The Frame

GAUHATI, India (AP) -- Raging floodwaters fed by monsoon rains have inundated more than 2,000 villages in northeast India, sweeping away homes and leaving hundreds of thousands of people marooned Friday. At least 27 people were killed, but the toll was expected to rise.

About 1 million people have had to evacuate their homes as the floods from the swollen Brahmaputra River -- one of Asia's largest -- swamped 2,084 villages across most of Assam state, officials said.

Assam's flooded capital of Gauhati was hit by mudslides that buried three people. Many of the city's 2 million residents were negotiating the submerged streets in rubber dinghies and small wooden boats. Most businesses were closed.

Officials have counted 27 people dead so far, but the toll is expected to be much higher as unconfirmed casualty reports mount. Many of the victims so far have drowned, including five people whose boat capsized amid choppy waves.

"We never thought the situation would turn this grim when the monsoon-fed rivers swelled a week ago," said Nilomoni Sen Deka, an Assam government minister.

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COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) -- Officials say dozens of homes have been destroyed by a wildfire threatening Colorado Springs, but the heat and flames remain too intense for authorities to fully assess the damage to the state's second-largest city.

Steve Cox, an aide to Mayor Steve Bach, offered the first estimate on the number of lost homes on Wednesday.

The towering blaze has forced mandatory evacuations for more than 32,000 residents, including about 2,100 people from the U.S. Air Force Academy just north of Colorado Springs.

Fire information officer Rob Dyerberg says the blaze doubled in size overnight to about 24 square miles.

Heavy smoke and ash billowed from the foothills west of the city of 419,000.

Bright yellow and orange flames flared in the night, often a signal that another home has been lost.

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MANITOU SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) -- Brutal wildfires across the West have put tourist destinations from Montana to New Mexico in danger just at the height of midsummer family road-trip season, putting cherished Western landscapes at risk along with hordes of vacationers.

In Colorado, the $5 billion tourism industry is on edge as images of smoke-choked Pikes Peak and flaming vacation cabins near Rocky Mountain National Park threaten to scare away summer tourists.

In central Utah, a wildfire in an area dotted with vacation cabins was burning an estimated 39 square miles and threatening about 300 homes. Firefighters had that blaze at 10 percent containment Monday. The Sanpete County Sheriff's office has said that as many as 30 structures may have been lost.

But even as firefighters made progress on fires threatening structures from Utah to Montana, and some evacuated residents in Colorado were allowed to return home, tourists streamed out of some of Colorado's most popular summer sights.

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Four years ago today, The Frame was born. Originally, the photo blog was created to show off the best photography from The Sacramento Bee staff as well as that of wire services. It soon became apparent that there is a tremendous thirst out there for visual storytelling from events around the world. In response, The Frame evolved into a "big picture" blog about world events.

The reaction has been overwhelming. Traffic to the blog has increased each year and comes from all points around the globe. To date, The Frame has drawn more than 10 million hits.

Over the years, the posts have covered everything from Space Shuttle missions to Holi festivals in India to the reaction to Michael Jackson's death. Posts of military personnel dispatched from Afghanistan drew a lot of response as did those of disasters such as the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Last fall, a post of before-and-after images from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan drew more than two million page views to the blog.

To all the viewers out there, Thank You for your continuing support. Please feel free to contact me with ideas or questions as The Frame heads into it's fifth year.

--Tim Reese

BOSTON (AP) -- Record-breaking heat scorched the Northeast for the second straight day Thursday, breaking records from Vermont to Delaware and sending people flocking to beaches, pools and air-conditioned museums to stay cool.

At least eight temperature records nationwide were broken, and three others were tied, the National Weather Service said. In Vermont, temperatures soared to 97 degrees in Burlington, and the air in Georgetown, Del., and at Kennedy Airport in New York registered a record-breaking 97 degrees.

But relief is on the way, according to Dave Unger, a forecaster for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He said the East Coast will get a break from a low pressure system and possible coastal storms that are expected to lower temperatures heading into the weekend.

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World Refugee Day, a day initiated by the United Nations to raise awareness on the plight of refugees worldwide, is observed on June 20 every year. This year, the theme is, "Refugees have no choice. You do."

