Photos Of The Week #11

March 17, 2013 02:59 GMT

Afghan National Army soldiers take part in a military exercise in Kabul. (RFE/RL / Sabawoon)

Children work in a brickyard in Iran. (RFE/RL / Aboutaleb Nadari)

Members of the Kosovo Police take part in a graduation ceremony in Pristina. (AFP/Armend Nimani)

Members of the Kosovo Security Force rescue a woman whose house has been flooded since the night before, in the village of Zajm. (Reuters/Hazir Reka)

Crew members of the nuclear-powered submarine "Karelia" are seen during a training exercise at the training complex of the Northern Fleet, in the Murmansk region. (ITAR-TASS)

A man rides a horse during a parade on Hungary's National Day in Targu Secuiesc, Romania. Thousands of ethnic Hungarians from the central Transylvanian region of Romania gather in a celebration in Targu Secuiesc to mark the 1848 Hungarian Revolution. (AFP/Daniel Mihailescu)

Civilian passengers of France's Airbus A330 Zero-G, who are not astronauts or scientists, enjoy weightlessness during the first zero-gravity flight for paying passengers in Europe. All boarding cards, costing 6,000 euros, were sold for the years 2013 and 2014. Zero gravity is simulated by flying a series of parabolic flight maneuvers. (AFP/Mehdi Fedouach)

Journalists film during a press visit of the installation "Big Air Package" by U.S.-Bulgarian artist Christo in Oberhausen, western Germany. Eighteen years after the wrapping of the Reichstag, Christo is returning to Germany with his latest art project, in which he says visitors will be "virtually swimming in light." (AFP/Patrik Stollarz)

A Chinese policeman walks across a pile of fake medicines seized in Beijing in recent months. The rapid growth of Internet commerce has led to an explosion of counterfeit drugs sold around the world, with China the biggest source of fake medicines. (AFP)

The world's largest message-in-a-bottle is released into the ocean in Tenerife, Spain, in a project sponsored by the Norwegian soft drink Solo. The 8-meter-long bottle contains a 12-square-meter letter and is equipped with navigation lights required for a drifting object in international waters, solar panels, satellite communications, tracking technology, and a custom camera. (AFP/Desiree Martin)

Riders take part in the Sheikh Sultan Bin Zayed al-Nahyan International Equestrian festival in the Boudthib Endurance Village near the Emirati capital, Abu Dhabi. (AFP/Karim Sahib)

Students of a medical academy celebrate Maslenitsa, or Pancake Week, in the southern Russian city of Stavropol. Maslenitsa is widely viewed as a pagan holiday marking the end of winter and is celebrated with pancake eating, while the Orthodox Church considers it as the week of feasting before Lent. (Reuters/Eduard Korniyenko)

People push cars after a heavy snowfall in the Ukrainian city of Lviv. (AFP/Yuriy Dyachyshyn)

Indian Jyoti Amge, 19, the world's shortest woman, sits next to Morocco's Brahim Takioullah, who has the largest feet in the world, according to the Guinness Book of Records, during an event in Kuwait City. Amge and Takioullah are in Kuwait as part of a competition organized by the Guinness Book of Records. (AFP/Yasser Al-Zayyat)

Members of the North Korean Worker-Peasant Red Guards shout anti-U.S. slogans at an undisclosed location. (AFP/KCNA)

A rebel Syrian fighter aims his weapon at government forces' positions situated at the Menagh military airport near the northern city of Aleppo. (AFP/Jim Lopez)

People wait in the rain at St. Peter's Square for the smoke announcing the result of the conclave at the Vatican. A new pope, Pope Francis, was elected on March 13. (AFP/Tiziana Fabi)

Pope Francis appears on the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica after being elected the 266th pope of the Roman Catholic Church at the Vatican. (AFP/Osservatore Romano)

Tens of thousands of dead fish float on the waters of the popular Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon beside the Corcovado Mountain in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Officials said recent storms sent large amounts of organic matter into the lagoon, sending oxygen levels critically low. (AFP/Christophe Simon)

A serviceman of the Belarusian Interior Ministry's special forces unit breaks a stack of burning tiles with his head during a show at their base in Minsk. (Reuters/Vasily Fedosenko)

Protesters wearing diapers picket the Spanish government's social cuts, the construction of a high-speed train, and the military budget in front of the Basque government's headquarters in the northern city of Bilbao. (AFP/Rafa Rivas)

