Glimpse into 2008

 January 4, 2008 Silhouettes from a sunrise in Mumbai as a man feeds pigeons grain at the seashore. (REUTERS)

 January 8, 2008 Zoo conservation researcher Chloe Inskip counts South American leaf-cutter ants at the Chester Zoo in northern England. The zoo’s license requires it to take stock of its 8,000 individual animals once a year. (REUTERS)

 January 11, 2008 A man attends a memorial in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, for assassinated Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. (AP)

 January 17, 2008 A man rides his horse through flames during the “Luminarias,” an annual religious celebration in the village of San Bartoleme de los Pinares, northwest of Madrid. Tradition holds that the fire purifies the animals. (REUTERS)

 January 22, 2008  An inflatable boat owned by Greenpeace maneuvers between a ship belonging to the Japanese whaling fleet (right) and a supply ship in an attempt to disrupt a refueling.
(AFP/ Greenpeace)
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 January 30, 2008 An Afghan laborer makes sweets at a traditional sweet factory in the old city of Kabul, Afghanistan. (AFP)

 February 25, 2008 Israeli soldiers hide in a wheat field near Kibbutz Hahal Oz, which borders the Gaza Strip. In February, Israel deployed thousands of police officers and troops to the border to prevent the threat of a mass penetration of Palestinian protesters into Israel. (Getty Images)

 March 8, 2008 A boy concentrates on perfecting his skateboarding tricks while a fire burns behind him at the Yuma Mesa Fruit Growers Association in Yuma, Arizona. (AP)

 March 11, 2008 A Chinese migrant worker sorts through an endless sea of plastic bottles at a recycling centre in Beijing. (DPA)

 March 12, 2008 A landless peasant in Brazil resists state police forcibly moving her and some 200 other members of the Landless Movement from a piece of private property in the Brazilian Amazon. Their bows and arrows were no match for tear gas and trained dogs. (REUTERS)

 March 18, 2008 A young Iraqi girls fiddles with her chewing gum amid the ruins of a former Iraqi military headquarters destroyed early in the American invasion of 2003. Her family calls the ruins home. (AP)

 March 24, 2008 A church official in Zimbabwe uses milk to baptize a new member thought to be 'possessed by evil spirits' as an act of exorcism. (Getty Images)

 March 25, 2008 A wounded man confronts the soldiers who have shot three rockets into his home. The man is from the isle of Anjouan in the Comoros, the island nation in the Indian Ocean between Madagascar and Mozambique. The soldiers are from the Comoros and Tanzania, on behalf of the African Union. The setting is the battle in early March 2008 to wrest back control of the islands from Mohamed Bacar, a renegade leader and former president who had proclaimed himself leader of the nation. (AFP)

 March 31, 2008 A group of men playing cricket on a pitch in Kabul are enveloped by a dust storm. (REUTERS)

 April 10, 2008 A woman shops for burqas in Herat, a city in western Afghanistan west of Kabul. (AP)

 April 30, 2008 Pigeons are thrown about by the strong winds accompanying a dust storm in Kuwait City. (REUTERS)

 May 2, 2008 An Iraqi boy looks on sceptically as he is dwarfed by a US soldier in Baghdad. (AFP)

 May 8, 2008 A boy in Indonesia prepares to siphon off fuel from a container. At the time, oil prices were reaching record highs. (REUTERS)

 June 3, 2008 A miner extracts sulphur from the Kawah Ijen volcanic crater in East Java. The sulphur is put to use in sugar refineries and in cosmetics, medicines and explosives. (REUTERS)

 June 4, 2008 Sometimes those free ringside VIP seats offer more than you were hoping for. Here, former Madrid mayor Jose Maria Alvarez del Manzano (second from left) and some friends get a close up look at what being on the wrong side of the bull can really mean. (DPA)

 June 6, 2008 Tear gas canisters rain down on demonstrators in the West Bank village of Bilin, near Ramallah, protesting Israel’s erection of a separation barrier. (AP)

