Most Beautiful Places at Night

Moulin Rouge-PARIS- FRANCE

Arc de triomphe-PARIS- FRANCE

Budapest Parliament-BUDAPEST -HUNGARY

Széchenyi Chain Bridge at Night-BUDAPEST- HUNGARY

The Colosseum at Night-ROME- ITALY

Devil's Mill in Mala Strana- PRAGUE

Eiffel Tower-PARIS- FRANCE


Times Square- NEW YORK CITY

Santiago de Cuba Sunset- CUBA

Grand Market at Night-Leuven- BELGIUM

Catedral de San Cristóbal-HAVANA- CUBA

Dreaming of the Thames-LONDON- ENGLAND

Nice Pics

Barack Obama works on the speech that we would deliver after his strong showing on Super Tuesday in February.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates shakes hands with a reporter before a television interview in Baghdad, Iraq.

A list of names of high school students who survived the massive earthquake that struck Sichuan, China in May is scanned at a stadium housing people made homeless by the tragedy.



Investor Warren Buffett checks his watch while waiting for members of the media at the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders' conference.

Pope Benedict XVI arrives for a general audience on St. Peter's Square in November.

During the BLACK ERA of Gen. Pervez Musharaf a Pakistani lawyer runs away from tear gas fired by police officers during a protest in front of the residence of the country's deposed chief justice, Iftikhar Mahmood Chaudhry.

A Georgian man cries as he holds the body of his relative after a bombardment in Gori, near South Ossetia, Georgia. Five people were killed in the attack.

His holiness the Dalai Lama prostrates himself before a statue of Buddha at his residence in Dharamsala, India.

Athletes competing in the men's road cycling event race past Tiananmen Square on the first day of the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.

Barack Obama is joined by his wife Michelle and aide Valerie Jarrett, among others, as he makes his way to a victory speech St. Paul, Minnesota. The speech would be his first after clinching his party's nomination in June.

John and Cindy McCain, joined by Florida Governor Charlie Crist (in the yellow shirt) get a tour of Everglades Safari Park in June.

A video of departing President George W. Bush plays at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Laid off from his job at Wachovia Bank in March, Gregory Gochtovtt, 40, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, decided to enlist in the National Guard. He shipped out to Iraq in December.

Congolese government forces stand guard along a road in the eastern Congo during renewed fighting in November.

A tire burns atop a truck used as a makeshift roadblock in Kisumu, Kenya, after the town had been cleared of ethnic Kikuyus by armed mobs in January.

A house is engulfed in flames as floodwaters and crashing waves inundate beach homes on Galveston Island as Hurricane Ike approaches the Texas Gulf Coast.

Boathouses borne by rising floodwaters collide with a railroad bridge in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in June.

Emergency workers carry a wounded man out of a collapsed building in Mianyang, China, after it was destroyed by an earthquake in May.

Siamoy, an Afghan woman from remote Badakhshan province in Afghanistan, feeds her one-month old baby. The remote, mountain region has the highest maternity mortality rate in the world.

iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dons 3-D glasses to watch a program about an Iranian rocket during a visit to Iran's space control center in Tehran.

Cardboard cutouts of John McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin stand near the press section of the Straight Talk Air campaign plane.

Hillary Clinton departs a campaign event in Nashua, New Hampshire.

Not to be outdone by two aides who each did a pair of pull-ups, Obama does three before stepping out to address a crowd at the University of Montana.

A young supporter of the GOP ticket arrives at a campaign event on Halloween Day dressed as vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin

Cindy McCain waits while her husband works goes over a speech in a hotel room in Dallas.

Barack Obama works the phones during a campaign stop in Providence, Rhode Island.

Obama and his wife Michelle depart the stage in Grant Park after winning the Presidential election on November 4, 2008.

New Type of Clouds

DES MOINES, Iowa – Looking out the 11th floor window of her law office, Jane Wiggins did a double take and grabbed her camera. The dark, undulating clouds hovering outside were unlike anything she'd seen before.
"It looked like Armageddon," said Wiggins, a paralegal and amateur photographer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. "The shadows of the clouds, the lights and the darks, and the greenish-yellow backdrop. They seemed to change."
They dissipated within 15 minutes, but the photo Wiggins captured in June 2006 intrigued — and stumped — a group of dedicated weather watchers who now are pushing weather authorities to create a new cloud category, something that hasn't been done since 1951.
Breaking into the cloud family would require surviving layers of skeptical international review. Still, Gavin Pretor-Pinney and his England-based Cloud Appreciation Society are determined to establish a new variety. They've given Wiggins' photo and similar pictures taken in different parts of the world to experts in England, and are discussing the subject fervently online.
"They (the clouds) were the first ones that I noted of this type and I was unsure which category to put them under," said Pretor-Pinney, author of "The Cloudspotter's Guide." "When we put pictures up online we list the category, and I wasn't sure how to categorize it."
Some scientists are skeptical. They argue that researchers who have long watched the sky haven't seen anything distinctly new for decades.
There are three main groups of clouds: cumulous, cirrus and stratus. Each has various sub-classifications built on other details of the formation.
Brant Foote, a longtime scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said the clouds photographed by Wiggins already fit into the existing cumulous classification.
But Pretor-Pinney, who never studied meteorology, believes the clouds merit their own cumulus sub-classification. He proposes they be called altocumulus undulatus asperatus. The last word — Latin for roughen or agitate — is a reference to the clouds' undulating surface.
"Not necessarily gentle or steady, but quite violent-looking, turbulent, almost twisted in its appearance," he said.
The group has compiled several photographs documenting the formations from the billowy, rolling clouds shot by Wiggins in Iowa to ones from New Zealand that were much more menacing, hanging lava-like in the sky.
Foote said it would be "very unusual" for such a formation to be recognized as a new variety of cloud.
"People have been looking at clouds for hundreds of years and the general cloud classification is well defined," Foote said. "It's not as if someone discovered a new plant in the Amazon. It's what you've seen every day. There was no atmospheric condition that caused a new kind of cloud to form."
Pretor-Pinney is working with the Royal Meteorological Society in Reading, England, to prepare his case. If that group signs off, the proposal will go to the United Nation's World Meteorological Organization in Geneva.
Society executive director Paul Hardaker said a small panel within the society is gathering evidence to review. Their efforts include talking with those who took the submitted photos to determinine when, where and amid what weather they were taken. Hardaker said meteorologists tend to be skeptical of such proposals.
"We like to believe that just about everything that can be seen has been, but you do get caught once in a while with the odd, new, interesting thing," Hardaker said. "By this stage we think it's sufficiently interesting to explore it further and we're optimistic about the information we've got."