GlobalPost

The Iranian capital was still in the grip of rioting as darkness fell Saturday night. Vali Asr Avenue, the city's most historic thoroughfare which traverses the city, has not seen anything like it since the 1979 Iranian Revolution

Authorities discontinued cellphone communications, blocked several websites and moved swiftly to squash pockets of resistance.

Rioters continued battling riot police on motorcycles and bassiji militias, as residents watching the violence from balconies and rooftops shouted "death to the dictator."

It's 4.30 a.m. in North Tehran's Tajrish Square and the sky is turning gray as dawn approaches.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's supporters are out in force, celebrating. Fifty cars have gathered in the middle of the square honking horns and shouting slogans. As young men set off fireworks, the president's supporters dance alongside them. Immediately, police cars with sirens flashing, and plain-clothes policemen in unmarked Kia cars holding walkie-talkies, converge on the scene to ensure the jubilation does not get out of hand.

The slight figure of Farah Ismail Eid is a far cry from the swashbuckling, murderous image of a pirate of the high seas.

The scourge of piracy along the Horn of Africa's coastline has caused shipping firms to pay millions of dollars in ransoms and has taken several lives. The mighty U.S. Navy and other major powers have deployed warships and frigates to patrol the waters of the Gulf of Aden, but still the pirates succeed in hijacking cargo ships.

Two friends drive at top speed towards Tehran, the Iranian capital, on the night of the 2009 Presidential elections. Both in their early 20s, they represent the Islamic Republic's so-called children of the revolution: Iranians under 30, an age group that makes up 70 percent of the population.

Both are fervent supporters of reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who inherited the reformist mantle from former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami and has squared up to incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the Islamic Republic's most crucial election.

The truck artists of Karachi apply a splash of color to an otherwise bleak canvas.

A Karachi-based group bent on eradicating child labor is offering school lessons outside working hours.

Sher Shah is a hard-working neighborhood — a confusing knot of cramped lanes offering up a riot of rattling power looms, puttering motors and booming furnaces. This rough suburb, with its garment factories, machine shops and scrap metal smelters far from the imposing cement skyscrapers of the city center, forms the industrial gut of Karachi.

Despite Karachi's decades-old reputation as Pakistan's most violent city, over the last year this urban economic hub has remained a haven from the bombings and violence reverberating through the rest of the country. But a flaring of ethnic clashes in recent weeks, exacerbated by a the arrival of thousands of refugees from the violence in northern Pakistan, has many worried that instability has returned to the streets of this massive port city on the shores of the Arabian Sea.

The day is closing in Jellozai and children run along the narrow dusty rows of UNICEF-stamped tents trying to squeeze a little more play time out of the dying evening. Some 43,000 people live in this refugee camp just outside of Peshawar, after fleeing violence in the tribal regions not far from here.

Beginning last summer, intensified clashes between Taliban militants and the Pakistani military — as well as U.S. drone attacks — have created chaos in the ungoverned tribal belt between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

NORTH MITROVICA, Kosovo — Displaced by conflict and stranded by bureaucratic inertia, dozens of Roma families remain on toxic land 10 years after they were relocated there by the United Nations following the Kosovo war.

The spreading global financial crisis has raised the specter of widespread upheaval in this small but strategically important mountainous former Soviet nation straddling Afghanistan's jagged northern border.

"The crisis is the start of a catastrophe," said Saifullo Ergashev, executive director of the Human Rights Center here. Tajikistan was devastated by food and energy shortages last year due to unusually cold winter conditions, and experienced severe energy and water shortages again this winter.

ISTANBUL — Ottoman fezzes and false moustaches abounded. A man dressed as the Grim Reaper waited at a tram stop.

As the masked revelers made their way down Istanbul’s most famous pedestrian thoroughfare, well-dressed diners gaped from the area’s hundreds of restaurants and taverns.

With their eccentric procession, these fancily dressed merrygoers revived a bawdy working-class carnival, known as Baklahorani, banned by the Turkish authorities during World War II.