Photos Of The Week #51

An Afghan fire fighter tackles a huge blaze that has devastated much of Kabul's central market. (RFE/RL/Sayedjan Sabawoon)

North Korean girls dance during a performance at a nursery school in the North Korean border town of Siniuju, across from China's northeastern city of Dandong. (AFP/Wang Zhao)

A Syrian patient smokes a cigarette at the Dar Al-Ajaza psychiatric hospital in the heart of the Old City of Aleppo. The psychiatric ward in Syria's war-ravaged second city, housing around 60 patients, has lacked the means to function properly since fighting broke out there in July. (AFP)

Fog partially covers the Dolomites before the Men's World Cup Giant Slalom in Alta Badia. (AFP/Olivier Morin)

Shock-rocker Marilyn Manson performs at a concert in the Belarusian capital, Minsk, on December 21. (Belapan)

Clad in Santa Claus costumes, workers clean windows some 55 meters above the ground outside a hotel in Tokyo. (AFP/Toru Yamanaka)

A reveler, dressed as a unicorn, celebrates the sunrise during the winter solstice at Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain in southern England. (Reuters/Kieran Doherty)

Boris Lezhnin, 75, walks along an embankment of the Yenisei River in the Russian city of Divnogorsk, south of the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, in temperatures of around minus 30 degrees Celsius. Lezhnin said he goes on his evening walks in any weather. (Reuters/Ilya Naymushin)

An activist of Ukraine's Femen feminist group is taken away by police as she demonstrates near the EU Council building in Brussels, where an EU-Russia summit was being held. (AFP/Georges Gobet)

More than 17,000 illegal weapons, either confiscated or voluntarily handed over, were destroyed at a Belgrade recycling center. All of the weapons were dismantled and turned into scrap metal. (RFE/RL/Vesna Andjic)

Performers take part in a Mayan Culture Festival to commemorate the 13th bak'tun, an epoch lasting roughly 400 years, in downtown Copan, Honduras. (Reuters/Jorge Cabrera)

An unexploded bomb is seen in the Ain Terma area in Ghouta, east of the Syrian capital, Damascus. (Reuters/Karm Seif/Shaam News Network)

Russian President Vladimir Putin gives his annual press conference in Moscow. (AFP/Natalia Kolesnikova)

Men fish on the frozen Yenisei River amid temperatures of about minus 25 degrees Celsius near the village of Khmelniki, some 50 kilometers south of Russia's Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. (Reuters/Ilya Naymushin)

Brady Leman of Canada, Andreas Matt of Austria, and Daniel Bohnacker of Germany compete during the semifinal of the FIS men's Skicross World Cup at the Val Thorens ski resort in the French alps. (AFP/Philippe Desmazes)

A Bangladeshi laborer pulls a cart full of empty drums during a nationwide strike in Dhaka. Twelve like-minded Islamic parties called an eight-hour general strike in the capital and a dawn-to-dusk general strike across the country as they seek a ban on left-wing political parties. (AFP/Munir uz Zaman)

People walk past decorated trees in the Kosovar capital, Pristina. (AFP/Armend Nimani)

A NASA handout picture shows a rocket booster with a Soyuz TMA-07M spaceship bound for the International Space Station blasting off from the Russian-leased Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. (AFP/NASA/Carla Cioffi)

A man walks along the embankment in St. Petersburg, Russia, of the Neva River as temperatures reached minus 20 degrees Celsius. (Reuters/Alexander Demianchuk)

Gay-rights activists brave rotten eggs thrown at them by antigay Orthodox believers during a "kiss-in" protest outside the State Duma in Moscow. Russian legislators had planned to debate a bill that would introduce sanctions for providing minors with information on homosexuality. (AFP/Andrey Smirnov)

A man rides a motorcycle past a mosque destroyed by a government air strike in Syria's Azaz city. (Reuters/Ahmed Jadallah)

An elderly woman shields her face against the abnormally cold temperatures in the northeastern Kazakh city of Pavlodar, where temperatures reached minus 37 degrees Celsius. (AFP/Vladimir Bugayev)

A sweet-singing frog (Gracixalus Quangi), which uses unique calls to attract females, was one of the new species discovered in the high-altitude forests of northern Vietnam in 2011. A new report from the WWF details other discoveries made last year -- 126 new species in the Greater Mekong area, from a devilish-looking bat to a walking catfish. (AFP/WWF/Jodi J.L. Rowley/Australian Museum)

Children look out the windows of a school bus as it pulls into Newtown High School in Newtown, Connecticut. Students returned to school in the shattered Connecticut town on December 18, accompanied by police and counselors to help them cope with grief and fear after a shooting rampage that killed 26 people in the town, 20 of them small children. (Reuters/Lucas Jackson)

A woman adds candles to a heart shape to honor Vaclav Havel on Prague's Wenceslas Square on the first anniversary of the late Czech president's death on December 18. (epa/Filip Singer)

An Egyptian woman screams as she walks past soldiers standing guard in front of the Presidential Palace ahead of a planned demonstration by opposition supporters. (AFP/Marco Longari)

People walk over a bridge in front of the chimneys of a city power plant in subzero conditions in Kyiv.

