Features

  London / DPA Almost as soon as Malcolm Kerr has thrown the mackerel, it has disappeared down Tiffany the pelican’s throat. It almost looks as if the bird has sucked the fish in as it passes – unchewed – down its neck, making a large bump as it does so. Tiffany is particularly hungry today and Kerr has to ...

  Nairobi / AFP When Beatrice Athiambo pulls the plastic covering off her stall in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi in the morning, her first customers are already waiting. They want to buy the earth that she sells – to eat. In Africa, geophagia, the eating of clay or stones, is widespread, especially among pregnant women, though estimates vary widely ...

  Butembo / AFP In DR Congo’s war-infested Great Lakes region, carpenter-turned-sculptor Sauveur Mulwana has left a trail of monumental statues over the past decade as part of his self-styled mission to revive local history and boost peace. The 42-year-old moved back home to Butembo, a teeming city of more than a million near the borders of Uganda, Rwanda and ...

  Vienna / DPA Music comes to Alma Deutscher when she dreams. “I sometimes get a melody in the middle of the night. Then I wake up and I sneak out of bed and I write it down in my notebook,” the British girl says. Like many 11-year-olds, Alma also has a vivid imagination when she is awake, but unlike ...

  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 ...

  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 ...

  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 ...