Winners

Boats rest on a pier at Ishinomaki port, in Miyagi prefecture, on 15 April, more than a month after a tsunami devastated large areas of northeastern Japan.

After security forces fired live rounds on demonstrators in Libya’s second city of Benghazi, in mid-February, anti-government protests escalated. Over the next few months, opposition to the rule of long-time dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi became a full-scale national revolt.

The Tohoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan damaged vital cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. A 20-kilometer exclusion zone was declared around the plant, and more than 80,000 people were evacuated.

A young Shiite woman stands among the dead and injured, after a bomb blast at the crowded Abu Fazal shrine in Kabul, on 6 December.

A leopard attacks a forest warden after escaping from the Mahananda Wildlife Sanctuary, in West Bengal, India.

On 22 July, Anders Behring Breivik killed 69 people on the small island of Utøya, 40 kilometers northwest of Oslo, in Norway.

Fatima al-Qaws cradles her son Zayed (18), who is suffering from the effects of tear gas after participating in a street demonstration, in Sanaa, Yemen, on 15 October.

Hosni Mubarak is wheeled into court on a bed on 7 September.

Americans experienced the fifth year of a national housing crisis. By the end of 2011, some four million families had lost their homes after they could no longer meet mortgage payments. People renting houses often found themselves in a similar situation, no longer able to afford the rent and facing eviction.

Competitors swim over a school of fish at the start of the mass swim, part of the Ironman World Championship.

BASE jumper Johannes Dagemark takes a leap off a 150-meter-high wind turbine in Skara, Sweden.

The World Swimming Championships in Shanghai, China.

A portrait of North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, decorates a building in the country’s capital Pyongyang.

More than 50 percent of Haitians are illiterate, and only 25 percent have regular access to electricity, which means that battery-operated radios are the country’s main medium.

Bolivia is home to some 36 indigenous groups. The country’s president, Evo Morales, the first indigenous Bolivian to hold that office, is leader of the Movement towards Socialism party, whose long-held goal has been the integration of indigenous communities into national life.

Jason raises his daughter Elyssa as a single parent, after his partner Julie died of Aids-related illnesses in 2010.

Inna Shevchenko (21) is a leader of Femen, a Ukrainian protest group comprising almost exclusively young women, which organizes topless demonstrations against such issues as sex tourism, the sex industry, and internet marriage brokering.

Inside an interrogation room in Ukraine.

While working in Afghanistan during 2011, Simon Norfolk had the idea of trying to photograph groups he felt might have been interesting to the 19th-century photographer John Burke, were he there today.

A model poses in front of a tailor’s stall in the center of Dakar, Senegal during the ninth edition of the Dakar Fashion Week.

Entertainers perform in restaurants in the Russian resort city of Sochi, on the eastern coast of the Black Sea.

Artworks depicting Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic of China, are experiencing a resurgence in popularity.

A female of the Pterosoma planum species.

With rhinoceros horn worth more than gold, the animals are the target of poachers. South Africa alone lost over 400 rhinos to illegal poaching in 2011. It is estimated there are only 16,000 rhinos left in the world, and the animal faces extinction.

Hunting sharks for their fins has become big business across the globe, as shark-fin soup soars in popularity among China’s growing, newly affluent middle class. Up to 73 million sharks are killed annually.

An instructor at the Kommandokorps training camp in Carolina, South Africa, demonstrates techniques of gun use.

A man climbs a high-voltage electricity tower in Chengdu, Sichuan, China.

Public executions in Iran, alleged to have the second-highest execution rate in the world after China, are usually conducted as punishment for murder or rape