A cyclist on a damaged road in Toa Alta, Puerto Rico, days after Hurricane Maria tore up the island on Sept. 20 as a Category 4 storm with winds of up to 154 mph. The storm left nearly all 3.4 million people on the island without power and most without water. The island’s governor ordered a review of all deaths in the hurricane after several media organizations questioned whether the official death toll of 64 was too low.
The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season will be remembered for a deadly trio of storms — Harvey, Irma and Maria — that ravaged Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and numerous Caribbean islands.
A Venezuelan opposition activist wearing a homemade gas mask takes cover behind a makeshift shield as clashes erupt with police during a rally against President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas on May 8.
Hundreds of thousands took to the streets to protest Maduro’s administration, which they claim has become a dictatorship responsible for triple-digit inflation, skyrocketing crime and crippling food shortages.
Donald Trump waits to step out onto the portico for his inauguration as president on Jan. 20.
The Colima Volcano erupts on Jan. 26 in Mexico. The country’s most active volcano entered an explosive stage of activity, with eruptive columns up to 2 ½ miles tall and occasional incandescent fragments launched almost a mile from the crater.
A man carries his daughter while walking from an ISIS-controlled part of Mosul, Iraq, toward Iraqi special forces soldiers on March 4.
The Iraqi government in October 2016 launched a wide-scale U.S.-backed military offensive to recapture Mosul and the surrounding areas, with various Iraqi military, police and paramilitary forces taking part in the operation. The city’s eastern half was declared liberated in January, and the push for the city’s western section, separated from the east by the Tigris River, began the following month.
Sunken boats lay submerged in Saint John Bay after Hurricane Irma ripped through the U.S. Virgin Islands on Sept. 16, leaving flattened homes, flooding and widespread damage.
The ferocious Category 5 storm, which killed at least 28 people across the Caribbean, devastated housing, power supplies and communications, leaving some small islands almost cut off from the world.
After their wedding ceremony, Nathan Mauger and Connie Young, along with family and friends, toast the solar eclipse from the Rose Garden in Manito Park in Spokane, Washington, on Aug. 21.
Americans from coast to coast donned protective glasses and gazed in awe at the first total solar eclipse to cross the nation since 1918. The eclipse carved a narrow “path of totality” through 12 states at 1,500 miles per hour.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un watches the launch of a Hwasong-12 missile in an image released by North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency on Sept. 16.
North Korea took big steps in its nuclear and missile programs in 2017. The country tested what it said were its first three intercontinental ballistic missiles, as well conducting its largest nuclear test to date.
Flames engulf French police officers as they face protesters during a May Day rally in Paris on May 1. Masked demonstrators threw firebombs at police before being dispersed by tear gas. Four officers were injured, with one seriously burned in the face.
President Barack Obama presents Vice President Joe Biden with the Presidential Medal of Freedom during a ceremony in the State Dining Room of the White House on Jan. 12. Biden was awarded with the highest civilian honor for an “extraordinary career in public service.”
Obama said the tribute gave the internet one last chance to joke about the “bromance” the two share. He called Biden the “best possible choice, not just for me, but for the American people.”
A statue of the Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee is removed in New Orleans on May 19.
It was the last of four statues to Confederate-era figures to be removed under a 2015 City Council vote. The removal capped a nearly two-year process that has been criticized by those who say the monuments are a part of Southern heritage and honor the dead. But removal has drawn praise from those who saw the monuments as brutal reminders of slavery and symbols of the historic oppression of black people.
Mary Della Ratta, 94, sits by a battery-powered lantern in her home on Sept. 13, three days after Hurricane Irma knocked out power in Naples, Florida. “I don’t know what to do. How am I going to last here?” said Della Ratta.
About 6.8 million people remained without electricity for days in the steamy late-summer heat as a result of Irma.
Police maintain a security cordon as a huge fire engulfs the Grenfell Tower early on June 14 in west London. Combustible exterior paneling fueled the flames that enveloped the residential tower block, killing 71 people, authorities said.
The disaster shocked Britain and raised questions about growing inequality, not least because it took place at a publicly owned tower block in Kensington and Chelsea, one of London’s — and Britain’s — richest boroughs. Many residents were angry at authorities for ignoring their safety concerns, which were raised months before the fire.
