On the July 10, 2025, an elderly couple in Eonam-dong, Jung-gu, Daejeon, who finished their field work, cooled off by sitting on a bench in the yard near the water tap. (Photo by Shin Hyeon-jong)

Wearing hats and dancing to Sodapop. As the popularity of “K-Pop Demon Hunters (K-Pop Demon Hunters)” spreads around the world, foreign tourists wearing hats and dancing to the K-Pop Demon Hunters song “Sodapop” are seen in Gwanghwamun, Seoul on the afternoon of the August 29, 2025. (Photo by Park Seong-won)

On the November 24, 2025, children are making human faces by collecting fallen leaves in the forest in front of the Yuseong-gu Office in Daejeon. (Photo by Shin Hyeon-jong)

People carry the body of a man they uncovered from under the rubble of houses destroyed by Saudi airstrikes in the old city of Sanaa, Yemen, Friday, June 12, 2015. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed)

These new virtual stores are built by european mega grocery kings Tesco for their South Korean Home Plus supermarkets. So far virtual shopping has been a hit with customers, according to Technologyreview: “The virtual grocery store has been a hit among more 10,287 customers, with Home Plus reporting a 130 percent increase in online sales”.

A man reacts after catching a trout with his hands during an event promoting the Ice Festival on a frozen river in Hwacheon, about 20 km (12 miles) south of the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas, January 10, 2015. The annual ice festival, which is one of the most famous and biggest festivals in South Korea, expects to see more than 1,000,000 people attend. The festival lasts for three weeks from January 10 this year. (Photo by Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters)

While communism, collectivism, worms, dry rot and casual looting failed to destroy the majestic wooden churches of Russia, it may be ordinary neglect that finally does them in. Dwindled now to several hundred remaining examples, these glories of vernacular architecture lie scattered amid the vastness of the world’s largest country. Just over a decade ago, Richard Davies, a British architectural photographer, struck out on a mission to record the fragile and poetic structures. Austerely beautiful and haunting, “Wooden Churches: Traveling in the Russian North” (White Sea Publishing; $132) is the result. Covering thousands of miles, Mr. Davies described how he and the writer Matilda Moreton tracked down the survivors from among the thousands of onion-domed structures built after Prince Vladimir converted to Christianity in 988.

On July 7, Chinese archaeologists from the Academy of Social Sciences announced that they have reconstituted a 5,300-year-old Mongolion pottery statue found at a relic site in North China, according to Xinhua news agency.