 June 17, 2008 An African man sits on the deck of a Maltese patrol boat. One of thousands of Africans who tries to migrate to Europe illegally every year, this man was rescued when the small boat he and several dozen other would-be immigrants were in capsized off the southern coast of Malta. Countless others have lost their lives on similar journeys. (AFP)

 June 26, 2008 With a mock flag of the European Union as their backdrop, two actors in Brussels simulate a torture scene as part of a protest marking the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. (REUTERS)

  June 30, 2008 A man reads a copy of a state-owned paper in Zimbabwe proclaiming President Robert Mugabe as the winner of his runoff with his main rival, Morgan Tsvangirai. Doubts about the validity of the election led to widespread violence that only calmed when a power-sharing arrangement was signed in September. (AP)

 July 9, 2008 Balloon lumpfish (Eumicrotremus pacificus) cling to a balloon at the Epson Shinagawa Aqua Stadium in Tokyo. Ventral sucker disks allow the deep-sea fish to cling to rocks. (Getty Images)

 July 15, 2008 A Chinese policeman waves away a visitor outside Beijing’s Forbidden City complex a few weeks before the city hosted the 2008 Olympic Games. Security for the Games was unprecedented, but they went off without much trouble. (Getty Images)

 July 17, 2008 A long-exposure shot captures just the flames of the candles carried by Buddhists circling a large statue of Buddha on the outskirts of Bangkok, Thailand. (REUTERS)

 August 13, 2008 Inhabitants of the Georgian city of Gori flea the Russian forces invading the country. The two nations went to war in early August over the separatist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russia now recognizes the two regions as independent states, though Georgia -- and most of the West -- view them as “Russian-occupied territories.” (AFP)

 August 20, 2008 A villager navigates his way over earth cracked by months of drought on the Indonesian island Java. His hope is to find water to carry back to his livestock. (REUTERS)

 August 22, 2008 Jordanian policewomen practice unarmed combat at a training facility east of Amman. Jordan opened the first women’s police academy in the Arab world in 1972. (Getty Images)

 September 9, 2008 An Indian policeman huddles behind his shield as he is pelted by Muslim protesters in the contested region of Kashmir. (REUTERS)

 September 15, 2008 A man tries to catch a chicken with a net on Mount Bromo in Indonesia’s East Java province. The chicken was thrown into the volcanic crater by villagers as part of the Kasada festival, in which offerings are thrown into the crater to thank the Hindu gods for ensuring their safety and prosperity. (REUTERS)


  A deaf Bedouin lighting a hand rolled cigarette by the Red Sea in Nuweiba, Sinai, Egypt, October 6, 2008 (OMAR CHERIF)

 October 14, 2008 Children bathe in waste water in Jakarta after the Indonesia drought. (REUTERS)

 October 29, 2008 A container ship lies off the coast of Lebanon as a lighting illuminates the sky. (REUTERS)

 November 8, 2008 A male student waits to be rescued from the rubble of a school that had collapsed on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. The collapse killed more than 90 students and teachers and left 150 wounded. (REUTERS)

 Novermber 21, 2008 This time it wasn’t school collapses or devastating tropical storms, but the grossly impoverished island nation of Haiti was also the scene of scores of tragic deaths of children caused by malnutrition. Here, a 4-year-old girl embraces an aid worker preparing her to be weighed. (AP)

 December 1, 2008 Two women from the Aymara ethnic group practice their putting while on a work break at the La Paz Golf Club, the world’s highest course. (AFP)

 December 2, 2008 Thousands of mourning Israeli Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem attend the funeral of Arieh Levish Teitelbaum, one of the six Israeli victims of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. (AFP)

 December 5, 2008 Two Japanese climbers were stranded for six days just below the summit of Mt. Cook, New Zealand’s highest peak. One died before the weather allowed the other to be rescued by helicopter. (REUTERS / The Christchurch Press)

 December 18, 2008 Members of South Korea’s Grand National Party spray members of the opposition Democratic Party with fire extinguishers in an attempt to block them from entering a parliamentary committee room. The opposition parties were trying to block the ruling party’s attempt to introduce a bill to approve a free trade pact with the United States. The protests continue to this day. (AP)