President Donald Trump, in an 18-wheeler, welcomed truck drivers and trucking CEOs to the White House to discuss health care on March 23.
A cat tries to find dry ground around an apartment complex in Houston after Hurricane Harvey hit on Aug. 30. Harvey made landfall in South Texas on Aug. 25, leading to days of downpours that dumped more than 50 inches of rain. Harvey damaged or destroyed about 200,000 homes as the storm system flooded much of Houston and smaller coastal communities.
Uprooted trees lay alongside a road in Hildesheim, Germany on Oct. 6.
An injured woman comforts a child at a hospital, after jets pounded the Barzeh and Qaboun neighborhoods in the northeast corner of Damascus, Syria, on Feb. 20.
The nearly seven-year civil war in Syria has killed hundreds of thousands of people and driven more than 11 million from their homes.
A counterdemonstrator uses a lighted spray can against a white nationalist at the entrance to Lee Park in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 12.
Charlottesville became a target for white nationalists after the city council voted to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a downtown park. After several smaller rallies, hundreds of white nationalists and counterprotesters converged downtown.
A police officer looks over a large sinkhole that swallowed a Toyota Camry in St. Louis on June 29. No injuries were reported and the car’s owners told a local TV station they were returning from the gym when they found their car in the crater. It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the collapse.
President Donald Trump speaks with former President Barack Obama on the steps of the U.S. Capitol after Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, as first lady Melania Trump and Michelle Obama look on.
A polar bear stands on the ice in the Franklin Strait in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago on July 22. While some polar bears are expected to follow the retreating ice northward, others will head south, where they will come into greater contact with humans, encounters that are unlikely to end well for the bears.
Residents wade through floodwaters after record rainfall from Harvey in Beaumont Place, Houston, on Aug. 28.
While scientists say man-made climate change didn’t trigger Harvey, new studies calculate that a warmer, wetter world made it at least three times more likely that the stalled storm over Houston would flood the fourth most-populous U.S. city.
A boy is evacuated during an attack on the Iranian Parliament in central Tehran on June 7.
Gunmen dressed as women stormed the Parliament building while a suicide bomber targeted a shrine to the Islamic republic’s founder in deadly twin attacks that were claimed by ISIS. The near-simultaneous attacks were the first terrorist incidents in Tehran in more than a decade.
Members of the 3rd Special Forces Group, 2nd battalion, at the burial service for U.S. Army Sgt. La David Johnson in Hollywood, Florida, on Oct. 21.
Johnson and three other U.S. soldiers were killed in an ambush in Niger on Oct. 4.
A Coffey Park home burns in Santa Rosa, California, early on Oct. 9.
A series of blazes that started the night of Oct. 8 destroyed about 8,900 homes and other buildings in Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino and Yuba counties.
A woman screams as she mourns the death of a protester in Mathare, in Nairobi, Kenya on Aug. 9.
Kenya suffered months of political uncertainty after President Uhuru Kenyatta defeated opposition leader Raila Odinga in an August election that was nullified by the Supreme Court, which cited irregularities following a challenge to the results by Odinga; a new vote was ordered. It was the first time in Africa that a court had nullified a presidential election.
Kenyatta vowed to unite Kenyans at his inauguration on Nov. 28.
The Coffey Park neighborhood was destroyed as wildfires swept through Santa Rosa, California, on Oct. 11.
Sonoma County was one of the hardest hit, with 24 people killed and whole residential blocks in the city of Santa Rosa completely decimated. Another 20 people were killed in Napa, Mendocino and Yuba counties.
At the peak of the firestorm that started the night of Oct. 8, there were 21 major wildfires that burned a total of more than 383 square miles and forced 100,000 people to flee their homes.
Sloane Stephens holds up the U.S. Open championship trophy as the lid falls off after she won the women’s singles final on Sept. 9 in New York.
Stephens never looked shaken by the setting or the stakes in her first Grand Slam final. She easily beat her close friend Madison Keys, 6-3, 6-0, capping a remarkably rapid rise after sitting out 11 months after foot surgery.
The 83rd-ranked Stephens, who beat Venus Williams in the semifinals, is only the second unseeded woman to win the tournament in the Open era, which began in 1968.
