In a photo taken on November 27, 2016 a female traffic police officer directs traffic on a road in Pyongyang. Believed to be hand-picked for their looks, Pyongyang's female traffic police are a familiar sight at intersections around the capital, where traffic volumes have noticeably increased in recent years. (Photo by Ed Jones/AFP Photo)

Members of a propaganda troupe perform in a public square in Pyongyang on April 12, 2017. (Photo by Ed Jones/AFP Photo)

A man covered with mineral-rich mud smiles on a bank of lake Tus in Khakassia region, southwest of the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, Russia, July 16, 2016. (Photo by Ilya Naymushin/Reuters)

The contest began in 2007, and since then photographers from more than 70 countries have entered. Photo: Michael O'Neal of San Francisco won first place in the animals category in the 2014 iPhone Photography Awards. (Photo by Michael O'Neal)

Associated Press photographer Wong Maye-E tries to get her North Korean subjects to open up as much as is possible in an authoritarian country with no tolerance for dissent and great distrust of foreigners. She has taken dozens of portraits of North Koreans over the past three years, often after breaking the ice by taking photos with an instant camera and sharing them. Her question for everyone she photographs: What is your motto? Their answers reflect both their varied lives and the government that looms incessantly over all of them. (Photo by Wong Maye-E/AP Photo)

Ride operator Van Mai wears a face mask against the spread of the coronavirus while working at the Playland amusement park at the Pacific National Exhibition, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Friday, July 10, 2020. (Photo by Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP Photo)

Mailin Gobbo reacts as she leaves the courtroom after hearing a judge acquit former Catholic Priest Carlos Eduardo Jose, who she says sexually abused her for years when she was an adolescent, in San Martin, Argentina, Tuesday, March 9, 2021. The court acquitted the 62-year-old, citing the statute of limitations had run out. (Photo by Natacha Pisarenko/AP Photo)

A billboard depicting a soldier, with a slogan reading “Contract service. A real man's job”, in St. Petersburg, Russia, 02 June 2023. On 24 February 2022, Russian troops entered Ukrainian territory in what the Russian president declared a “Special Military Operation”, starting an armed conflict. (Photo by Anatoly Maltsev/EPA)