The bodies of two female workers of an antipolio drive lie in the morgue of Jinnah Hospital in the Pakistani city of Karachi. Five vaccination workers have been shot dead in Pakistan since December 17. The immunization campaign has been suspended after the attacks. (Reuters/Akhtar Soomro)

A view of snow-covered fields and villages in the Bhaderwah Valley of India, some 200 kilometers east of Jammu. (AFP)

Taliban fighters stand handcuffed near their seized weapons as they are displayed to the media at the governor's house in Jalalabad. Nineteen Taliban insurgents were arrested by Afghan joint forces during an operation in the Bati Kot District of Nangarhar Province. (AFP/Noorullah Shirzada)

Two women play in the snow in temperatures of minus 30 degrees Celsius in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. A severe cold spell has brought temperatures around 10 to 20 degrees Celsius lower than average across Siberia, according to media reports. (Reuters/Ilya Naymushin)

Pigeons warm themselves on a metro ventilation shaft in central Moscow. (AFP/Kirill Kudryavtsev)

An Orthodox priest baptizes an infant during a mass baptism of some 900 babies into the Georgian Orthodox Church in Tbilisi. (EPA/Zurab Kurtsikidze)

A trumpeter plays from the Old Town tower above the traditional Christmas market in Old Town Square in central Prague. (AFP/Michal Cizek)

A view of an eruption at Ecuador's Tungurahua Volcano from the city of Banos. (AFP/Agencia API)

Participants launch Chinese lanterns during an event in Puebla, near Mexico City. Organizers hoped to break a Guinness world record by launching 16,000 lanterns, all of which were made by people with disabilities, according to local authorities. (Reuters/Imelda Medina)

Emergency workers remove snow from around a car after a blizzard engulfed the western Ukrainian city of Brody, west of Kyiv, on December 17. Around 2,000 stranded vehicles were freed from the snow during the past 24 hours, according to the Emergency Ministry. (Reuters/Marian Striltsiv)

Villagers mourn over the bodies of 10 girls between 9 and 11 years old who were killed by an explosion in Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan, as they were collecting firewood. (Reuters/Parwiz)

A truck loaded with cauliflower drives toward a market in Cairo, Egypt. (Reuters/Khaled Abdullah)

Women in traditional dress are seen at an international film festival of the CIS countries, the Baltic states, and Georgia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. (RFE/RL/Alia Suranovа)

People bow in front of a portrait of North Korea's late leader Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang on December 17, the first anniversary of Kim's death. (Reuters/Kyodo)

A woman shields her face while braving the abnormally freezing outdoors in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, about 2,800 kilometers east of Moscow. The temperatures in Novosibirsk dropped to minus 35 Celsius. (AFP/Valery Titievsky)

The team from Montenegro celebrates after winning the women's European handball championship final match against Norway at the Kombank Arena in Belgrade. (Reuters/Marko Djurica)

Smoke rises from the chimneys of a heating plant at Berlin's Brandenburg Willy Brandt airport in Schoenefeld, Germany. (AFP/Patrick Pleul)

U.S. President Barack Obama prays during a vigil held at Newtown High School for the families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. The shooting, in which 20 elementary school students and six adults were shot dead, was one of the deadliest such incidents in the nation's history. (Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)

Rachel Pullen (center) kisses her son Landon DeCecco at a memorial for victims of the fatal school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

A NATO soldier walks past the site of an explosion in Kabul. A bombing in the Afghan capital killed one person and wounded 15 on December 17. (Reuters/Omar Sobhani)

The Soyuz TMA-07M spacecraft is transported to its launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The Soyuz spacecraft, which will carry U.S. astronaut Thomas Marshburn, Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, and Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, is scheduled to fly to the International Space Station on December 19. (Reuters/Sergei Remezov)

A soldier of the Armed Forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina takes aim during an exercise near Banja Luka. The drill, which tests soldiers on conquering a territory and rescuing the wounded from a war zone, is the final one for the basic officer trainee course. (Reuters/Dado Ruvic)

Afghanistan -- A girl walks in a snow-covered cemetery in Kabul, 18Dec2012