The Globe

Adam Ferguson, The New York Times
An Afghan woman is rushed from the scene of a suicide car bomb in Kabul, Afghanistan, on December 15, 2009. Afghan authorities reported eight people were killed and 40 were wounded in the blast.

Majid Saeedi, Getty Images
Supporters of the defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi run in the streets during protests in Tehran on June 16, 2009. The landslide victory by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad four days earlier had shocked the opposition, who claimed widespread election irregularities. As demonstrations escalated, the Iranian government banned foreign media from covering protest rallies, shut down text-messaging services and blocked cell phone transmissions and access to some websites.

Tomas van Houtryve, Panos Pictures
A hotel staff member polishes benches under a picture of Chairman Mao Zedong on November 3, 2009 in Nanjie Village, Henan Province, China. Nanjie is a model collective village run along Maoist lines. Residents live in identical apartments and receive free health care and education, but earn only a token salary, paid in coupons rather than currency. The government-supported Red Tourism program glorifies the deeds of past communist leaders through monuments, battle reenactments and tours of model communist villages like Nanjie. Hardly a reference can be found to the millions killed during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

Tomas van Houtryve, Panos Pictures
A candidate takes the oral test to become a tour leader at the Yangjialing Revolution Headquarters site in Yan'an, China, on November 8, 2009. In 1945, the Seventh National Congress of the Communist Party of China was held in this assembly hall, naming Mao Zedong the undisputed leader of the party and the revolution and enshrining Mao's "thought" into the Party Constitution.

Tomas van Houtryve, Panos Pictures
A young Moldovan girl burns a portrait of Vladimir Lenin that rioters had taken from the Parliament building in Chisinau, Moldova, on April 7, 2009. Thousands of demonstrators had ransacked the building to protest what they said was a fraudulent victory by the governing Communist Party in the general election on April 5.

Tomas van Houtryve, Panos Pictures
Papers fall out of the windows of the parliament building as rioters ransack the inside in Chisinau, Moldova, on April 7, 2009. Demonstrators had stormed the building to protest the victory of the governing Communist Party in the general election two days earlier. Opposition leaders accused the Communists of rigging the elections and demanded a recount. More than 30 people were injured in the protests and three demonstrators died in police custody under mysterious circumstances. The poorest country in Europe, Moldova is the only former Soviet Union state to vote the Communist Party back into power through democratic elections.

Susana Vera, Freelance
An Arhuaco girl rests on hay outside her home in Nabusimake, Colombia. The indigenous communities of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta are abandoned victims of the armed conflict in Colombia.

Susana Vera, Freelance
Fredi Montero, a 19-year-old Wiwa, sells fique fiber for weaving handbags to a neighbor in Potrerito, Colombia. One of four indigenous groups inhabiting the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Wiwas along with Kogis, Arhuacos and Kankuamos believe the sacred Sierra Nevada is the heart of the world. By protecting the mountain range, they keep the entire planet in balance. Yet over the past three decades, the Sierra Nevada has become a battleground of guerrillas, paramilitary groups, drug dealers and multinational corporations. Besieged by violence, the indigenous people now find themselves and their culture at risk of extinction.

Adam Nadel, Freelance
Pham Van Diep, 12, right, and his brother, Pham Van Duc, 10. The boys live near Da Nang, Vietnam, an area heavily sprayed with defoliants during the Vietnam War, and both have undergone numerous medical procedures to correct ailments doctors attribute to dioxin contamination. The places in Vietnam that were heavily sprayed with Agent Orange, an herbicide containing dioxins, have a birth defect rate of 2.4 percent, significantly higher than the national average of 0.6 percent. Diep says his friends all think his scars are the result of a fight. He doesn't correct them.

Ricardo Moraes, Reuters
People look at the body of a man found dead in a supermarket cart in the Morro dos Macacos slum of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, October 20, 2009. Brazil's president offered nearly $60 million in federal funds to help Rio de Janeiro police combat drug gangs after 17 people were killed the previous weekend, raising questions about the city's ability to safely host the 2016 Olympics.

