View the entire collection of winning images from the 55th World Press Photo Contest. The winners were selected from over 100,000 images submitted to the contest.
Tsunami waves hit the town of Natori, in Miyagi prefecture, Japan.
On 22 July, Anders Behring Breivik killed 69 people on the small island of Utøya, 40 kilometers northwest of Oslo, in Norway.
Towards the end of January, people in Egypt staged mass protests against the rule of their own leader, President Hosni Mubarak.
Rebels battle for Ras Lanuf, an oil-refining town on the Libyan coast, on 11 March.
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 young woman in a wedding gown is grabbed by a local community officer, as she tries to commit suicide in Changchun, Jilin province, China.
A leopard attacks a forest warden after escaping from the Mahananda Wildlife Sanctuary, in West Bengal, India.