Merit Prize Winner: “A Well Earned Rest in the Sahara”. This photo of Moussa Macher, our Tuareg guide, was taken at the summit of Tin-Merzouga, the largest dune (or erg) in the Tadrat region of the Sahara desert in southern Algeria. Moussa rested while waiting for us to finish our 45-minute struggle to the top. It only took ten minutes of rolling, running, and jumping to get back down. The Tadrat is part of the Tassili N'Ajjer National Park World Heritage area, famous for its red sand and engravings and rock paintings of cattle, elephants, giraffes, and rhinos that lived there when the climate was milder. Photo location: Summit of Tin-Merzouga, Tadrat, Tassili N'Ajjer National Park, Algeria. (Photo and caption by Evan Cole/National Geographic Photo Contest)

Some are in it just for the money, others to help buy a meal. Then there are those who trade for fun or to spend time among friends. Millions of investors – pensioners, security guards, high-school students – dominate China's stock markets, conducting about 80 percent of all trades. Retirees gather in brokerage houses dotted around China also to enjoy some company and savour the air conditioning on hot days. Some start as young as 13, trading from home with an eye on future careers in finance. Winning isn't guaranteed. This year, among the most turbulent in China's financial history, its stock markets more than doubled in the six months to May, only to crash amid concerns that growth in the country, which makes everything from cars to steel, is slowing faster than previously thought. (Photo by Aly Song/Reuters)

“This city in Bolivia's highlands has hired Aymara women dressed in traditional multilayered Andean skirts and brightly embroidered vests to work as traffic cops and bring order to its road chaos. About 20 of the “traffic cholitas” have been trained to direct cars and buses in El Alto, a teeming, impoverished sister city of La Paz in Bolivia's Andes mountains”. – El Alto via Associated Press. Photo: In this December 3, 2013 photo, an Aymara woman cops directs traffic on the streets of El Alto, Bolivia. The women wear the bright petticoats and shawls of indigenous women in the Andes, called cholitas in Bolivian slang, the main difference being that instead of bowler hats they wear khaki green police-style caps. Some don fluorescent traffic vests. (Photo by Juan Karita/AP Photo)

A polar bear whose bottom half is caked in oily black gunk. A whale wrapped in striped fabric: a pseudo straightjacket. These are the messes climate change leaves behind, the things we know are happening but often don’t have the opportunity to see with our own eyes. Swiss street art duo Christian Rebecchi and Pablo Togni, otherwise known as NeverCrew, met in art school when they were 15 and started making work together soon after. As a team, the artists adorn the world with eye-popping and gut-wrenching images depicting the consequences of humanity’s actions on earth. (Photo by NeverCrew/The Huffington Post)

In this March 12, 2015 photo, a man tours a graffiti exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, in Bogota, Colombia. The city-run museum recently held an exhibition highlighting the work of Bogota street artists who go by aliases such as Joems and the MonsTruacioN collective. (Photo by Fernando Vergara/AP Photo)

A street artist, calling on people to visit an amusement park, walks past the military-themed street exhibition “Together to Victory” in Saint Petersburg on February 3, 2025. (Photo by Olga Maltseva/AFP Photo)

A demonstrator wearing a mock school uniform costume is pictured next to a traffic police officer during a rally held to support women's rights to an abortion in Santiago, Chile, July 25, 2015. (Photo by Ivan Alvarado/Reuters)

Father Felix Mendoza, a Venezuelan Catholic priest, center, prays over a woman who cries, saying she is in physical pain, at a public hospital in Caracas, Venezuela, Tuesday, May 11, 2021, amid the new coronavirus pandemic. Father Felix has been visiting patients at the hospital to comfort the sick, for the last 20 years. (Photo by Ariana Cubillos/AP Photo)