2009 in random pictures

Connie Kirchner kisses her cat, Buddy, after finding he had survived the 49er fire that destroyed her home in Auburn, California, Monday, Aug. 31, 2009. The 49er fire broke out Sunday, consuming 340 acres, and burned an estimated 50 homes. Kirchner and her family were forced to flee their home Sunday before they could grab Buddy. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)




Liu Huiling, a Han Chinese patient, who was injured during ethnic clashes recuperates at People's Hospital in Urumqi, western China's Xinjiang province, Wednesday, July 8, 2009. Ethnic clashes have paralyzed Urumqi over the past several days, with minority Uighur and Han Chinese mobs roaming the streets and attacking each other. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)




From left to right: Arin Safadi, a Druze woman from the Golan Heights, sets out on a one-way trip to her wedding in Syria; A teenage albino girl in a government-run school in Tanzania, being sheltered from criminals who have already killed dozens of albinos to sell their body parts for luck potions and talismans; Bajau boys, also known as "sea gypsies", paddle their boat near their homes on stilts in the Sulawesi Sea off of Malaysia.




Militiamen run in a street during a firefight against Government troops in the Somali capital of Mogadishu on March 30, 2009.




A man displays a 3-day-old green turtle hatchling before releasing it into the ocean at a turtle hatchery in Kosgoda, north of Galle, Sri Lanka on July 7, 2009. Of the world's eight turtle species, Sri Lanka is home to five. Turtle hatcheries along the coast provide a way of earning a living for the people running them and also help combat the poaching of turtle eggs. (REUTERS/Vivek Prakash)




In this photograph taken on July 7, 2009, a Sri Lankan Tamil refugee girl displaced by the conflict between military troops and Tamil Tigers looks on from a window in her tent school in a refugee camp at Cheddikulam in the northern district of Vavuniya. Sri Lanka's military restricts access to some 300,000 internally displaced people held in tightly-guarded camps where journalists are allowed in only under the supervision of the authorities. (Ishara S. KODIKARA/AFP/Getty Images)




Launch of the Ares I-X




An Afghan carpenter holds his prayer beads in front of his shop in Kabul October 19, 2009. (REUTERS/Ahmad Masood)




A man stands near the scene of an explosion in Peshawar, Pakistan on Wednesday Oct. 28, 2009. A car bomb has torn through a busy marketplace in northwestern Pakistan, collapsing several buildings, setting fires and killing at least 93 people including 60 women and children, mere hours after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in the country on an official visit. (AP Photo/Mohammad Iqbal)






On September 30th, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) added 76 new items to its "List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity", for safeguarding and preservation. The "Intangible" list is a companion to UNESCO's World Heritage list, which focuses on physical sites worldwide. Submitted jointly by member states Argentina and Uruguay, the "symbolic universe" of tango was among the traditions added to the list.






Martian landscapes. Victoria Crater at Meridiani Planum. The crater is approximately 800 meters (about half a mile) in diameter.




Smoke from fireworks surrounds the Brandenburg Gate quadriga in Berlin at the end of the official ceremony to mark the anniversary of the reunificiation of Germany, on November 9, 2009. (LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images)

Sisters displaced by war hold hands in front of a makeshift hut at Bulengo camp just outside Goma in eastern Congo, February 26, 2009. (REUTERS/Finbarr O'Reilly)