A Brazilian military police officer holds a suspected drug dealer during an anti-drug operation in the Complexo do Alemao favela, or slum, on April 25 in Rio de Janeiro.
A man shields a woman during a mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas on Oct. 1.
A gunman perched on the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas Strip hotel unleashed a shower of bullets on the festival below, killing 58 people and wounding more than 500 as tens of thousands of frantic concertgoers ran for their lives. It was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
Protesters hold their phones up during a pro-independence demonstration calling for the release of jailed Catalan activists and leaders in Barcelona on Nov. 11.
Catalonia, a powerhouse region of Spain, held an independence referendum that triggered the country’s worst political crisis in decades and lead to mass street demonstrations.
White House adviser Kellyanne Conway looks at her phone after taking a photo of President Donald Trump and leaders of historically black universities and colleges in the Oval Office of the White House on Feb. 27. The images of Conway kneeling on the couch with her shoes on sparked a debate about decorum in the executive mansion.
Larry Koser Jr. and his son Matthew look for important papers and heirlooms inside Koser’s house after it was flooded by heavy rains from Hurricane Harvey in the Bear Creek neighborhood of Houston on Aug. 29. The neighborhood flooded after water was released from the nearby Addicks Reservoir.
White nationalists rally around a statue of Thomas Jefferson on the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville on Aug. 11.
The white nationalists were holding the rally to protest plans by the city of Charlottesville to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
A vehicle drives into a group of counterprotesters demonstrating against a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 12. The collision left 32-year-old Heather Heyer dead and dozens injured.
Firefighters Steven Baldock, Kristopher Garayalde and Scott Crumrine remove a flag as flames from a fire approach a home in Oroville, California, on July 8.
After five years of severe drought, the first major wildfires raged across the state. The Butte County wildfire swept through grassy foothills and destroyed 10 structures, including homes, and led to several minor injuries. The blaze was one of three in California that grew quickly as much of the state baked in record-breaking heat.
A boy bikes past destroyed cars and houses in a neighborhood recently liberated by Iraqi security forces, on the western side of Mosul, Iraq, on March 19.
ISIS militants swiftly overran Mosul in 2014. The U.S.-backed offensive to retake the city was launched in October and proceeded slowly, even though Iraqi political and military officials had vowed to declare victory by the end of 2016.
President Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany, on July 7.
Residents view the first iceberg of the season as it passes the South Shore, also known as Iceberg Alley, near Ferryland, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, on April 16.
A streaker ran onto the track at the World Athletics Championships in London on Aug. 5.
The Eagle Creek wildfire burns as golfers play at the Beacon Rock Golf Course in North Bonneville, Washington, on Sept. 4.
Wildfire season this year was supposed to be mild after an extremely wet winter and spring but ended up one of the worst in U.S. history in land burned. The foliage that sprouted from previous rain and snow has gone bone-dry in intense heat, feeding flames in places that have not seen downpours in months and strangling cities with smoke.
A woman poses for a selfie in front of the carcass of a humpback whale on Ipanema beach in Rio de Janeiro on Nov. 15. Biologist Rafael Carvalho said the whale appeared to have been dead for a few days. Authorities were urging beachgoers who had flocked to Ipanema on a national holiday to stay away from the animal.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and his wife, Louise Linton, hold up a sheet of new $1 bills during a tour of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington on Nov. 15.
Mnuchin and U.S. Treasurer Jovita Carranza went to see firsthand the production of the first currency to bear their signatures.
A Cuban man wades through a flooded street in Havana, on Sept. 10. Deadly Hurricane Irma battered central Cuba, knocking down power lines, uprooting trees and ripping the roofs off homes as it headed toward Florida.
Seawater penetrated as much as 1,600 feet inland in parts of the city. Authorities said they had evacuated more than a million people as a precaution, including about 4,000 in the capital.
John Bain and Brandon Baker take cover from the embers as they try to help stop a fire from burning a stranger’s home on Dec. 5 in Ventura, California. Strong Santa Ana winds rapidly pushed multiple wildfires across the region, expanding across tens of thousands of acres and destroying hundreds of homes and structures.
