World News in Pictures

[Mr Lick]

The first complete views of the legendary wreck: As the starboard profile shows, the Titanic buckled as it plowed nose-first into the seabed, leaving the forward hull buried deep in mud—obscuring, possibly forever, the mortal wounds inflicted by the iceberg.









Aft grand staircase dome: Decorated like the forward grand staircase dome featured in the movie Titanic, the aft grand staircase led down to the deluxe a la carte restaurant, allowing patrons to arrive in style



Davit pile: Titanic's lifeboats were hoisted overboard by davits, or small cranes. Most were ranked off the deck by flailing funnel cables. These two were entangled by ropes left dangling after a boat was launched

[Mr Lick]

Two visitors look at a model of the U.S. Capitol in the miniature park 'Miniwelt' in Lichtenstein, Germany on March 30

[Mr Lick]

Tibetan exiles offer prayers near the coffin containing the body of 27-year-old Jamphel Yeshi, wrapped in a Tibetan flag, inside the Tsuglakhang temple, in Dharmsala on March 30.

[Mr Lick]

Polar bear cub Anori cuddles with his mother Vilma at the zoo in Wuppertal, Germany, on March 29. Anori was born on Jan. 4 and has stayed in a closed enclosure with his mother for the past two months. He is the half-brother of Knut, who died in 2011.



A male Sumatran orangutan dad gets a kiss from his cub inside their enclosure at a city zoo in Moscow on March 30.

[Mr Lick]

A worker cleans a shop stormed by demonstrators following clashes between police and protesters after a general strike in Barcelona, Spain, on March 30. The Spanish government prepared to approve on Friday a new austerity budget that hundreds of thousands protested against this week in sometimes violent demonstrations.




A man leaves a bank stormed by demonstrators following clashes between police and protesters after a general strike in Barcelona, Spain, on March 30. The Spanish government prepared to approve on Friday a new austerity budget that hundreds of thousands protested against this week in sometimes violent demonstrations.

[Mr Lick]

Marijuana growers get store in D.C.

A company that candidly caters to medical marijuana growers is opening up its first outlet on the East Coast. The opening of the weGrow store on Mar. 30 in Washington coincides with the first concrete step in implementing a city law allowing residents with certain medical conditions to purchase pot.




Workers puts on the finishing touches to WeGrow store in northeast Washington, Thursday, March 29, 2012, in preparation for its Friday opening. A company dubbed the "Walmart of Weed" is putting down roots in America's capital city, sprouting further debate on marijuana _ medical or otherwise. Just a few miles from the White House and federal buildings, a company that candidly caters to medical marijuana growers is opening up its first outlet on the East Coast.






WeGrow franchisee Alex Wong, left, and WeGrow founder Dhar Mann, right pose inside the WeGrow store in northeast Washington, Thursday, March 29, 2012, as they prepare for its Friday opening



Potting soil is displayed at the WeGrow store in northeast Washington, Thursday, March 29, 2012. A company dubbed the "Walmart of Weed" is putting down roots in America's capital city, sprouting further debate on marijuana _ medical or otherwise

[Mr Lick]

Hitler parents' tombstone removed

The tombstone marking the grave of Adolf Hitler's parents was removed from an Austrian cemetery the week of Mar. 26 to deter neo-Nazi commemorations of the German dictator.







This undated file photo shows the grave of Alois and Klara Hitler, the parents of German Nazi Dictator Adolf Hitler, in Leonding near Linz, Austria. Leonding Mayor Walter Brunner says Friday, March 30, 2012, that the tombstone marking the grave will be removed. Brunner says the decision was made by a relative of the family who says she does not want the grave to continue serving as a neo-Nazi pilgrimage site

[Mr Lick]

London, England: Bolton Wanderers footballer Fabrice Muamba poses for a photograph in the London Chest Hospital. The photograph, released by members of Muamba's family on Twitter, shows Muamba on the mend



