News
The Week in Pictures: August 19 - 26
Italy earthquake devastates towns, Rio Olympics come to a close, a penguin is promoted to brigadier and more.
Rescuers search through rubble following an earthquake in Pescara del Tronto, Italy on Aug. 24, 2016.
Crews using bulldozers and their bare hands raced to dig out survivors Thursday from a strong earthquake that reduced three central Italian towns to rubble. The death toll rose to 267, but the number of dead and missing was uncertain given the thousands of vacationers in the area for summer's final days.
Sister Mariana, a 32-year-old from Albania, checks her mobile phone as she lies near a victim following an earthquake in Amatrice, Italy, on Aug. 24.
Several elderly women were enjoying a reprieve from the summer heat in care of nuns in a convent in Amatrice, a medieval hilltop town. When the quake struck, half of the convent collapsed, apparently killing three nuns and four elderly women.
Sister Mariana was one of three nuns and an elderly woman who survived because they were in a part of the convent that was not fully destroyed.
She said the other survivors escaped holding hands.
"They saved each other, they took their hands even while it was falling apart, and they ran, and they survived," she said.
Brazilians react during the second half before their team defeated Germany to win the soccer gold medal during the Rio 2016 Olympic Games while watching a live broadcast on Leblon beach on Aug. 20 in Rio de Janeiro. Brazil won their first gold medal in soccer and avenged their humiliating 7-1 loss to Germany in the 2014 World Cup.
One-year-old female giant panda cub Nuan Nuan reacts inside her enclosure during joint birthday celebrations for the panda and its ten-year-old mother Liang Liang at the National Zoo in Kuala Lumpur on Aug. 23. Giant pandas Liang Liang, aged 10, and her Malaysian-born cub Nuan Nuan, 1, were born on August 23, 2006 and August 18, 2015 retrospectively.
A rescued woman is carried away on a stretcher following an earthquake in Amatrice, Italy, on Aug. 24.
The magnitude 6.2 quake struck at 3:36 a.m. on Wednesday and was felt across a broad swath of central Italy, including Rome, where residents woke to a long swaying followed by aftershocks. The temblor shook the Lazio region and Umbria and Le Marche on the Adriatic coast, a highly seismic area that has witnessed major quakes in the past and continued to shake early Thursday with aftershocks.
An Indian cyclist rides along a flooded road on the outskirts of Allahabad on Aug. 25. At least 300 people have died in eastern and central India and more than six million others have been affected by floods that have submerged villages, washed away crops, destroyed roads and disrupted power and phone lines, officials said on Tuesday.
Heavy monsoon rains have caused rivers, including the mighty Ganges and its tributaries, to burst their banks forcing people into relief camps in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand.
A woman cries at the morgue as she waits for the coffin of her relative, killed during the previous night's attack on a wedding party in Gaziantep, Turkey near the Syrian border on Aug. 21.
A child suicide bomber killed at least 51 people and wounded nearly 70 others at a Kurdish wedding party, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Sunday, decrying the attack as an apparent attempt by Islamic State extremists to destabilize the nation by exploiting ethnic and religious tensions.
Orthodox Christian nuns take part in an annual procession along the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem's Old City, during which an icon of the Virgin Mary is carried from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to a church at the foot of the Mount of Olives, the location believed by Christians to be that of the tomb of the Virgin Mary, early morning Aug. 25.
Standing in line for a special ceremony, uniformed soldiers of His Majesty the King of Norway's Guard are carefully inspected -- by a penguin.
Sir Nils Olav, a resident king penguin at Edinburgh Zoo, was honored with the title of brigadier on Monday during a parade in the Scottish park. The bird is the mascot of His Majesty the King of Norway's Guard and was made a knight in 2008.
The penguinial link between Edinburgh Zoo and Norway goes back to 1914 when a Norwegian family presented the zoo with king penguins.
In 1972, one of the zoo's king penguins was named Nils Olav after Norwegian Major Nils Egelien, who arranged his adoption, and Norway's then King Olav. Two others have shared the name since.
More than 50 Norwegian soldiers are in Scotland to take part in The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, and it has become a custom for them to promote the penguin when in the city.