President Donald Trump speaks on the phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Oval Office on Jan. 28. Of those pictured here, only one — Vice President Mike Pence — remains in the administration at year’s close. From left, the others, and their position at the time, were: chief of staff Reince Priebus, chief strategist Steve Bannon, communications director Sean Spicer and national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Trump’s calls and interactions with Putin have been closely scrutinized after U.S. intelligence assessments that the Kremlin meddled in the 2016 election, with multiple investigations still ongoing into whether Trump’s campaign colluded with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton.
A pew inside a Coptic Christian church is covered in blood after it was bombed in Tanta, Egypt, on April 9, Palm Sunday. Another Coptic church, in Alexandria in northern Egypt, was also bombed. The two attacks killed at least 43 people and wounded about 100 in an assault claimed by ISIS.
The blasts came just weeks before Pope Francis visited the Arab world’s most populous country, which has been beset by extremist violence against its minority Christians.
A police car patrols Fajardo, Puerto Rico, as Hurricane Maria hits, on Sept. 20. The strongest hurricane to hit Puerto Rico in more than 80 years destroyed hundreds of homes and turned some streets into raging rivers in an onslaught that has plunged the U.S. territory deeper into financial crisis.
President Donald Trump tosses a roll of paper towels into a crowd as he visits those affected by Hurricane Maria at Calvary Chapel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on Oct. 3.
Trump praised the roughly 200 people gathered, saying there was a lot of “love” in the room. The president also handed out flashlights and said of the recovery: “The job that’s been done here is really nothing short of a miracle.”
A Bangladeshi man helps Rohingya Muslim refugees disembark from a boat on the Bangladeshi shoreline of the Naf river after they crossed the border from Myanmar in Teknaf on Sept. 30.
Over 620,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar to Bangladesh in the largest refugee crisis to hit Asia in decades.
The crisis began when a Rohingya insurgent group launched attacks with rifles and machetes on a series of security posts in Myanmar on Aug. 25, prompting the military to launch a brutal round of “clearance operations” in response. Those fleeing have described indiscriminate attacks by security forces and Buddhist mobs, including monks, as well as killings and rapes.
Naseer Ud Din holds his infant son, who drowned when the boat they were traveling in capsized just before reaching the shore, as his wife, Hanida Begum, cries upon reaching the Bay of Bengal shore in Shah Porir Dwip, Bangladesh, on Sept. 14.
Nearly three weeks into a mass exodus of Rohingya fleeing violence in Myanmar, thousands were still flooding across the border in search of help and safety in teeming refugee settlements in Bangladesh.
A leaf falls during a fall day along New York State Route 91 on Oct. 28, in Tully.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, right, enjoys the beach with his family and friends at the governor’s summer house on July 3 at Island Beach State Park — one of the numerous parks and beaches that were closed by a government shutdown.
Christie defended his visit to the state-owned beach house, saying that he had previously announced his plans to vacation there, and that the media had simply “caught a politician keeping his word.”
Snow covers Kandy Freeman’s hair as she participates in a Black Lives Matter protest in front of Trump Tower in New York on Jan. 14.
Former FBI director James Comey takes his seat before testifying at the beginning of the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on June 8.
Comey was fired by President Donald Trump on May 9 amid the agency’s investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
A man rides a wave in the Pacific Ocean waters of La Pampilla beach in Lima, Peru, on March 2. As most Lima residents prepare to sleep, a handful of hardcore surfers descend on the only beach in Peru where they can ride the waves at night.
A demonstrator catches fire after the gas tank of a police motorbike exploded during clashes in a protest against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, in Caracas on May 3. Political unrest in Venezuela killed 369 people this year.
Roses are placed on chairs inside the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, on Nov. 12, the first time the congregation gathered since a massacre took 26 of their fellow parishioners’ lives a week before.
The church said that, with the help of volunteers, organizers labored around the clock for over 72 hours to repair and restore the sanctuary.
A woman and her poodle wait to be rescued while floating on an air mattress in floodwaters from Hurricane Harvey in Houston on Aug. 27.
Britain’s Prince Philip, in his role as captain general of the Royal Marines, attends a parade on the forecourt of Buckingham Palace in London on Aug. 2. Philip, 96, the husband of Queen Elizabeth, bowed out of public life with a final solo appearance at the event. Philip has been by the queen’s side throughout her 65 years on the throne, and she has described him as “my strength and stay.”