Cairo, Egypt: Protesters try to dismantle a concrete barrier. Reports state that the barricade, made of cement blocks, was erected by security forces along Qasr el-Eini street in central Cairo in November following bloody clashes with protesters in the area. People are trying to dismantle the barricade to allow traffic back in the street

[Mr Lick]

Myanmar, Burma: Supporters of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, shout slogans atop a lorry during an election campaign for the byelections near the village of Wah Thin Kha

[Mr Lick]

Seville, Spain: Young girls wear the traditional black 'mantillas' during a children procession at Our Lady of the Rosary school ahead the Holy Week



Allahabad, India: A Hindu devotee offers prayers during a dip in the River Ganges amid the Hindu festival of Navratri.



Jakarta, Indonesia: A policeman fires teargas at protesters during a rally against government plans to hike fuel prices



Canape Vert, Haiti: A couple stands near the scene where at least six people of two families were killed during a landslide accident in a Petion-Ville slum

[Mr Lick]

An anti-government protester runs for cover after throwing a molotov cocktail at a riot-police armoured vehicle during an anti-government protest in the village of Sitra south of Manama, March 30, 2012.



Egyptians try to dismantle a concrete barrier at the Qasr al-Aini Street in downtown Cairo March 30, 2012



U.S. President Barack Obama smiles while at Southern Maine Community College in Maine, March 30, 2012



Members of parliament from the ruling AK Party (AKP) and Republican People's Party (CHP) scuffle during a debate at the parliament in Ankara, March 30, 2012.

[Mr Lick]

An Israeli border police officer kicks a Palestinian protester during clashes on Land Day after Friday prayers outside Damascus Gate in Jerusalem's Old City March 30, 2012.



A Palestinian protester uses a sling to hurl stones at Israeli security officers during clashes at a demonstration marking Land Day, at Qalandiya checkpoint, near the West Bank city of Ramallah March 30, 2012.

[Mr Lick]

The Azamara Quest cruise ship arrives at Keelung Port in northern Taiwan in this March 28, 2010 file photograph. The luxury liner, carrying 590 passengers and 411 crew members, caught fire enroute after leaving Manila on March 29, 2012 to the Malaysian city of Sandakan

[Mr Lick]

Yemenis gather around a damaged vehicle purported to belong to an American teacher shot by gunmen in Taiz, Yemen, Sunday, March 18, 2012. Two gunmen on a motorcycle shot dead early Sunday an American teacher working at a language institute in a central Yemeni city, the region's provincial governor said









This undated photo provided by James Shrum shows Joel Shrum. Joel Shrum, an American man shot to death in Yemen, went there in 2009 to learn Arabic, not to proselytize, his parents said Monday, March 19, 2012. The parents of 29-year-old Joel Shrum rejected the idea, circulating in Yemen, that he was there as a Christian missionary. They said Yemen was the latest chapter in Shrum's life of seeking to help others out of poverty and build bridges between cultures

[Mr Lick]

Children wearing hoods as penitents take part in a procession at a school during the eve of Holy Week in the Andalusian capital of Seville, southern Spain. Hundreds of processions take place around the clock in Spain during Holy Week, drawing thousands of visitors.



A large tree crushes a parked car outside an apartment building early in Portland, Ore. The National Weather Service says heavy rains have filled many streams and rivers in western Oregon and much of the area is under a flood warning or watch

[Mr Lick]

Emergency workers at the scene of a fatal landslide that involved a bus and a car between Martina and Vinadi, Switzerland. Swiss police reports that a bus and a car were badly damaged in the accident in which the bus driver died.



A model presents a creation by Chinese label Eve's Temptation Lingerie collection 2012 during the China Fashion Week in Beijing, China.

Name the day baby!

