“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)

When you think of the People's Liberation Army, you probably don't think of line dancing. But the Chinese military's latest online recruiting video makes a soldier's life look more fun than the macarena. The brief spot, posted last week on the website of the Ministry of National Defense and going viral, features tanks and fighter jets, as well as soldiers dancing in rows to a quirky hit tune by the Chopsticks Brothers called “Little Apple”. Its lyrics include, “You are my little dear little apple/I can never stop loving you”.

“Hey! I'm Thomas Shahan, an artist and macrophotographer from Oklahoma. In my spare time over the past few years, I've been shooting portraiture of local arthropods. Why would I devote countless hours to tramping through forests, fields and the like searching for insects and spiders? Well, despite some common beliefs, arthropods (members of the phylum Arthropoda – insects, spiders, crustaceans...) represent an endlessly varied, wildly beautiful and fascinating bunch of animals with surprisingly personable faces and behavior. Often, all it takes is simply inspecting their lives on a closer level to turn repulsion to reverence”. – Thomas Shahan

Photo: Adult Male Jumping Spider at Sunset – Phidippus mystaceus. (Photo by Thomas Shahan; Source: Flickr)

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all weapons were created by Sonia Rentsch rather than by gunsmiths? In the series Harm Less, Sonia had constructed a number of firearms using various plants. Of course people might say that it’s not the guns that kill people; it’s the people that kill people. However, this statement is completely false. Can you imagine some equivalent of school shooting if the guns were not available? Yes, some crazy kid would still be able to bring a weapon to class, but most likely it would be a club or a penknife, making him easily tamable. (Photo by Sonia Rentsch)

The winners of the Historic Photographer of the Year Awards 2020 from triphistoric.com celebrate the places and cultural sites around the world that offer a window to the history that exists all around us. This year, restricted by Covid, photographers were called on to scour their photographic archive to share their imagery of those places that dominate our past. Here: The Brighton Palace Pier. (Photo by Michael Marsh/Historic Photographer of the Year 2020)