Rodrigo Abd, Associated Press
Don Carlos, owner of Valles del Sol car repair shop turned funeral home, prepares the body of a murdered man for burial in Guatemala City, Guatemala, August 29, 2009.

Alejandro Bringas, Reuters
Military and forensic experts inspect the body of a man killed outside a nightclub in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, August 31, 2009. The man had been handcuffed to the fence and shot several times by drug hit men, reported local media. The assailants had left a warning, known as a "narco mensaje," near the body.

Rina Castelnuovo, The New York Times
A woman bathes her son in the unauthorized West Bank outpost of Maoz Esther. Although ideological settlers disagree with the decision, Israel has promised to dismantle two dozen outposts as part of its commitment to a two-state solution.

Rina Castelnuovo, The New York Times
A Jewish settler throws wine at a Palestinian woman in the West Bank city of Hebron, March 10, 2009. Hebron is a center of conflict between the two groups.

Paula Bronstein, Getty Images
An inspector combs through the rubble in the parking garage of the Pearl Continental Hotel in Peshawar, Pakistan, on June 10, 2009. A car bomb there the day before killed 17 people.

Massimo Berruti, Agence VU
Portrait of a man who lost two children and a sister in a June 10, 2009 car bomb blast, Peshawar, Pakistan, November 2009.

Carolyn Drake, Panos Pictures/Prospekt
Schoolchildren pick cotton in Zhetisay, Kazakhstan. The area was sparsely populated before the Soviet Union government began building towns in order to launch its massive cotton industry, which now spans all the countries in Central Asia. Water being funneled away from the Syr Darya River to irrigate the fields is one of the reasons for the Aral Sea's depletion.

Carolyn Drake, Panos Pictures/Prospekt
In the Tajikistan village of Akjar, the irrigation canal is the only source of water. Plumbing shut down after the Soviet Union collapsed, so the village relies on dirty water for survival.

Carolyn Drake, Panos Pictures/Prospekt
Low water levels in a reservoir above Nurek Dam in Tajikistan. The water that nourishes the five former Soviet Union republics of Central Asia comes from melting glaciers and snow in the mountains of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. During Soviet times, decisions about how to share resources were made by the central government in Moscow. Since becoming independent in 1991, the nations now argue about how the area's dams should be used. Countries downstream want water to be stored in reservoirs during the winter and released for irrigation in the summer. Upstream countries want to use the water in winter to generate electricity.

Emilio Morenatti, Associated Press
A Pakistani boy from Swat Valley sleeps under a mosquito net outside his tent at the Jalozai refugee camp, near Peshawar, Pakistan, May 26, 2009.

Tomas van Houtryve, Panos Pictures/Prospekt
Children clean up after lunch in the cafeteria of the Gymnasia-orphanage N.2 in Chisinau, Moldova, on May 28, 2009. The facility has over 500 children living on the campus. About 80 percent are social orphans whose parents have turned them over to institutional care.

Arpad Kurucz, Nepszabadsag
On November 3, 2004, the last conscripts left the Hungarian Army after a 135-year tradition of the draft. Today, nostalgia for the army is intense, and military survival camps have become fashionable. For the past three years, the Military Traditional Association in Mogyoród, Hungary, has hosted military camps for children. For one week, kids learn what was taught to soldiers in a month of basic training and take part in shooting exercises with dummy ammunition. The practice has made some wonder if the camps are a way for extreme right-wing groups to acquire military training and experience.

Hyunsoo Leo Kim, The Virginian Pilot
Dut Daniel Aketch, a Lost Boy of Sudan, holds the first documented picture of himself taken at a refugee camp in Kenya. He does not know his own age, but he knows he was young when he fled the massacre of his village in Southern Sudan. He is one of thousands of children who escaped the country's civil war.

James Chance, Freelance
As in any society, the North Cemetery has its social classes. At the bottom of the cemetery's hierarchy are the squatters, who live in shanties perched on top of the wall of tombs that forms the northern exterior wall. The most populated area of the burial grounds, roughly 100 families live here.

James Chance, Freelance
Residents of the North Cemetery's squatter neighborhood look down from their homes at a funeral below.