Events In Pictures

Indian schoolchildren form the shape of the new symbol for the Rupee at a school in Chennai. India unveiled a symbol for its rupee currency that it hopes will become as globally recognised as signs for the dollar, the yen, the pound and the euro. Ministers made their final decision at a cabinet meeting after examining a shortlist of five designs. The winning design was inspired by the letter "R" in the Roman alphabet and "Ra" from the ancient Devanagari script used in Hindi

Eskil Ronningsbakken, 30, performs a handstand at the observation platform over Trollstigen in Norway

He also balances on a stack of chairs perched on a rock which is lodged over a 1,000m gap in Kjeragbolten, Rogaland, Norway

A female bear swam and crossed more than a kilometre of ice to get to the vessel, which was stopped and shut down in fast ice on the island of Spitsbergen in the Svalbard Archipelago, Norway. The bear showed intense curiosity as she went from stem to stern of the ship, returning to the bow to stand up against the hull itself. She

amazed onlookers from the bow as they gazed over the ship's railing in disbelief as the bear looked right into their clicking cameras.

Gao Hanjie puts the finishing touches to his homemade helicopter in Shenyang, northeast China. Gao spent two months making the 350kg, three-metre-long aircraft and will soon be looking for a suitable open space for the first test flight

Lightning strikes while a rainbow is formed in the skies over Palmdale, California

An aerial view of a storm-damaged electricity pylon near the village of Vethuizen, in the east of The Netherlands

The external fuel tank for the last scheduled space shuttle flight is transported to the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida

A resident pushes his motorcycle through a flooded street in Xianning, Hubei province, China

A boy dives into a fountain at Moscow's Manezhnaya Square

Prince Harry smiles as he stands in a RAF Fuchs vehicle during a visit to RAF Honington in Suffolk

Parishioners carry twelve flambeaus to bless the way for twelve local gods to travel to the holy Nachi Waterfall during the annual Nachi Fire Festival at the Kumano Nachi Taisha shinto shrine in Nachi-Katsuura, Wakayama Prefecture, Japan

A clown performs during a dress rehearsal for "Slava's Snowshow" in Sao Paulo, Brazil

Activists of a women's rights group wash themselves in a city fountain as they protest against the summer switch-off of publicly-supplied domestic hot water in Kiev, Ukraine, The poster in their hands reads "Wash me!"

Arnold Schwarzengger holds 'Little Al', a 20-year-old aligator, as he tours the California Exposition and State Fair in Sacramento

A Chinese farmer has received two watermelons for the price of one after harvesting a double fruit from his field in Wuhan, central China's Hubei province. 25-year-old Xiong Wei said: "It's the first time for me to see such a weird shaped watermelon."

Workers pack sweets inside a large box at the annual international Damascus Exhibition in Syria. The 112-metre-long sweet box, weighing four tons, has been registered as the largest filo dessert in the Guinness World Records