A palm squirrel and ring-rosed parakeet compete for space on a stump in a residential area of Chandigarh, India in the last decade of August 2024. (Photo by Anuj Jain/Solent News)

Travel photographer Amos Chapple recently crossed into Turkmenistan on a three-day transit visa and was able to photograph many of the sights and monuments in Ashgabat, the capital and largest city. Turkmenistan is a single-party country, a former Soviet state, run by a president at the center of a cult of personality.

Photo: A young couple leave the Alem Entertainment Center in Ashgabat. The current president has a history of breaking obscure records. In 2012 the wheel atop this complex was entered into the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's largest enclosed Ferris wheel. The structure was built at a cost of $90m. (Photo by Amos Chapple via The Atlantic)

A truck driver cleans the mirror of his decorated truck in Charsadda outside Peshawar, Pakistan October 18, 2016. (Photo by Fayaz Aziz/Reuters)

October winner. “A burst of the aurora borealis over Kirkjufell, taken in September 2016. This shot has been a holy grail for me and was finally captured after many trips”. MICK RYAN, JUDGE: Iceland is a hotspot for aurora photography and this composition of the symmetric, free-standing Kirkjufell and the trident waterfall is much-sought after. If you can time your visit when the aurora “kp” index is high and know the settings for nighttime aurora images, you may end up with a beautiful photograph like this. (Photo by DВ/The Guardian)

A journalist operate a harness with multiple recording devices capable of recording and live streaming outside the Great Hall of the People where the opening session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) was held in Beijing, China, Friday, March 3, 2017. Thousands of delegates have gathered at the Chinese capital for the opening of the annual session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, which advises the rubberstamp parliament, whose annual session begins Sunday. (Photo by Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)

The possible surface of TRAPPIST-1f, one of seven newly discovered planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system that scientists using the Spitzer Space Telescope and ground based telescopes have discovered. (Photo by Reuters/NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Nyibol Lual, 13 years old, helps her family to prepare the land for cultivation on May 31, 2017, in Panthau, Northern Bahr al Ghazal, South Sudan. The family has a small land where they cultivate sorghum. An estimated 63 per cent of the population in Northern Bahr al Ghazal is experiencing severe food insecurity, according to the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report. The situation is particularly bad in Aweil West and Aweil South counties, where the exhaustion of household food stocks and growing dependence on financially inaccessible markets have left the population facing Emergency levels of food insecurity. (Photo by Albert Gonzalez Farran/AFP Photo)

A woman, wearing a traditional Sevillana dress, performs as she asks for alms in downtown Malaga, Spain, April 28, 2016. (Photo by Jon Nazca/Reuters)