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December 18, 2009 |
The decade in news photographs
Call it what you will, "the noughties", "the two-thousands" or something else, the first decade of the 21st century (2000-2009) is now over. Looking back on the past ten years through news photographs, it becomes clear that it was a dramatic, often brutal decade. Natural disasters, terrorist attacks and wars were by far the most dominant theme. Ten years ago, Bill Clinton was ending his final term in office, very few had ever heard of Osama bin Laden, the Taliban ruled Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein still ruled Iraq - all that and much more has changed in the intervening time. It's really an impossible task to sum up ten years in a handful of photographs, but below is my best attempt at a look back at the last decade - feel free to let me know what I missed in the comments below. (50 photos total)

In the 22 April 2000 file photo, six-year-old Elian Gonzalez screams while holding on to Donato Dalrymple, the man who saved him at sea in November of 1999, while federal agents rush to take custody of the boy in his Miami relative's home in the Little Havana district of Miami, FL, 22 April, 2000 in an early morning raid on the house. The US Supreme Court ruled 28 June 2000 that it had rejected an asylum hearing for the boy, clearing the way for his return home to Cuba later 28 June. (AL DIAZ/AFP/Getty Images) #

Air France Concorde flight 4590 takes off with fire trailing from its engine on the left wing from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, in this July 25, 2000 file photo. The plane crashed shortly after take-off, killing all the 109 people aboard and four others on the ground. (AP Photo/Toshihiko Sato, File) JAPAN OUT #

Broward County canvassing board member Judge Robert Rosenberg looks over a questionable ballot, 25 November 2000, at the Broward County Courthouse in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The Broward County canvassing board continues a manual recount of votes to make the 26 November deadline as mandated by the Florida State Supreme Court to accept hand-counted ballots for certification. (RHONA WISE/AFP/Getty Images) #

Osama bin Laden is seen at an undisclosed location in this Al-Jazeera television image broadcast in this Oct. 7, 2001 file photo. Bin Laden praised God for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and swore America "will never dream of security" until "the infidel's armies leave the land of Muhammad," in a videotaped statement aired after the strike launched Sunday by the U.S. and Britain in Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Al Jazeera, File) #

A young Afghan woman shows her face in public for the first time after 5 years of Taliban Sharia law as she waits at a food distribution center in central Kabul November 14, 2001. Under its strict interpretation of Islam, the Taliban ordered all women hidden behind head-to-toe burqas. (REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis) #

US President George W. Bush meets pilots and crew members of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln as they return to the US after being deployed in the Gulf region 01 May 2003. President Bush landed on the aircraft carrier which is scheduled to dock in San Diego 02 May. Bush in a speech to be delivered from the ship is expected to tout Saddam Hussein's ouster as "a crucial advance" in the war on terrorism but warned "difficult work" lies ahead in that campaign and in Iraq. (HECTOR MATA/AFP/Getty Images) #

An Iraqi prisoner of war comforts his 4-year-old son at a regroupment center for POWs of the 101st Airborne Division near An Najaf, Iraq in this March 31, 2003 file photo. The man was seized in An Najaf with his son and the U.S. military did not want to separate father and son. (AP Photo/Jean-Marc Bouju, File) #

A Russian police officer carries a released baby from the school seized by heavily armed masked men and women in the town of Beslan in the province of North Ossetia near Chechnya, September 2, 2004. An armed gang, holding hundreds of people hostage in a Russian school, on Thursday freed four infants and at least two women. By the end of the crisis, over 385 people were killed including 31 hostage takers and 186 children. (REUTERS/Viktor Korotayev) #

Bodies of victims are evacuated after a train exploded near the Atocha train station in Madrid 11 March 2004. At least 131 people were killed and some 400 injured early 11 March 2004 in near-simultaneous explosions on three trains in Madrid at the height of morning commuter traffic, the Spanish interior ministry said. In what appeared to be a deliberate attack staged only 72 hours ahead of Spanish general elections, the blasts went off on a long-distance high-speed carrier and two suburban trains packed with commuters. (CHRISTOPHE SIMON/AFP/Getty Images) #

This is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Starting in late 2003, astronomers pointed Hubble at a tiny, relatively empty part of our sky (only a few stars from the Milky Way visible), and created an exposure nearly 12 days long over a four-month period. The result is this amazing image, looking back through time at thousands of galaxies that range from 1 to 13 billion light-years away from Earth. Some 10,000 galaxies were observed in this tiny patch of sky (a tenth the size of the full moon) - each galaxy a home to billions of stars. (NASA/ESA/S. Beckwith - STScI, and The HUDF Team) #

On May 19th, 2005, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view as the Sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars. This Panoramic Camera mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of the rover's 489th martian day, or sol. Spirit was commanded to stay awake briefly after sending that sol's data to the Mars Odyssey orbiter just before sunset. The image is a false color composite, showing the sky similar to what a human would see, but with the colors slightly exaggerated. (NASA/JPL/Texas A&M/Cornell) #

