In this Wednesday, March, 5, 2014 photo, Afghan female boxers practice at the Kabul Stadium boxing club, Afghanistan. The women, who are 18 and older, don't have much more than determination, and a trainer who runs them through their paces, watches as they spar, corrects their technique, tells them when to jab, how to protect themselves, when to power through with a left and then a right. (Photo by Massoud Hossaini/AP Photo)

The Belgian photographer Anton Kusters spent two years photographing the Yakuza, Japan’s most notorious gang. He returned with some amazing images that he made into a book called “Odo Yakuza Tokyo”. (Odo means “the way of the cherry blossom” and is the credo of the Yakuza family he followed. Photo: An erotic danser picks up fake 2-dollar bills during a private dance with a Yakuza customer in a strip tease bar in Kabukicho, a bar which is controlled by the ODO family – 2010. (Photo and caption by Anton Kusters)

A motorcyclist ferries a pillion rider sitting on goods in Phnom Penh on June 6, 2017. (Photo by Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP Photo)

Timbuktu: A UN peacekeeper from Burkina Faso stands guard at the Djinguereber mosque, built in the 14th century, during a visit by a UN delegation on election day in Timbuktu, Mali, July 28, 2013. (Photo by Joe Penney/Reuters)

People look at “The Fall” sculpture by Steve Cramb on display between Bondi and Tamarama beach as part of the Sculpture by the Sea exhibition in Sydney on October 21, 2022. (Photo by Muhammad Farooq/AFP Photo)

The erupting Litli-Hrútur volcano on the Reykjanes Peninsula in Iceland captured with a drone in the last decade of July 2023. (Photo by Elliot McGucken/Animal News Agency)

A charred deer figure stands in the ruins of a devastated home, as the Eaton Fire continues, in Altadena, California, on January 14, 2025. (Photo by Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)

“Honorable Mention”. An Indian rhinoceros, far from home and stuck inside with late-winter blues at the Toronto zoo. Photo location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada. (Photo and caption by Stephen De Lisle/National Geographic Photo Contest)