A man overlooks the snow-covered Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, Dec. 30, 2010. Designed by architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold, the memorial consists of a 19,000 square meter (4.7 acre) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs, arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. Building began on April 1, 2003 and was finished on December 15, 2004. It was inaugurated on May 10, 2005, sixty years after the end of World War II, and opened to the public on May 12 of the same year. It is located one block south of the Brandenburg Gate, in the Friedrichstadt neighborhood.
Employees of Landmark Sign and Electric hold a cable attached to the New Year's Eve ball during a test on top of One Times Square, Thursday, Dec. 30, 2010 in New York. The ball is powered by 32,256 Philips Luxeon LEDs and covered in 2,688 Waterford Crystals.
An Environmental Protection Agency contractor examines debris at the William C. Franks Furniture store in Wayne, Mich., Thursday, Dec. 30, 2010. Utility workers were searching for a reported natural gas leak in a suburban Detroit neighborhood for more than two hours before a massive explosion at a family-owned furniture store leveled the building and left two people dead and two others injured, Consumers Energy spokeswoman Debra Dodd said. One day later, authorities in Wayne are shifting their search from sifting through rubble for survivors to seeking key answers: What caused the explosion, and could it have been prevented?
A Greek Orthodox clergyman cleans the floor of the Church during the annual cleaning ceremony at the Church of the Nativity, believed by many to be the birthplace of Jesus Christ, in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, Thursday, Dec. 30, 2010. A holiday cleaning is performed at the Church of the Nativity every year, ahead of the Greek Orthodox and Armenian Christmas celebrations, both celebrated on January 6.
Two employees walk through a clearing between two walls of snow on the tarmac at the airport in Frankfurt, central Germany,Thursday, Dec. 30, 2010.
A man holds a bear fur during New Year ritual dances in Comanesti, 186 miles north of Bucharest, Romania, Thursday Dec. 30 2010. In pre-Christian rural traditions, dancers wearing colored costumes or animal furs, toured from house to house in villages singing and dancing to ward off evil. In the current economic downturn situation in Romania, a European Union member since 2007, the tradition has moved to Romania's cities where dancers travel to perform the ritual for money.
Buffaloes sit in a dairy farm on the outskirts of Gauhati, India, Thursday, Dec. 30, 2010.
A Pakistani boy selling camel's milk looks on while standing on the roadside waiting for customers on the outskirts of Islamabad, Pakistan, Thursday, Dec. 30, 2010.