From Headbutts to Hanging Chads
The decade was still young, the world still unaware of what a perfectly executed terror attack looked like, when two planes slammed into the World Trade Center towers in New York in an assault broadcast live on television.
It was a horrific crime — some 3,000 innocents died in New York that day. And in Washington D.C. And in a Pennsylvania field. They are images which the world will likely never forget, and they are included in the press photos of the decade just released by Reuters.
The attack triggered a chain of violence that has defined the decade. Soon after Sept. 11, 2001, NATO launched an attack on Afghanistan and US President George W. Bush kicked off his war on terror — a war that before long included the invasion of Iraq.
Pictures from those events are powerful testimonies to the suffering of war. But conflict made for impressive images in other ways as well. Zinadine Zidane headbutting Marco Materazzi in the World Cup final. The too-close-to-call 2000 elections between Al Gore and George W. Bush. The plague of the locusts in Africa in 2005.
Other photos depict the death of a Pope, the melting of the Arctic ice or stars Michael Jackson and Paris Hilton. Then there’s French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s chummy photo with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, as Angela Merkel smiles, or the iconic image of then-Russian President Vladimir Putin shirtless and fishing.
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Pope Benedict XVI, German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was elected Pope in 2005. Here, he greets thousands of worshippers from the balcony of the St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican.
A would-be immigrant from Africa crawling on the beach, after his arrival in a makeshift boat, in Spain’s Canary Islands in 2006.
Majid Kavousifar and his nephew Hossein Kavousifar were publically hanged in Iran, after they killed a judge, known for jailing several dissidents.
An ultra-Orthodox Jew protesting against the construction of a highway in Israel in 2005.
What’s he looking at? Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon looks through a pair of binoculars with the lens cap still on.
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Full article and photos: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,657880,00.html
