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Oil Thieves of the Niger Delta
Photograph by George Osodi for Darlingtons blog “It’s not OK for us to be doing this, we know, but the government is not looking after us at all,” says Daniel Sekibo (pictured). “There were no jobs here, so what do we do?” As night falls on a recent evening in the mazelike creeks of the Niger Delta, several oil thieves plunge into the dense, green mangroves along the Nun River. Above the forest, black coils of smoke rise to the sky. The river hums with outboard motors as skiffs carry residents to communities in the web of Nun offshoots. The boats halt at military checkpoints, barges manned by idle soldiers. Silhouetted passengers raise their hands to show they are unarmed and not transporting stolen oil. Daniel Sekibo leads the way. We are making our way to a camp near a Nigerian Agip Oil pipeline where he and his team, young men in their teens through thirties, refine stolen oil. The camp is a 15-minute walk from their village center, which is little more than a bar on a...
Terra-cotta warriors get 'sex change'
When Emperor Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, anticipated his death more than 2,000 years ago, he wanted an army of warriors to guard his mausoleum forever and protect him in the afterlife. So he ordered the creation of some 8,000 terra-cotta soldiers , along with hundreds of terra-cotta horses and chariots, to be buried with him in his tomb. Historians speculate the soldiers were modeled after eight individuals. When the statues were discovered by workers digging a well in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, in 1974, the world was stunned by the spectacular funerary art and the legacy of the powerful emperor. Since then, it's become a major tourist attraction and a World Heritage site.
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