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AZIZ KHAN GHARI, Pakistan (AP) -- Less than four months ago the world was cheered to learn that India had gone a full year with no new cases of polio -- a landmark that left only Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria on the World Health Organization's list of countries where the disease is endemic.

But the battle is far from over, judging by the WHO's latest expressions of alarm. It says that in both Nigeria and Afghanistan the number is creeping up, while budget shortfalls are jeopardizing the effort to hold polio at bay in 24 other high-risk countries.

And then, on Saturday, a militant commander in northwest Pakistan warned polio vaccination teams to stay away from the territory he controls near the Afghan border, saying he would not allow immunizations until U.S. drone attacks in the country are stopped.

The statement by Hafiz Gul Bahadur is an obstacle to efforts to beat polio on Pakistan.

The polio virus, which usually infects children in unsanitary conditions, attacks the nerves and can kill or paralyze. It can spread widely and unnoticed before it starts crippling children. On average about one in 200 cases will result in paralysis.

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MADRID (AP) -- Spain's public debt load has doubled since 2008, the central bank said Friday, as the government sought to talk calm into markets worried that the eurozone's fourth-biggest economy might need a bailout.

Spain is applying across-the-board cutbacks to slash its debt and deficits, but is having to do so at a time of recession, with unemployment near 25 percent. The austerity measures risk backfiring as they hurt the economy, depriving the government of valuable tax receipts.

They have also sparked strikes and protests, some of them violent.

Striking coal miners armed with homemade rockets and slingshots clashed with police in northern Spain on Friday, leaving seven people injured, two of them seriously, the Interior Ministry said.

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BELLVUE, Colo. (AP) -- Massive wildfires in drought-parched Colorado and New Mexico tested the resources of state and federal crews Monday and underscored the need to replenish an aging U.S. aerial firefighting fleet needed to combat a year-round fire season.

Wyoming diverted personnel and aircraft from two fires there to help with a 60-square-mile wildfire in northern Colorado. Canada also loaned two aerial bombers to fight the Colorado blaze following the recent crash of a U.S. tanker in Utah. And an elite federal firefighting crew arrived to try to begin containing a fire that destroyed at least 118 structures.

All told, about 600 firefighters will be battling the fire some 15 miles west of Fort Collins by Tuesday, said incident commander Bill Hahnenberg.

Elsewhere in New Mexico, firefighters made slow progress against the largest wildfire in state history. The blaze has charred 435 square miles of forest since it was sparked by lightning in mid-May, and was 37 percent contained Monday.

Arizona's state forestry division dispatched two water tenders and 15 fire trucks to New Mexico, which also welcomed the arrival of a DC-10 jetliner that can lay a 100-yard-wide, mile-long line of retardant or water.

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A glimpse of daily life around the world through the lenses of photographers of the Associated Press and their member newspapers.

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RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) -- One of the world's largest open-air landfills, a vast, seaside mountain of trash where thousands of people have made a living sorting through the debris by hand, was set to close last weekend after 34 years in malodorous service.

Long a symbol of ill-conceived urban planning and environmental negligence, Rio de Janeiro's Jardim Gramacho dump is being transformed into a vast facility that will harness the greenhouse gases generated by the rotting rubbish and turn them into fuel capable of heating homes and powering cars. Environmentalists had blamed Gramacho for the high levels of pollution in Rio's once pristine Guanabara Bay, where tons of run-off from the garbage had leaked.

Less clear is what will happen to the more than 1,700 people who worked at the site, scaling hills of fresh, fly- and vulture-covered trash to pluck recyclable plastic, paper and metal from the 9,000 tons of detritus once dumped there daily. Known as "catadores" in Portuguese, the trash pickers will receive a lump-sum payout from the city, but there's no place for them at Gramacho's replacement, the high-tech Seropedica dump, where most of the Marvelous City's garbage is already being sent.

"When you first get here, you're like, 'Ick, I don't know if I can do this,' but then you get used to it and you make friends and you find it's good work," said Lorival Francisco dos Santos, a 46-year-old from Brazil's impoverished northeast who spent 13 years at the landfill.

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Today, The Frame begins a monthly feature focusing on the best images from the photographers of The Sacramento Bee / sacbee.com. In the first week of each month we'll take a look back at the best images from the previous month. 

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