People sit near a fully loaded in Madama near the border with Lybia on January 1, 2015. French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian paid a surprise visit to northern Niger on January 1, to visit a base being built to combat the growing flow of weapons and jihadists from neighbouring Libya. Le Drian travelled from Chad to Madama, a desert outpost about 100 kilometres from Libya, where he saw in the New Year with troops at a French base. Madama is situated on the route used by jihadists and arms smugglers in southern Libya to reach northern Mali and Niger. (Photo by Dominique Faget/AFP Photo)

“Cassowaries are large, flightless birds related to emus and (more distantly) to ostriches, rheas, and kiwis”, writes Olivia Judson in the September issue of National Geographic magazine. How large? People-size: Adult males stand well over five foot five and top 110 pounds. Females are even taller, and can weigh more than 160 pounds. Dangerous when roused, they’re shy and peaceable when left alone. But even birds this big and tough are prey to habitat loss. The dense New Guinea and Australia rain forests where they live have dwindled. Today cassowaries might number 1,500 to 2,000. And because they help shape those same forests – by moving seeds from one place to another – “if they vanish”, Judson writes, “the structure of the forest would gradually change” too. (Photo by Christian Ziegler/National Geographic)

An armed man herds his cattle close to the village of Nimini in northern South Sudan, February 8, 2017. In the chaos of South Sudan's civil war, it took three years for Nyagonga Machul to find her lost children. Machul had traveled from her village to the capital when President Salva Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, fired his deputy Riek Machar, a Nuer, in 2013. (Photo by Siegfried Modola/Reuters)

A woman sits on a terrace at Tiki hostel in Cantagalo favela, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 16, 2016. Hostels in a few of Rio's more than 1,000 slums serve not only as a cheap housing alternative for the more adventurous among the estimated 500,000 foreign tourists expected to arrive for the Olympics in August. The establishments also open up the rich culture of the city's shantytowns for travellers, giving them a glimpse into once “no-go” areas where about one-fifth of Rio's population lives. (Photo by Pilar Olivares/Reuters)

People stand in front of a black ribbon, symbolising remembrance and mourning, being projected onto the Sydney Opera House on February 9, 2023 in solidarity with Turkey and Syria after a massive earthquake devastated the two countries. (Photo by David Gray/AFP Photo)

A woman photographs “Super Space Titan Kitty” by Colin Christian at the “Hello! Exploring the Supercute World of Hello Kitty” museum exhibit in honor of Hello Kitty's 40th anniversary, at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, California October 10, 2014. (Photo by Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

Zhang Ze of China in action during his Oceania zone group1 match against Bernard Tomic of Australia of the 2011 Davis Cup on July 8, 2011 in Beijing, China. (Photo by Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)

A woman prays while touching the fingers of a Buddha statue during the annual Makha Bucha Day, which celebrates Buddha's teachings, in Ang Thong, Thailand February 11, 2017. (Photo by Jorge Silva/Reuters)