Week in Photos

Ponte de Lima, Portugal. A villager gets thrown by a stampeding bull in the center of the historic riverside town of Ponte de Lima.
As part of the annual "Vacas das Cordas" celebrations, which stretch back 350 years, town residents chain a bull to the church, pour wine on it, and then release it into the streets.



Helsinki, Finland. A crucial soccer game in Finland came to what you might call a screeching halt when a wild owl flew onto the field.
Nineteen minutes into the Euro 2008 qualifier match, a northern eagle owl swooped in and roosted on one of the goals at the end of the pitch. After a minute or two, it flew to the opposing team's goal, where it continued to suspend play for another five minutes.
Fans cheered as the owl refused to budge, and officials conferred on how to unseat the winged predator.
In time, the owl took off again, flew a couple of laps around the stadium, and perched on a railing at the end of the field while Finland bested Belgium, 2-0.



London, England. While spring cleaning is a big challenge for the average person, the task is even larger for conservators at London's Natural History Museum.
How large? About 50 feet (15 meters) in this case—the size of an average male sperm whale.
The conservator seen above is sweeping ten years of dust off a sperm whale skeleton in the museum's whale room, which is now closed for cleaning and expected to reopen in July.
The sperm whale, weighing on average 40 tons, is the largest toothed whale on the planet. Whalers hunted the species almost to extinction for its spermaceti oil, blubber, and meat throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.
Herman Melville famously brought the story of a sperm-whale hunt to life in 1851 with his novel Moby Dick



Lahore, Pakistan. Hundreds gather in a canal to cool themselves as temperature in the Pakistani city soar to 109.4 degrees Fahrenheit (43 degrees Celsius).
Lahore is the country's second largest city and the capital of the Punjab Province, which is characterized by a spring monsoon followed by a very hot summer.
On June 6 thousands of activists braved the heat to gather outside the city’s provincial assembly to urge Pakistan’s President General Pervez Musharraf to resign.
The president’s recent media restrictions and his suspension of a popular supreme court judge spurred the demonstrations, according to the Associated Press.
And at least for the weather, things aren’t likely to cool down anytime soon. Forecasts predict temperatures in Lahore to rise as high as 115 degrees Fahrenheit (46 degrees Celsius) by the week’s end.



Wuhan, China. It might resemble a giant pot of bouillabaisse, but this is one fish stew that will probably make you sick to your stomach.
Fish suffocated by the hundreds this week at a fishery near Wuhan, China, after an outbreak of blue-green algae used up too much of the oxygen in the water.
Authorities believe the algae bloom was sparked by dirty rainwater released by a pumping station upriver.
On May 22 a similar pollution-driven algae outbreak in Lake Tai in China's Jiangsu Province forced local authorities to shut off drinking water routed to the lakeside city of Wuxi.
"It came out bluish-green and smelled awful," Shi Qing, a tourist boat operator at Wuxi's lakeside Turtlehead Peninsula, told the Washington Post. "The lake was covered in algae and we had to send boats out to clear it."