A picture made with a tilt-shift lens shows “Dwarf Empire” cast member 19-year-old Han Zhen Yan posing in her fairy costume backstage outside one of the fairy tale-like houses at the Dwarf Empire theme park outside Kunming, China's Yunnan province, 04 April 2013. The Dwarf Empire theme park opened in mid-2009, employing a number of dwarves to create the show. Depending on what type of job they do at the park, employees earn between 800-2,000 CNY (100-250 Euros) per month, most of which goes towards their savings as lodging is provided, and their living quarters are equipped with kitchens where they prepare their own meals. (Photo by Diego Azubel/EPA)

Pangolins in Crisis: Brent Stirton, South Africa; 1st place, Natural world and wildlife. “Pangolins are the world’s most illegally trafficked mammals, with an estimated one million trafficked to Asia in the last 10 years. Their scales are used in traditional Chinese and Vietnamese medicine, and their meat is sold as a high-priced delicacy. As a result, pangolins are listed as critically endangered and anyone who trades or consumes them is breaking the law. This body of work exposes the trade, while exploring aspects of illegality and celebrating the people who are trying to save these animals”. (Photo by Brent Stirton/Sony World Photography Awards 2020)

Devotees of the small farming village of Bibiclat celebrate the Feast of Saint John the Baptist while covered in banana leaves and mud on June 24, 2025 in Aliaga, Philippines. Known as the “Taong Putik” (mud people), the ritual happens yearly in this small farming village as their own version of expressing their faith and celebrating the feast of Saint John the Baptist whom the survivors of the Japanese occupation in 1944 in their area prayed to for rain to save their fellow villagers. (Photo by Ezra Acayan/Getty Images)

The festival marks the end of the monsoon season and beginning of autumn. More than hundred girls under the age of nine gathered for the tradition of worshiping young pre-pubescent girls as manifestations of the divine female energy. The ritual holds a strong religious significance in Newar community. It is a community affair held primarily to save small girls from diseases and bad luck in the years to come. Photo: A young Nepalese girl dressed as a Kumari or living Goddess, smiles for camera as she waits for Kumari puja at Hanuman Dhoka, Basantapur Durbar Square in Katmandu, Nepal, Tuesday, September 17, 2013. (Photo by Niranjan Shrestha/AP Photo)

Lido cabaret dancers perform during a demonstration outside the cabaret as dancers, other employees and union activists are gathering to try to save their jobs and the history of the cabaret, known for its dinner theater and its “Bluebell Girls” revue, Saturday, May 28, 2022 in Paris. Amid financial troubles and changing times, the venue's new corporate owner is ditching most of the Lido's staff and its high-kicking, high-glamour dance shows – which date back decades and inspired copycats from Las Vegas to Beirut – in favor of more modest musical revues. (Photo by Thomas Padilla/AP Photo)

Emergency workers save a shepherd dog from a beach during a forest fire on August 2, 2021 in Mugla, a Marmaris' district, as Turkey struggles against its deadliest wildfires in decades. A roaring blaze raced toward a Turkish thermal power plant and farmers herded panicked cattle toward the sea as wildfires that have killed eight people raged on for a seventh day. The nation of 84 million has been transfixed in horror as the most destructive wildfires in generations erase pristine forests and rich farmland across swaths of Turkey's Mediterranean and Aegean coasts. (Photo by AFP Photo/Stringer)

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)

In this March 7, 1991 file photo, a U.S. Marine patrol walks across the charred oil landscape near a burning well during perimeter security patrol near Kuwait City. Twenty five years after the first U.S. Marines swept across the border into Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War, American forces find themselves battling the extremist Islamic State group, born out of al-Qaida, in the splintered territories of Iraq and Syria. The Arab allies that joined the 1991 coalition are fighting their own conflicts both at home and abroad, as Iran vies for greater regional power following a nuclear deal with world powers. (Photo by John Gaps III/AP Photo)