All posts tagged "Features"

One springtime night a decade ago, bearded men wearing flip-flops kidnapped 276 girls from their boarding school dormitories in Chibok, north-eastern Nigeria. They forced the teenagers onto lorries and drove them deep into a vast forest in the savannah. "My captors did a lot of things to me and the other girls," says Glory Mainta, who was abducted that day. "We were beaten, shouted at – there’s nothing that they didn’t do to us. While they didn’t force us to marry them, what they did to us was worse. We were just managing till God saved us." It was a full two years before one of her fellow stu......

Although Mark Inglis walks on prostheses, he has achieved a feat that tests the physical boundaries of many. A year ago, the New Zealander reached the highest point on Earth, the 8,849-metre summit of Mount Everest. And he says that he barely needed more help than fellow mountaineers during the climb. "I don't have a disability," emphasizes the 64-year-old in an interview with dpa. "I just have an additional complication in my training and have to concentrate much more on the mountain and make more of an effort." He explains in an online video that he has loved mountaineering since his youth. ......

Of course there would be quieter places for a Pinscher to do his business in Bolzano. But now, in South Tyrol's capital, he squats in Waltherplatz, right in front of the cathedral. The owner, mid-20s, fur-trimmed down jacket, dog on a lead, doesn't seem to care much. He doesn't even look up from his phone. Then the dog and owner are gone again. The legacy is left behind - right in the centre of the busy square. You can guess how it ends. Scenes like this are soon to be a thing of the past in Italy's northernmost province with its half million inhabitants - the majority of whom are German-speak......

"I just wanted to forget all the misery and everything I lost," says Ahmad, a Syrian whose name has been changed as he wishes to remain anonymous. Ahmad turned to forbidden means to escape the anguish he was enduring in war-torn Syria. For years Ahmad was addicted to the drug commonly known as Captagon, a synthetic amphetamine-type stimulant. Many people in the embattled country are like him. It is one of the countless consequences of the war, which will enter its 14th year in mid-March. The civil war in Syria began in March 2011 with anti-government protests that were put down violently by th......

When a newborn baby was rescued alive from beneath the rubble in the rebel-held Syrian town of Jandaris after earthquakes devastated Turkey and Syria in 2023, her news made headlines worldwide. Some 60,000 people were killed after two powerful earthquakes with a magnitude of 7.7 and 7.6 shook south-eastern Turkey and northern Syria on February 6, 2023. The "miracle baby" born under the rubble was her family's sole survivor. Now nearly a year old, she was named Afraa after her deceased mother. When rescuers pulled the baby, whose fragile body was bruised and covered with dust, from the rubble o......

Bill Keener's eyes widened as he peered through his binoculars and spotted the dark, shiny dorsal fins swiftly bobbing along the surface of San Francisco Bay. "There's three of them coming right at us," he said. It was a drizzly Tuesday morning in winter, and the Marine Mammal Center field researcher and I had been wandering along the pedestrian walkway on the Golden Gate Bridge for about an hour. Cars whooshed past us as we dodged bicyclists and paused at lookout points, keenly peering over the steel railing toward the murky turquoise water about 200 feet below. We were hoping to catch a glim......