"I looked at Joe and Joe's little finger was hanging off."
Speaking to several children who tried out for the TV show, none regret applying, and it seems they are happy to have tasted a small part of the Harry Potter magic.The P39-1 is an anonymous stretch of thinly tarred highway connecting the small towns of Newcastle and Normandien in South Africa, a four-hour drive from Johannesburg.
This week the single carriageway road, which runs mainly along the edge of farms nestled in the remote hills of the country's KwaZulu-Natal province, has found itself unexpectedly the subject of global attention.On Wednesday many South Africans were among those watching live around the world as US President Donald Trump ambushed his South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa with a video making the case that white people were being persecuted. He had previously said that a "genocide" was taking place.The most striking scene in the video was an aerial shot of thousands of white crosses by the side of the road - a "burial site" President Trump repeatedly said, of more than a thousand Afrikaners murdered in recent years.
The president did not mention where the road was although the film was quickly linked to Normandien.But the people who live nearby know better than anyone that his claim is not true.
The BBC visited the area on Thursday, the day after the Oval Office showdown, to find that the P39-1's crosses have long since disappeared.
There is no burial site, and the road looks like any other. A new grain mill has been built along one stretch where the crosses once briefly stood.The contrast between the insect's slender form and the leaf's textured surface underscores the intricate beauty of nature's hidden wonders.
Sebastião Salgado, regarded as one of the world's greatest documentary photographers, has died at the age of 81.The Brazil-born photographer was known for his dramatic and unflinching black-and-white images of hardship, conflict and natural beauty, captured in 130 countries over 55 years.
His hard-hitting photos chronicled major global events such as the Rwanda genocide in 1994, burning oilfields at the end of the Gulf War in 1991, and the famine in the Sahel region of Africa in 1984."His lens revealed the world and its contradictions; his life, the power of transformative action," said a statement from Instituto Terra, the environmental organisation he founded with his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado.