Features

  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. ...

  Gulu / AFP Lily Atong’s anxious eyes fix on the sky where a helicopter gunship circles over her thatched hut, so low she must shout to be heard. “When I see gunships like this it brings back the fear of being in the bush,” Atong says. Abducted as a young girl and forced to become a wife to Lord’s Resistance ...

  Berlin / AFP Better known for its electronic music and street art, Berlin is now also home to a budding graphic novel scene in a country that has treated illustrated stories as children’s literature. Hardly seen in bookstores just a few years ago, German-produced graphic novels now have their dedicated shelves, as not only homegrown artists but also foreign ...

  Ouinhi / AFP Daniel Aboko proudly shows off the 11 hectares (27 acres) of paddy fields he shares with other farmers — a small spread that produces a bounty of food thanks to smart irrigation and a hardy strain of rice. In just four years, small farmers in Ouinhi, southeastern Benin, have seen their rice harvest double from three ...

  Dhaka / AFP Many of Bangladesh’s most significant political prisoners have been incarcerated within the walls of the two-century old Dhaka Central Jail. Now the prison that has borne witness to much of the country’s brutal history has opened to the public as a museum. The last inmates of the 228-year-old prison in the capital’s old Mughal quarters were ...