Paul Dadge, right, helps injured tube passenger Davinia Turrell away from Edgware Road tube station in London following an explosion, during a series of bombings in London's transport system on July 7th, 2005. Four British Muslim men carried out the suicide attacks, killing 56 people. including themselves. (AP Photo/Jane Mingay) #

A would-be immigrant crawls past sunbathers after his arrival on a makeshift boat on the Gran Tarajal beach in Spain's Canary Islands May 5, 2006. Some 38 would-be immigrants arrived at the beach on a makeshift boat and some 39 were intercepted on a makeshift boat off Spain's Canary Island of Fuerteventura on their way to reach European soil from Africa. (REUTERS/Juan Medina) #

This picture taken 02 November 2007 shows a natural peatland forest next to cleared peatland which are prepared for acacia plantation in Kampar, outside Pekanbaru, Riau. Peatland which is dense, swampy forest that efficiently soaks up greenhouse gases from the world's worst polluters, when healthy. Widespread deforestation has made Indonesia, the nation hosting a major international climate change next month,become the third largest emitter of carbon in the world, the contribution coming most dramatically in the form of near-annual forest fires on islands such as Sumatra and Borneo. (AHMAD ZAMRONI/AFP/Getty Images) #

A woman takes her dead son into her arms, as she grieves for her six-year-old son, Dhiya Thamer, who was killed when their family car came under fire by unknown gunmen in Baqouba, capital of Iraq's Diyala province, 60 kilometers (35 miles) northeast of Baghdad, Iraq, in this Sept. 16, 2007 photo. The boy's ten-year old brother, Qusay, was injured in the attack as the family returned from enrolling the children in school, where Dhiya was to begin his first year. (AP Photo/Adem Hadei) #

View of the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment Tracker Outer Barrel (TOB) in the cleaning room. The CMS is one of two general-purpose LHC experiments designed to explore the physics of the Terascale, the energy region where physicists believe they will find answers to the central questions at the heart of 21st-century particle physics. (Maximilien Brice, © CERN) #

This September 10, 2008 NASA handout image received on September 12, 2008 shows a picture of Hurricane Ike downlinked by the crew of the International Space Station, flying 220 statute miles above Earth. The center of the hurricane was near 23.8 degrees north latitude and 85.3 degrees west longitude, moving 300 degrees at 7 nautical miles per hour. The sustained winds were 80 nautical miles per hour with gusts to 100 nautical miles per hour and forecast to intensify. (AFP/Getty Images) #

A Kenyan boy screams as he sees kenyan policeman with a baton approach the door of his home in the Kibera slum of Nairobi 17 January 2008. Hundreds of police who had earlier clashed with supporters of Kenya's opposition leader Raila Odinga at the entrance of the slum moved into the shantytown and did a house to house search for protestors. (WALTER ASTRADA/AFP/Getty Images) #

An indigenous woman holds her child while trying to resist the advance of Amazonas state policemen who were expelling the woman and some 200 other members of the Landless Movement from a privately-owned tract of land on the outskirts of Manaus, in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon March 11, 2008. (REUTERS/Luiz Vasconcelos-A Critica/AE) #

Internally Displaced People (IDPs) leave Kibati heading north from the city to their villages, Kibumba and Rugari, north of the provincial capital of Goma, Congo, on November 2, 2008. Several thousand people displaced in the fighting between rebels and government troops in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo began returning home Sunday as a ceasefire held, an AFP correspondent on the scene reported. (YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP/Getty Images) #

Protesters hold signs behind Richard Fuld, Chairman and Chief Executive of Lehman Brothers Holdings, as he takes his seat to testify at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the causes and effects of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, on Capitol Hill in Washington, October 6, 2008. Fuld told Congress on Monday that U.S. banking regulators knew exactly how Lehman was pricing its distressed assets and about its liquidity in the months before its collapse. (REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst) #

In this Nov. 26, 2008 file photo, a gunman identified by police as Ajmal Qasab walks at the Chatrapathi Sivaji Terminal railway station in Mumbai, India. Qasab was the only surviving terrorist of the ten attackers who carried out a series of attacks in Mumbai on November 2th, killing over 175 and injuring over 300. (AP Photo/Mumbai Mirror, Sebastian D'souza) #

A coroner examines the body of a man killed by gunmen in Medellin September 26, 2009. After a sharp fall in crime over recent years that raised hope of peace in Medellin, Colombia, the poor neighborhoods of the city are once again at war. The murder rate has more than doubled since the 2008 extradition of Medellin“s crime boss, known as Don Berna, which left a power vacuum in the local drug and extortion rackets. (REUTERS/Albeiro Lopera) #
More links and information
The '00s: Goodbye (at Last) to the Decade from Hell - Time magazine
The Noughtie List: the 2000s in Review - Curated list of lists