2021: The year's best pictures

Donald Trump lost a divisive US presidential election in November 2020. But many of his supporters refused to accept the results, and planned an assault on social media to stop the certification of President Joe Biden's election victory. On January 6, an angry mob attacked the Capitol building in Washington, the center of US democracy — an unprecedented event and a low point in American history.

The pro-Trump extremists failed to stop the peaceful transition of presidential power. Two weeks later, under strict security measures, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. took the oath of office at the age of 78. Biden is the 46th president of the United States, and the oldest person ever to take this office. He broke the record set four years earlier by Trump, who was 70 when he was elected.

Alexei Navalny returned to Moscow in January — and was promptly arrested. His return came after almost six months in Germany, where the Kremlin critic was treated for a poison attack allegedly carried out by the Russian secret service. Despite widespread protests in his support, a Russian court sentenced him to some 2 1/2 years in prison and banned his anti-corruption group.

Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party won the general election in late 2020 by a landslide. But the still-influential military seized power in February, ousted the government and detained the iconic leader and many of her supporters. This was followed by widespread protests and a violent crackdown that left hundreds dead. In December, Suu Kyi was sentenced to four years in prison.

Wherever they swarm, the sky goes dark, harvests vanish and local people are left with nothing. More than a billion locusts ate their way through several East African countries in February, leaving a trail of destruction and destroying the livelihoods of millions of small farmers. Kenya, one of the worst-affected countries, was only able to recover after using a massive amount of pesticide.

For nearly a week in March, Egypt's Suez Canal, one of the world's key waterways, was blocked by the container ship Ever Given. The impasse caused a backlog of more than 400 ships at both ends of the canal, crippling global supply lines and costing billions of dollars in lost trade. The 400-meter freighter was finally dislodged after a round-the-clock salvage operation that lasted six days.

For many, Derek Chauvin's guilty verdict brought relief: in April, the former Minneapolis police officer was sentenced to 22 1/2 years in prison for the murder of George Floyd. A year earlier, Chauvin, who is white, knelt on Floyd's neck for more than eight minutes until the 46-year-old Black man lost consciousness and died. The event sparked worldwide protests against racism and police brutality.

In April, India was hit hard by COVID's second wave. Due to the spread of the highly contagious delta variant, infections surged. Hospitals were overcrowded and overwhelmed, and medical oxygen was scarce across the country. Crematoriums in Delhi were completely overloaded, with mass cremations of COVID-19 victims continuing day and night. Cases finally began easing in June.

In early May, clashes broke out between Arab and Jewish Israelis over the imminent eviction of Palestinian families in Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. After Israel failed to respond to an ultimatum from Hamas, which rules in the Gaza Strip, the Islamist militant group fired rockets at Israel, sparking an 11-day war in which 260 Palestinians die. Thirteen die on the Israeli side.

The Spanish exclave of Ceuta, in North Africa, had never seen such an onslaught. Some 8,000 migrants and refugees managed to cross into the area from Morocco in May, clambering over a fence or swimming around it. The number of migrants attempting to get into Ceuta has grown since the EU stepped up its external border patrols. Most of the 8,000 people who made it to Ceuta have since been deported.

For decades, the Canadian government sent Indigenous children to religious boarding schools for reeducation. In May, the remains of more than 200 children were found at the site of one of these schools, and similar discoveries have been made in other areas. Amid a storm of public indignation and an outpouring of grief, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced plans for a full inquiry.

This sculpture, which depicted the faces of the G7 heads of state at the time, was dubbed Mount Recyclemore, based on legendary Mount Rushmore in the US. Activists set it up at this year's G7 summit in the English county of Cornwall in June to protest growing environmental pollution and the perceived failure of the seven leading industrial nations to do enough to curb the climate crisis.

The conflict in Ethiopia had been simmering since late 2020, but it exploded in June. Fighters from the Tigray People's Liberation Front launched an offensive, capturing the provincial capital, Mekele. In response, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed mobilized government troops. The UN has said tens of thousands of people have been killed since November 2020, and more than 2 million displaced.

The Chinese Communist Party celebrated its 100th anniversary on July 1 with plenty of pomp and ceremony. Here, students honored the party with a choir performance at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, where the student pro-democracy movement was bloodily crushed in 1989. Amid on ongoing government human rights crackdown in Hong Kong and elsewhere, space for dissent has been shrinking.

The Summer Olympics were due to take place in Tokyo in 2020, but they were postponed for a year because of COVID. In late July, they finally got underway — staged without any audiences because of the ongoing pandemic. But these ghostly games did nothing to lessen the joy of China's female synchronized swimmers, who celebrated their silver medal in truly synchronized fashion.

Germany has rarely seen such a natural disaster. After days of heavy rain in July, rivers burst their banks in western Germany and neighboring nations. The Erft River and Ahr Valley were badly hit, as water levels rapidly rose by several meters and swept everything away. More than 180 people were killed in the floods, which caused billions of euros of damage. The region will take years to recover.

These people, crammed together in a US military plane on their way to Qatar, took part in one of the biggest evacuations in history. More than 100,000 people were flown out of Afghanistan in a panic-stricken rush after the shockingly swift fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August. Countless others were forced to stay — an embarrassing and tragic finale to the 20-year US-led mission in Afghanistan.

The Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma, in the Canary Islands, was slumbering for years, but on September 19 it finally erupted. For months, it continued to spit out ash and streams of lava into nearby communities, and sparked small earthquakes. The molten rock destroyed roads, homes and even entire villages until it eventually stopped in late December.

Back in the spring, few people were expecting the SPD's candidate, Olaf Scholz, to emerge as the beaming victor in Germany's federal election. His center-left party was still 10 points behind the conservative bloc, and the Greens appeared to be in the lead. But the Social Democrats ended up taking the most seats on September 26, and Scholz was sworn in as Germany's new chancellor on December 8.

Asylum-seekers from Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries are still camped out between Poland and Belarus. To pressure the European Union, Belarus' authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko has helped thousands to get to the frontier. But the EU has refused to be coerced. The losers in this cynical game are the migrants themselves. Several have already frozen to death in freezing temperatures.

Many migrants in northern France are also becoming increasingly desperate, attempting to make the dangerous crossing to England in flimsy rubber dinghies. This year, more and more people have been rescued by authorities in the English Channel — and more people have drowned than ever before. At least 27 migrants died in the worst-ever incident in late November.

There were high expectations for this year's climate conference in Scotland. But what did it actually achieve? States pledged to rein in global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) and to curb coal use, but weren't clear about how that would be done. Proposed climate funds for developing countries were also below par. Was COP26 a success, or just a load of "hot air"?

Angela Merkel led Germany for 16 years, steering the country through a number of crises. But now her time is over, and Germany's first female chancellor has retired. During her farewell military ceremony, she made many smile with her choice of music: the German armed forces' brass band played a song by German punk legend Nina Hagen.

Much like in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic continued to dominate 2021. There have been some successes, with the world launching the biggest global vaccination campaign in human history. But the coronavirus has also caused endless suffering around the world, killing more than 5.4 million people. Will we turn a corner in 2022?