Venezuela's acting President and presidential candidate Nicolas Maduro kisses a painting of late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez during a campaign rally in the state of Vargas April 9, 2013. Venezuelans will hold presidential elections on April 14. Maduro promised on Tuesday to hike Venezuela's minimum wage by about 40 percent if he is elected in a weekend vote to replace late socialist leader Chavez. (Photo by Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters)

Amish girls play softball after class during an end of the school year celebration on Tuesday, April 9, 2013 in Bergholz, Ohio. The celebration was also part of a farewell picnic for four women and one man from this tight-knit group in rural eastern Ohio who will enter prison on Friday, April 12, joining nine already behind bars on hate crimes convictions for hair- and beard-cutting attacks against fellow Amish. (Photo by Scott R. Galvin/AP Photo)

China has sent its first woman into space on a mission to dock with an orbiting station, the latest step in an ambitious programme to go to the moon and on to Mars.

Photo: China's first female astronaut Liu Yang, waves during a sending off ceremony before she departs for the Shenzhou 9 spacecraft rocket launch pad at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Jiuquan, China, Saturday, June 16, 2012. China will send its first woman and two other astronauts into space Saturday to work on a temporary space station for about a week, in a key step toward becoming only the third nation to set up a permanent base in orbit. (Photo by Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)

This April 9, 2016 photo provided by Bertrand Piccard via Global Newsroom shows Piccard taking a selfie on board Solar Impulse 2 during a test flight over the Pacific Ocean. The solar-powered airplane on an around-the-world journey had traveled 80 percent of the way from Hawaii to California by Saturday, April 23. The aircraft's destination on this leg of the journey is Mountain View, Calif., at the southern end of San Francisco Bay. (Photo by Bertrand Piccard/Global Newsroom via AP Photo)

Kimono-clad women enjoy the view from Tokyo Sky Tree’s 350-meter-high observation deck in Sumida Ward, Tokyo, on the Coming of Age Day, January 9, 2017. Sumida Ward invited about 430 local 20-year-old to the deck to celebrate them. Many city governments invite local 20-years-old to there’s symbolic places and celebrate for their Coming of Age Day. (Photo by The Yomiuri Shimbun via AP Images)

A displaced Yemeni woman from Hodeida fills water containers at a make-shift camp in a village in the northern district of Abs in the country's Hajjah province, on May 9, 2019. The Yemeni conflict has triggered what the United Nations describes as the world's worst humanitarian crisis, with 3.3 million people still displaced and 24.1 million in need of aid. (Photo by Essa Ahmed/AFP Photo)

Children carrying guns and flags or wearing Soviet-style uniforms have become a common sight at Victory Day parades and other events in Russian-controlled Crimea. Russian and Ukrainian human rights activists have warned that such displays point to a growing trend of promoting Russian patriotism among kids on the Crimean peninsula, annexed from Ukraine in 2014. Here: A young Crimean girl wears military-type clothes during a Victory Day celebration in Sevastopol on May 9, 2018. (Photo by Oleksandra Surgan/Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty)

Soldiers stand guard in Maua square where a cotton candy vendor passes by in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Saturday, July 9, 2016, as security is deployed to get to know the areas they'll be patrolling during the Olympics. Roughly twice the security contingent at the London Olympics will be deployed during the August games in Rio, which are expected to draw thousands of foreigners to a city where armed muggings, stray bullets and turf wars between heavily armed drug gangs are routine. (Photo by Leo Correa/AP Photo)