Travel

For rent: One Hungarian village, and a mayoral title

For rent: One Hungarian village, and a mayoral title

15 Photos

Mayor Kristof Pajer was looking for a way to save his tiny Hungarian community from extinction. The solution? He put the whole village up for rent.

For 210,000 forints ($730) a day, visitors get access to seven guest houses that sleep 39 people, a bus stop, horses, chickens and four hectares (10 acres) of farm land.

Guests are offered the temporary title of deputy mayor, giving them the right to oversee law and order and rename the four village streets for the length of their stay.
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Goblin shark in Australia, 18-foot oarfish and other odd fish

Goblin shark in Australia, 18-foot oarfish and other odd fish

29 Photos

A goblin shark, a rare sea creature described as an ‘alien of the deep’ is found off Australia and delivered to the Australian Museum in Sydney on March 3, 2015. In May 2014, shrimpers fishing in the Gulf of Mexico pulled up an incredibly rare, almost prehistoric-looking goblin shark. Earlier, an 18-foot oarfish was found off Catalina Island in California. Here’s a look at the goblin shark, oarfish and other big and/or odd-looking fish.

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The mysteries of Antarctica

The mysteries of Antarctica

22 Photos

Earth’s past, present and future come together here on the northern peninsula of Antarctica, the wildest, most desolate and mysterious of its continents.

Clues to answering humanity’s most basic questions are locked in this continental freezer the size of the United States and half of Canada: Where did we come from? Are we alone in the universe? What’s the fate of our warming planet?

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Bolivian grandmothers – and great-grandmothers – stay fit with handball

Bolivian grandmothers – and great-grandmothers – stay fit with handball

17 Photos

Known in the Aymara language as “awichas,” or grandmothers, the women pull sports jerseys over their long-sleeved blouses and ruffled skirts, then perform warm-up exercises while singing a childhood song.

The women, some of them great-grandmothers, arrive with their tennis shoes every Wednesday at a covered court in El Alto, an impoverished city near the capital of La Paz.

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On Iwo Jima: Baltimore school principal, police union president in historic photo

On Iwo Jima: Baltimore school principal, police union president in historic photo

When he was a teenager, Len Pojunas Jr., now in his 60’s, and his brother were talking with their mother about how they wanted to know somebody in a famous battle.

Their mother, Bee, explained that their father was — serving as a Marine on Iwo Jima.

A glance through the World Book Encyclopedia showed a half-inch photo from the battle, which he showed to his father when he was home.

“Honest to God, he put his hand on his forehead. ‘That’s my troop,'” Pojunas Jr. recalled his father saying. The elder Pojunas then started naming some names and a life of research about that photo began.

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Ringing in the Year of the Sheep

Ringing in the Year of the Sheep

31 Photos

Dragon and lion dancers performed in bustling and noisy Chinatowns in Southeast Asian capitals, where ethnic Chinese trooped to temples to burn incense sticks and offer prayers.

The Year of the Sheep, known variably as the Year of the Goat or Ram, is celebrated during the seven-day holiday, which started Wednesday. Unlike the previous Year of the Horse, which was generally considered to be an auspicious time, this year, according to some astrologists, would bring a volatile economy, more transport accidents and windy natural disasters.

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