[OhOh]

Vehicles move on the long-span Aizhai suspension bridge in Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, central China's Hunan Province, March 31, 2012. Aizhai suspension bridge, with a main span of 1,176 meters and a maximum height of 330 meters, was open to traffic on Saturday. Spanning over the Dehang canyon, the bridge was built as part of the expressway from southwest China's Chongqing Municipality to Changsha city in Hunan. Its completion would greatly improve the transportation between the two cities, according to authorities

[OhOh]

China successfully sends a French-made communication satellite "APSTAR-VII" into orbit with its Long March-3B carrier rocket from southwest Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China's Sichuan Province, March 31, 2012

[OhOh]

With the participation of crowds of Syrians in addition to representatives of Syrian, Palestinian, Arab and international sides, the activities of the Global March to al-Quds started on Friday in Damascus.



The Syrian Arab Committee for Supporting the Palestinian People and Resisting the Zionist Project and the Syrian-Palestinian Preparatory Committee for Global March to al-Quds organized on Friday an oratorical festival on occasion of the 36th anniversary of Land Day at Dar al-Baath in Damascus.

[OhOh]

Chinese President Hu Jintao said at the BRICS Leaders meeting that practical cooperation is an important pillar of BRICS cooperation. This has been proved true at the just-ended meeting as the financial cooperation results have become the most prominent for all the results achieved by the member countries in Delhi this time.

With witnessing by leaders of the BRICS countries, the leaders of state banks of BRICS countries signed a master agreement on extending credit facilities in the local currencies of the five countries and a BRICS multilateral letter of credit confirmation facility agreement

[OhOh]

Support for the war in Afghanistan has fallen to an all-time low with the majority of Americans saying the U.S. should withdraw all of its troops from Afghanistan before the 2014 deadline set by the Obama administration, according to a new poll.

The CNN/ORC International survey released Friday indicated only 25% of Americans favored the war in the Asian country. A majority of Republicans voiced opposition to it, for the first time since the war began in 2001.

[Mr Lick]

The 10 best April fools




Alaska’s volcano, 1974
In Sitka, Alaska, the volcano Mount Edgecumbe had been dormant for around 9,000 years when, one morning in 1974, residents noticed dark smoke spooling from its top. Round up the children! Call the authorities! When a coastguard helicopter flew in to investigate, the pilot saw that 100 tyres had been doused in cooking fuel and set alight in the volcano’s crater. Meanwhile, around the rim, someone had spraypainted “April Fool” in 50ft letters. It was the careful work of a local joker, Oliver Bickar, who’d been planning the prank for four years



The spaghetti harvest, 1957
“The biggest hoax any reputable news establishment ever pulled,” CNN later said of this celebrated stunt on the BBC’s Panorama. In a Richard Dimbleby-narrated short, around 8m viewers were told of Swiss farmers struggling to cope with “an exceptionally heavy spaghetti crop”. Pickers were filmed taking spaghetti strands from plants while Dimbleby soberly explained that “after picking, the spaghetti is laid out to dry in the warm Alpine air”. Among those fooled were then-director of the BBC, Ian Jacobs, who admitted having to look up “spaghetti” in his encyclopedia



Peta’s fish pills, 2001
When, in 2001, a competitive fishing competition was scheduled for 1 April on Lake Palestine in Texas, animal rights group Peta decided to have some fun. The organisation promised to disrupt the event by dissolving sleeping pills into the 40bn-gallon lake, thus knocking out all the fish for the day and sparing them the anglers’ hooks… Local newspapers took the threat seriously (complaining of “borderline terroristic methods”) and Texan officials followed suit. Park rangers were soon in position around the lake to intercept any Peta members carrying armfuls of tranquiliser tablets

[Mr Lick]

Branson’s UFO, 1989
The casual but enormous risk taken with this 1989 prank merits its inclusion. In a publicity-stunt-cum-April-Fool-joke, Richard Branson flew across London in a hot-air balloon made to look like an alien spacecraft. The plan had been to land in Hyde Park, where everyone would chuckle and run off to buy tickets on Branson’s new airline, Virgin Galactic. But wind blew Branson off course and he ended up floating to Surrey over the M25. Police later confirmed they’d received calls from emergency roadside phones, motorists having halted their speeding cars, convinced they’d seen a UFO



