A mahout bathes his elephant in the river Sabarmati on a hot summer day in Ahmedabad, India May 21, 2017. (Photo by Amit Dave/Reuters)

Revellers celebrate New Year's Day in central Moscow, Russia, January 1, 2016. (Photo by Tatyana Makeyeva/Reuters)

People cool off by diving into a swimming pool on a hot summer day in Amritsar, India, on June 8, 2025. (Photo by Narinder Nanu/AFP Photo)

A pupil arrives on the first day of school at Yas American Academy in Abu Dhabi in the last decade of August 2025. (Photo by Victor Besa/The National)

A singer drinks from a huge bowl of beer on-stage as he pays tribute to the customers after performing at an entertainment club in Beijing, on May 8, 2014. (Photo by Jason Lee/Reuters)

A woman is helped as she reacts on the floor amid anti-government protests after Peru's former President Pedro Castillo was ousted, in Lima, Peru on January 23, 2023. (Photo by Pilar Olivares/Reuters)

From Britain to China to Mali, new maps showing travel times to the nearest urban centre reveal huge differences between countries. Using Open Street Map and Google, a University of Oxford team have created a visual breakdown that suggests major inequalities when it comes to commuting. Here: China. The dataset used for China was unique as it relied solely on Open Street Map, due to restrictions on accessing Google data. The population is densely concentrated in the east and accessibility is increased, whereas rural provinces in the west remain remote. (Photo by Daniel Weiss/Jennifer Rozier/Malaria Atlas Project/University of Oxford)

Twenty-four-year-old Maryam Aghayee makes hyper-realistic baby dolls acting as surrogates for some Iranian families who are apprehensive of having more children. “It has been about three or four months since I started this work”, says Maryam in Tehran, Iran on October 7, 2020. “After making my second doll, many orders have been coming in. The second doll was much more realistic than the previous one. After making my second doll, I said that from now on I can take customer orders. I did not intend to start a business from the beginning because it was a hobby, but after the second doll, the demand for these kinds of dolls increased, customers want to have such dolls”. (Photo by Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via Reuters)