...a thousand words, and then some

Every February, the Netherlands-based World Press Photo organisation honours its choices as the most significant press-photography of the last 12 months. It's well worth checking out this year's winners galleries, as well as past archives going back to 1955. Some of the photos are simply breathtakingly beautiful. Others send my mind into serious contemplation on the situation of being a human being. Some so poignantly draw me into a position of empathy with the subject, they nearly have me in tears.

Here are just a few of the 2006 winners which caught my eye:

A settler resists Israeli security forces during the forced evacuation of the Amona outpost.
(Photo by Oded Balilty)

The wedding of a US marine, returned after being wounded in the war in Iraq.
(Photo by Nina Berman)

A psychiatric hospital inmate in central Africa.
(Photo by José Cendón)

An accused burglar in Mexico.
(Photo by Daniel Aguilar)

A Latvian girl collects flowers in preparation for Midsummer celebrations.
(Photo by Espen Rasmussen)

And some from the past:

1995 - A young refugee in a bus fleeing civil war in Chechnya.
(Photo by Lucian Perkins)

1980 - A starving boy and a missionary in Uganda.
(Photo by Mike Wells)

1994 - A Rwandan man tortured by the Hutu militia.
(Photo by James Nachtwey)

2003 - An Iraqi man and his son at a prisoner of war holding camp.
(Photo by Jean-Marc Bouju)

1965 - A South-Vietnamese family crossing a river to escape US bombing.
(Photo by Kyoichi Sawada)

Truly, we live in an astonishing - and sometimes terrible - world.