The comet PanSTARRS (left) is seen with a crescent moon as both set over the Very Large Array radio telescope antenna near Magdalena, New Mexico. The comet, now just faintly visible in the Northern Hemisphere, was discovered in June 2011 by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (PanSTARRS) in Hawaii. (AFP/Stan Honda)

A woman walks with a child and dog in a snow-covered park in the Belarusian capital, Minsk. (AFP/Viktor Drachev)

Tunisian cigarette vendor Adel Khadri set himself on fire in the Tunisian capital, Tunis, reportedly out of desperation because he could not find a steady job. Khadri later died from his burns. The number of people committing suicide has multiplied since street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire on December 17, 2010, in protest against police harassment. Bouazizi's self-immolation ignited a mass uprising that ousted former dictator Ben Ali and touched off the Arab Spring uprisings. (Reuters)

A Balinese man kicks up fire during the Perang Api ritual ahead of Nyepi day, on the island of Bali. Nyepi is a day of silence for self-reflection to celebrate the Balinese Hindu new year, where Hindus in Bali observe meditation and fasting but are not allowed to work, cook, light lamps, or conduct any other activities. (Reuters)

North Korea leader Kim Jong Un (center) visits a defense detachment near Baengnyeong Island. South Korea and U.S. forces are conducting large-scale military drills, while the North is also gearing up for a massive military exercise. (Reuters/KCNA)

More than 15,000 people march in silence to mark the 10th anniversary of the murder of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in Belgrade. Djindjic, the first democratically elected prime minister in postcommunist Serbia, was shot and killed by a sniper on March 12, 2003. (AFP/Andrej Isakovic)

Cardinals attend a Mass on March 12 at St. Peter's Basilica before the start of the conclave to elect a new pope at the Vatican. (AFP/Gabriel Bouys)

Wesa, a 2-week-old California condor chick, is pictured with a puppet used to feed it up to 15 mice daily at the San Diego Zoo in California. It will eventually be released into the wild. (AFP/Ken Bohn)

Syrian men search for their relatives among the bodies of civilians executed and dumped in the Quweiq River on the grounds of a school in the Bustan al-Qasr district of Aleppo. More than 30 bodies have been found recently in the Quweiq River. (AFP/JM Lopez)

Employees sew Israeli and U.S. flags in preparation for the upcoming visit of U.S. President Barack Obama in the town of Kfar Saba, Israel. Obama's three-day visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories will begin on March 20, Israel said. (AFP/Jack Guez)

A woman takes her picture with French President Francois Hollande as he visits the Gresilles neighborhood in Dijon at the start of a two-day trip. (Reuters/Philippe Wojazer)

Habitat engineer Volker Maiwald walks among rock formations while collecting geologic samples for study at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in the Utah desert. The MDRS aims to investigate the feasibility of human exploration of Mars and uses the Utah desert's terrain to simulate working conditions on the red planet. (Reuters/Jim Urquhart)

A vendor sells figurines of Venezuela's late President Hugo Chavez outside the national election board in Caracas. (Reuters/Marco Bello)

The "Silver Bullet" airstream trailer (center) carrying U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel is pictured inside a U.S. Air Force C-17 aircraft transporting him and his staff from Kabul to Ramstein air base in Germany. (AFP/Jason Reed)

Azra, 68, looks at her dead pet bird in a cage at her home, which was burnt by a mob two days earlier, in Lahore, Pakistan. Hundreds of Pakistani Christians took to the streets across the country, demanding better protection after a Christian neighborhood was torched in connection with the country's controversial antiblasphemy law. (Reuters/Mohsin Raza)

People sunbathe by the wall of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, Russia. (Reuters/Alexander Demianchuk)

A protester, wearing a sweater in the colors of the Bulgarian national flag, sits on the tracks as demonstrators block the main railway station in Sofia. Hundreds of Bulgarians took to the streets in a dispute against monopolies and widespread corruption. (Reuters/Stoyan Nenov)

A girl runs past pinwheels arranged in the shape of the Korean peninsula at Imjingak pavillion ini Paju, near the demilitarized zone that separates the two Koreas. (Reuters/Kim Hong-Ji)

Wrecked vehicles remain in a field of reeds in Namie, two years after the March 11, 2011, tsunami and earthquake near the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant. The tsunami sent a huge wall of water into the coast of the Tohoku region, splintering whole communities, ruining swathes of prime farmland, and killing nearly 19,000 people. (AFP/Yoshikazu Tsuno)

The Georgian folk ensemble Erisioni performs at the State Kremlin Palace in Moscow. (ITAR-TASS/Stanislav Krasilnikov)