Jupiter and Venus with the crescent Moon, seen from the Mount Wilson Observatory in the San Gabriel Mountains above the Los Angeles Basin, November 30, 2008. Photo by Dave Jurasevich, superintendent of the Mount Wilson Observatory. © David M. Jurasevich. Read more about the photo here.

A view of the Macau peninsula, a popular setting for many James Bond films, and more recently for the world’s newest and largest casinos. Macau, while being only 29.2 sq km in size, is considered one of the most densely populated cities on the planet, due to it’s rapidly growing population and booming casino trade. It’s also the only part of China where gambling is legalized. Across the harbor lies the Chinese city of ZhuHai.

See additional images from Macau Hits the Jackpot, photographed by Justin Guariglia, which ran in Smithsonian’s September 2008 issue, online here.

Copyright Justin Guarglia/www.guariglia.com

Three Months of Winter on the Charles River, photographed by Bremner Benedict from her Riverbend series.

“This photo was taken two days after the outbreak of war over South Ossetia in August 2008. On assignment for Newsweek, I arrived August 9, the day after the Russians shelled a row of apartment blocks in the strategic military town of Gori, Georgia. Some buildings were still in flames. Dazed people wandered about, stunned that war had just suddenly erupted close to home. I found the hand here, amongst other body parts. It’s a simple picture, really: a dismembered hand lying in a plot of grass. Now that my photographs from this war have been seen by the public, this is the one photo that people keep coming back to, and perhaps not for the right reasons. Is it the confrontation with the ugly and dark side of life, at war with an aesthetic appreciation of the image? Which leads to a larger question—one that photojournalists face all the time: How does photojournalism reconcile itself to making images of aesthetic interest (beauty) in a document of historical objectivity (tragedy)?”

—Donald Weber

This image is included as part of a group show Georgia: The August War, on exhibit at the VII Photo Agency in DUMBO, Brooklyn, NY, through December 31.

Photo Copyright Donald Weber/VII Network

Paris, Texas, Aug. 31, 2008, photographed by Andrew Cutraro from an ongoing project.