From Around The World

Gigantic whale

A 4.2 metre great white shark leaps from the sea at the appropriately named Dangerous Reef off the northeast coast of Australia, 15 December 2004. A pair of great white sharks killed a teenage boy at crowded West Beach in Adelaide, 16 December, as his horrified friends looked on, in Australia's second fatal shark attack in five days

Pollution

Picture taken in 2003 of the Eiffel Tower in Paris seen through a haze of polllution.

Maldivian National Security Service personnel attempt to clear the carcass of a blue whale which washed ashore at the Full Moon Resort. The whale added to the huge problem of cleaning up the pristine Maldivian beaches after the tsunami destruction

Mount Erebus : This handout picture from the US Coast Guard shows lenticular clouds hovering over Mount Erebus volcano in McMurdo Sound where massive icebergs from the Ross Ice Shelf are clogging the sea

FILE PHOTO** Researchers, shown in this June 26, 2001 aerial photo from the Center for Coastal Studies, attempt to inject a North Atlantic right whale with a sedative in an unsuccessful effort to remove a commercial fishing line from the whale's jaw. Scientists have received reports of two rare Atlantic right whales, their heads and fins entangled in lines, off the North Carolina coast.

Smallest baby

In this photo released by the Loyola University Health System, Rumaisa Rahman, is seen next to a hand a few weeks after she was born at the Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Ill. Rumaisa, whose parents came from Hyderabad, India, weighed 8.6 ounces (243.80 grams) when she was delivered Sept. 19. She is believed to be the smallest baby in the world ever to survive.

Winter

Traffic on I-65 southbound between Henryville, Ind., and Sellersburg in southern Indiana was at a complete standstill Thursday morning, Dec. 23, 2004. Some motorists tried, in vain, to navigate the median into the northbound lanes, but many got stuck. Ice on hills that would not allow semi trucks to make the grade, shut down the interstate in both directions. Indiana State Police reported molre than 100 stranded vehicles between Indianapolis and Louisville, Ky.

Pike, a 22-year-old polar bear, digs into a Christmas present at the San Francisco Zoo in San Francisco on Friday, Dec. 24, 2004.

Zahi Hawass, the head of the Egyptian Supreme Council for Antiquities, left, exposes Wednesday, Jan. 5, 2005 in Luxor, Egypt, the 3,300-year-old mummy of the ancient King Tutankhamun to X-ray to assess the need for restoration and also to attempt to discover the cause of the early death of Tutankhamun, who ruled for nine years before dying at age 17. A team of egyptian archaeologists performed the X-ray using a German CT scan machine donated by Siemens and National Geographic

Costumed ultralight pilot Richard va Heuvelen leads a group of six juvenile whooping cranes Sunday, Dec. 12, 2004, above Crystal River, Fla., to the Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge on the final leg of their southern migration from the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin. The trip took 64 days and covered 1,200 miles.