the “Wefood” project earlier this month drew a long ...

  Frankfurt / DPA It’s too soon to sound the all clear, but international conservation organizati-ons have recorded a modest rise in the number of mountain gorillas in the volca- nic mountains of central Africa. Estimates put the number in Congo, Rwanda and Uganda at 800. This means that they are still highly endangered, but the population has risen from ...

  DPA Andreas Fraedrich has so many enormous golden-ball cacti that he could provide seating for a whole army of unloved older women — the thorny plants are jocularly known as “mother-in-law’s cushion.” The German also has a huge collection of other plants: queens of the night, ponytail palms, lemon and fig trees, yuccas, lantana, agave, weeping figs and rubber ...