Edison’s food creator, 1878
American newspaper The Daily Graphic published, in 1878, news of a technological breakthrough: Thomas Edison had invented “the Food Creator... a machine that will feed the human race!”. How, exactly, was unclear, but it would be able to manufacture meat, vegetables, wine and biscuits using only air, water and “common earth”. A final paragraph in the April article revealed that “the Food Creator” did not in fact exist; but not every reader got that far, and Thomas Edison received “a flood of letters from all parts of the country”, as he wrote to tell the Graphic’s editor. “Very ingenious,” he said



Freewheelz, 2000
In an article for American Esquire magazine, journalist Ted Fishman wrote about a company called Freewheelz who planned to offer members of the public a free Nissan Maxima if they would agree to it being covered with colourful adverts. “The revolution will get rolling in full on 1 April,” teased Fishman, who’d paid £40 for the domain name freewheelz.com as part of the wheeze. Meanwhile, a genuine start-up company called Freecar had been planning to launch just such a business, and its CEO (who later confessed he had wept when he read the article) paid the Esquire writer £15,000 for the domain name



Chinese liar’s day, 1993
The relaxation of press strictures in China by Chairman Deng Xiaoping in the early 1990s encouraged young editors like the China Youth Daily’s Yang Lang to have some fun on 1 April. In 1993 Lang ran several joke news stories in the Daily including one about a government plan to relax the one-child-per-family limit. It was a sensitive subject to lampoon, and according to prank aficionado Alex Boese (curator of a website called the Museum of Hoaxes and author of a 2004 book of the same name), the stunt was fiercely condemned. “Put plainly,” an editorial in the Guangming Daily warned, “April Fool’s Day is liar’s day.”

[Mr Lick]

Left-handed burger, 1998
Big-corporation pranks tend to range from the pointlessly timid (Starbucks were to introduce a new miniature cup size!) to the lazily implausible (Air France would fly to Jupiter!). Burger King’s 1998 unveiling of a “left-handed Whopper” – a normal burger, with “the condiments rotated 180 degrees” – was at the wimpier end of the scale. Still it fooled thousands in the US and UK with left-handers going out of their way to order one, and righties making it clear they’d prefer the original version. “Everyone knows that it takes two hands to hold a Whopper!” said a Burger King spokesperson later, ruining the fun by getting aggressively on-message



Lung-powered flight, 1934
A hoax is only as impressive as those it tricks, and there can be no better dupe than the fact-proud New York Times. The newspaper was the most prominent of several to pick up a 1934 spoof story from German publication Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, purporting to show a test pilot successfully using a device that enabled personal flight. Powered by lung power, it featured two rotor-blades attached to the man’s chest, and skis for landing. Rival publication Time was gleeful that the Times had been caught out. “The most amazing news pictures of the decade appeared last week…” began a crowing follow-up piece



Nat Tate, 1998
To publicise a new biography, Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960, the author William Boyd and a small band of conspirators arranged a launch party at a Manhattan gallery on 1 April 1998. Guests listened to David Bowie read extracts and made appreciative noises about the entirely forgotten Tate, whose reputation the book might yet revive… Tate, in fact, didn’t exist. The book was a mock-biography, and a journalist in on the joke had been circulating at the party, asking leading questions and getting New York’s cultural elite to feign knowledge of the artist. Boyd later sold a sketch he’d made under the guise of Tate, raising £7,250 for charity

[Mr Lick]

An electron microscope photograph shows a nano-scale F1 racing car model created by a newly developed 3D printing technique for nano structures, made available to Reuters March 29, 2012. Researchers from the Vienna University of Technology have set a new world speed record for creating 3D nano objects. The University team creates their grain of sand-size structures in just four minutes, a fraction of the time that other items have previously been printed. Making complex large 3D structures in the past would take hours or even days but with the newly developed 3D laser printer, the scientists can speed that up by a factor of 500 or in some cases 1,000 times. The process called "two-photon lithography" involves using a focused laser beam to harden liquid resin in order to create micro objects of solid polymer. The scientists said the technique could be developed to make small biomedical parts to be used by doctors.