Japanese embroidery artist Hiroko Kubota was in the process of making custom sized clothes for her smaller-framed son when he made a small request: could some of the shirts have cats on them? Kubota explains her son was somewhat obsessed with cats and had collected a small library of adorable images found around the web.

Takehiko Yagi is a rising star in Japanese photography, and his vibrant pictures of the Hindu spring festival of Holi won the Grand Prize at the fourth annual Nikkei National Geographic Photo Prize. Diving into the Colors of Holi is his first exhibition in the US, on show at Foto Care Gallery in New York until 28 September, 2016. Here: Jaipur, India, 2013, (Photo by Takehiko Yagi/The Guardian)

Fabian Ramirez, 11, scavenges a trash container for vegetables with his family that were discarded at the “Mercado de Abasto”, a market for vendors, during the fourth week of a quarantine to help contain the spread of the new coronavirus in Asuncion, Paraguay, Thursday, April 2, 2020. (Photo by Jorge Saenz/AP Photo)

“At her job, Maria Torero cares for sick human beings. At home, she lavishes love on slowly dying cats – 175 of them at last count. The 45-year-old nurse has turned her two-story, eight-room apartment into a hospice for cats with feline leukemia, scattering it with scores of feeding dishes and at least two dozen boxes litter boxes. Some have suggested she shelter healthy cats instead. “That's not my role”, she told The Associated Press. “I'm a nurse. My duty is to the cats that nobody cares about”. She said that “people don't adopt adult cats, especially if they are terminally ill”. – Franklin Briceno via Associated Press. (Photo by Martin Mejia/AP Photo)

A Puffin returns to it's nest with a beak full of sand eels on June 25, 2011 on Inner Farne, England. The Farne Islands, which are run by the National Trust, are situated two to three miles off the Northumberland coastline. The archipeligo of 16-28 separate islands (depending on the tide) make the summer home to approximately 100,000 pairs of breeding seabirds including around 36,000 Puffins, 32,000 Guillemots and 2,000 pairs of Arctic Terns. The species of birds which nest in internationally important numbers include Shag, Sandwich Tern and Arctic Tern. The coastline around The Farnes are also the breeding ground to one of Europe's largest Grey Seal colonies with around 4,000 adults giving birth to 1500 pups every year. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

An employe of Russian Space Training Center hangs out to dry space suits of Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin, NASA's U.S. flight engineer Kathleen Rubins, and Japanese space agency's flight engineer Takuya Onishi, right, after their undergoing training near in Noginsk, 60 km (38 miles) east of Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, July 2, 2014. The training was intended to simulate the capsule landing on water. Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin, Japanese space agency's flight engineer Takuya Onishi, and NASA's U.S. flight engineer Kathleen Rubins are being trained for a future mission to the International Space Station. (Photo by Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP Photo)

An undated handout picture made available by the Symbio Wildlife Park on 28 November 2016 shows three Pygmy Marmoset monkeys including an adult male, a female juvenile and a four-week-old baby, at the Symbio Wildlife Park in Helensburgh, South of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. (Photo by EPA/Symbio Wildlife Park)

An adult female Masai giraffe rears on its hind legs as it resists efforts by Kenya Wildlife Services (KWS) rangers to guide it into a transportation crate using ropes during an exercise to translocate large herbivores from Kedong Ranch due to land subdivisions and corralling that have disrupted wildlife migratory routes in Naivasha, Nakuru County, on November 16, 2025. Driven by two long ropes held by about twenty rangers, the blindfolded giraffe enters a tall trailer that is to transport it out of its natural habitat in the Rift Valley, which is deteriorating after having been resold. This is the first step in a meticulous relocation operation in the vast Kedong ranch, part of an ancestral corridor between Mount Longonot and Hell's Gate Park, near the iconic Lake Naivasha. (Photo by Tony Karumba/AFP Photo)