PHOTOS of the Month: October

We bring you a presentation of some of the best photos from around the world in the month gone by

A man watches the skyline of Shanghai from the Shanghai Financial Centre building.

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Pope Benedict XVI waves as he arrives to lead his weekly audience in Saint Peter's Square at the Vatican.

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A view of the street after violent clashes between Libyan interim government forces and loyalists of Muammar Gaddafi in Sirte.

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A woman walks at the new solar power plant Gemasolar the day of its inauguration in Fuentes de Andalucia, southern Spain.

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Model Kate is painted by artist Emma Hack in central London. Hack, a leading skin illustrator, is painting naked models in front of visitors to the Art London fair, camouflaging them against a wallpaper background designed by Australian interior designer, Florence Broadhurst.

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A Buddhist monk walks in a flooded street in central Bangkok. Thailand is struggling with its worst flooding in 50 years, which has affected a third of its provinces and could swamp more of its densely populated capital, Bangkok, if water flowing from the north and heavy rain cause canals to burst their banks.

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A baby gestures minutes after he was born inside the pediatric unit at hospital Escuela in Tegucigalpa. According to Honduras' health authorities, about 220,000 babies are born in Honduras each year and the cost of having a baby delivered at the public hospital is $10.

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Policemen are set ablaze on fire by a petrol bomb thrown by protesters during clashes near the Parliament building in Syntagma (Constitution) square in Athens. Clashes between rival groups of protesters broke out in front of the Greek parliament on Thursday, interrupting a rally by tens of thousands against a tough new package of austerity measures.

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Devotees of the Bang Neow Chinese Shrine stand amidst exploding firecrackers as they take part in a procession in celebration of the vegetarian festival in Phuket. The festival celebrates the local Chinese community's belief that abstinence from meat and various stimulants, during the ninth lunar month of the Chinese calendar, will help them obtain good health and peace of mind.

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A boy stands near defected soldiers, who are backing the anti-government protesters, as they take up their positions at an area of constant conflict with soldiers of Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh in Sana.

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An owner holds his dog as a priest blesses the pet at Sao Francisco de Assis Church in Sao Paulo. Pet owners bring their animals to be blessed every year on the day of Sao Francisco de Assis, Brazil's patron saint of animals.

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Orthodox Jewish man carries his daughter in one hand and a chicken in the other during the Kaparot ritual ahead of the holiday of Yom Kippur in Jerusalem's Mea Shearim neighbourhood. Kaparot is a custom connected to Yom Kippur, where white chickens are slaughtered as a symbolic gesture of atonement. The slaughtered chickens are then donated to the poor.

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A woman, who taped her eyes and mouth, protests against a privacy law in downtown Rome. Wikipedia has disabled its Italian website in protest against a privacy law drafted by Silvio Berlusconi's government which will impose new restrictions on newspapers and internet pages and curb police wiretaps.

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United States military officer CPT Padraic Heiliger from Alpha Co, 2nd Battalion 35th Infantry, Task Force Cacti lifts a boy while on patrol in a village near Combat Outpost Penich in Khas Kunar district in Kunar province, eastern Afghanistan.

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A young member of the Christian church Psalm 100 dressed as an angel holds a sign reading 'Hitmen, believe and repent' while a woman throws a bucket of water on a puddle of blood at a crime scene in Ciudad Juarez.

A group of 11 young people dressed as angels and carrying messages showed up at the crime scene where a man had been shot dead and a police officer injured.

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A girl sits in a bucket as her sister pushes it through flood waters on a street in Kandal province. Floodings have killed 207 people in Cambodia, the biggest hit by flooding in a decade while more than 100,000 hectares of rice paddies had been damaged, Cambodian National Disaster Management Committee has announced.

The CNDM said a total of 300,000 hectares of rice paddies were under water and the floodings have displaced more than 300,000 families.

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A man is framed through the window of a barbershop as he gets his hair cut in Islamabad.

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A member of the Occupy Wall Street movement shows his sign as he protests on 5th Avenue while marching through the upper east side of New York. The Occupy Wall Street movement took protests to the New York homes of super-wealthy executives as rallies against economic inequality were planned for over 50 US college campuses and in several cities around the world.

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A worker leaps over stacked sacks of paddy at a wholesale grain market in Chandigarh.

A boy looks at a plume of smoke rising from fuel trucks after they were attacked by unidentified gunmen on a highway near Shikarpur, about 39 km  from Sukkur in Pakistan's Sindh province.

Gunmen opened fire on an Afghanistan-bound convoy of NATO fuel supply trucks in the Shikarpur area of southern Sindh province and set fire to six of them, police officials said.

People walk behind a poster displaying pictures of ETA victims during the inauguration of the exhibition 'The Civil Guard, shield of democracy against terrorism' in the Andalusian capital of Seville.

The Basque separatist group ETA said that it was ending four decades of armed struggle and called for talks with the Spanish and French authorities on ending Europe's last major guerrilla conflict.

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Two men comfort each other near a collapsed building in Ercis, near the eastern Turkish city of Van.

Rescuers pulled survivors from beneath mounds of collapsed buildings and searched for the missing  after a major earthquake killed at least 264 people and wounded more than 1,000 in mainly Kurdish southeast Turkey.

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The shadow of Air Force One is cast on the Nevada Desert as it flies past a housing development project before touching down in Las Vegas.

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Participants cross a mud obstacle during the Wild Boar Dirt Run n Laaben, 50 km west of Vienna. Nearly one thousand competitors take part in the annual event, which consists of a cross country run followed by an assault course over a distance of either 10 or 20 km.

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A damaged house hangs over the surface after a landslide in Carrizal de Heredia al, north of San Jose, California.

The National Emergency Commission declared that the country was on 'yellow alert' after a tropical storm hit the country last week. More than 600 people have been forced to abandon their homes according to the NEC.

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A Palestinian boy awaits the arrival of prisoners freed from Israeli jails near the border between Rafah and Egypt in the southern Gaza Strip.

Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and hundreds of Palestinians crossed Israel's borders in opposite directions as a thousand-for-one prisoner exchange brought joy to families but did little to ease decades of conflict.

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Kate Bain from Lyon and Turnbull auctioneers poses for photographers with a framed pair of silk bloomers undergarments that once belonged to Queen Victoria, during a photocall for the auction of the Forbes Collection in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The bloomers are from a collection of over five hundred royal antiques to go on auction on November 1 in Edinburgh, from Old Battersea House which was the London home of the Forbes family, the US publishing dynasty.