Take a trip around the world with these images, visiting Macedonia, Seoul and Cologne, a Malaysian lion dance, a Roman pyramid and one very popular elephant in Tokyo.
A lion dance troupe performs the lion dance at a shopping mall ahead of the Lunar New Year celebrations in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Lion dancing is a centuries-old tradition dating back the Han Dynasty, when lion dancers were mostly from martial arts schools who used their acrobatic kicks and jumps to ring in the new year.
Reporters visit a frescoed chamber of the Pyramid of Cestius in Rome, on Wednesday. Rome's only surviving pyramid from ancient times is getting fresh visibility. After a Japanese clothing magnate paid for a cleanup, archaeologists are eager to show off the monument, constructed some 2000 years ago as the burial tomb for a Roman praetor, or magistrate, named Caius Cestius.
After a string of robberies and sexual assaults on New Year's Eve in the city, German authorities are keen to avoid a repeat of those events during the five-day street party.
The sale of Wentworth Woodhouse, near Rotherham, has been agreed for £7 million, although it will take tens of millions more to repair and refurbish the country mansion.
South Korean senior students clad in traditional attire take a souvenir photo of themselves before a joint graduation and coming-of-age ceremony at Dongmyung Girls' High School in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, 4 February. Schools across the nation hold graduation ceremonies this month.
An online petition drive wants the 69-year-old Hanako, or "flower child," to be moved to a Thai sanctuary, to live in a natural, grassy habitat where elephants romp in herds, not alone in her concrete pen, with a wading pool she hardly uses and a nearby side building to spend the night. The petition has attracted tens of thousands of signatures already, with the aim of submitting them to the suburban Tokyo zoo and the Japanese government.
Macedonia has lifted restrictions on the entry of refugees from the Greek border after Macedonian taxi drivers ended a five-day protest that had closed a key railway line, slowing migrant flows to Serbia.