Alfred the frog looks almost as scary as the pumpkin he is perched on at London Zoo 26 October 2011. Keepers at the zoo have joined in the Halloween tradition by supplying pumpkin lunches to some of their animals, including the giant waxy monkey frog. However Alfred is not quite the giant figure his species name suggests – he actually measures up at around 4 inches (10 centimeters). (Photo by EPA/Zoological Society of London)

A period of relative stability has put the Iranian capital No1 on the list of world cities that have achieved biggest improvements in liveability over the past five years, as calculated by the Economist Intelligence Unit. The “most improved” top 10 contains some unexpected names. So, eg, the fourth place: Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Latest ranking: 128; Ranking five years ago: 131; Five-year index movement: 3.8%. Here: A supporter of Ivory Coast president Alassane Ouattara campaigns in a market in the city’s Koumassi quarter. (Photo by Sia Kambou/AFP Photo)

In this May 4, 2014 photo, a miner holds an amalgam of mercury and gold he mined after working a 28-hour shift at an illegal gold mining process, in La Pampa, in Peru's Madre de Dios region. Thousands of artisanal gold miners sweat through the long shifts and endure, for a few grams of gold, the perils of collapsing earth, limb-crushing machinery and the toxic mercury used to bind gold flecks. (Photo by Rodrigo Abd/AP Photo)

Music student Daniele Gonzalez, (centre row, L), and Australian musician Susie Park from the Minnesota Orchestra (centre row, 2nd L), react during a rehearsal in Havana, May 15, 2015. The Minnesota Orchestra will offer two concerts in Havana and is the first major U.S. orchestra to play in Cuba since 1999. The trip cost nearly $1 million. It was underwritten by Marilyn Carlson Nelson, an heir to the Carlson hotel company fortune, and her husband Glen. The U.S. government gave special permission for a direct charter flight from Minneapolis to Havana for the event, putting 4 tons of equipment and 160 people on an Airbus 330. (Photo by Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters)

A dinosaur robot produced by Tyco Electronics Japan G.K. is controlled by a smartphone at CEATEC (Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies) Japan 2014 held at at Makuhari Messe in Chiba, east of Tokyo, Japan, 07 October 2014.With a Sharp Aquos ZETA mobile phone model, users can make the 6.5-meter (21 feet, 4 inches) long, 2.1-meter (6 feet, 11 inches) tall dinosaur robot to walk forward and backward, jump, move its head, hands and legs up and down, left and right, open and close its mouth by touching the screen panel and make it bark by shaking the handheld. (Photo by Kimimasa Mayama/EPA)

Computer Inc. (Asus) unveiled the Zenbook, the new super-thin laptops. Encased in brushed steel, the Zenbook feels solid, yet light. “The super-thin laptop’s $999 configuration, which includes 4 GB of 133MHz DDR 3 RAM, a 128 GB SATA Solid State Drive (SSD) and two USB 3.0 ports, is $200 cheaper than a similarly configured “competitor” (read: MacBook Air). You can by a MacBook Air for $999 with the same Intel Core i5 CPU — but with only half the memory and storage space. Zenbook would get 7 hours of battery life (roughly 3.4 hours of streaming video and 3.25 hours of gameplay) and could remain in standby for up to two weeks”.

Police officers detain a woman during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus, Saturday, September 19, 2020. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month and opposition determination appears strong despite the detention of protest leaders. (Photo by TUT.by via AP Photo)

Soma-Nomaoi is a festival that recreates a battle scene from more than 1,000 years ago. It is annually held for 4 days from July 22 to 25 in Haramachi City, Fukushima Prefecture, in the eastern part of Japan. In this historical event, 600 mounted samurai in traditional Japanese armor, with long swords at their side and ancestral flagstaffs streaming from their backs, ride across open fields. Soma-Nomaoi has been designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property.

Photo: A young woman (C) clad in samurai costume leads other local poeple as she rides her horse during a parade at the annual Soma Nomaoi festival in Minamisoma, Fukushima Prefecture, on July 28, 2012. The traditional full-scale festival kicked off for the first time after the accident of the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant following the massive earthquake and the tsunami on March 11, 2011. (Photo by Toru Yamanaka/AFP Photo)