Photographer of 'The Embrace' Wins Top Wildlife Photo Award

Photographer of 'The Embrace' Wins Top Wildlife Photo Award
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Photographer of 'The Embrace' Wins Top Wildlife Photo Award

Photographer of 'The Embrace' Wins Top Wildlife Photo Award

A unique glimpse of a rare tigress hugging a fir tree has won this year's Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. Russian photographer Sergey Gorshkov beat 49,000 entries from around the world to scoop the top prize in the prestigious contest with the image which took more than 11 months to capture with hidden cameras.

Judges said the photograph shows a 'scene like no other' and offers hope that Siberian, or Amur, tigers are making a comeback, The Metro reported.

Liina Heikkinen won the Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year title with a picture she took on holiday in Helsinki, Finland, at the age of 13 of a fox cub trying to eat a barnacle goose in a rock crevice while keeping its hungry siblings at bay.

The winners were being announced by the Duchess of Cambridge at an online awards ceremony on Tuesday night streamed from the Natural History Museum in London, where an exhibition of the images will go on display.

The grand title winners were selected from 100 of the top images submitted to the competition in categories which highlight the world's rich habitats, animal behaviors, and species. Winning images in different categories include a profile shot of a young male monkey, a rare picture of Pallas's cats taken in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and a polar bear in a circus. Photos of a biologist watching a Cordilleran flycatcher build a nest outside his window, a tiny diamondback squid in the darkness, and wasps from different species entering neighboring nests also won category prizes.

Chairwoman of the judging panel Rosamond Kidman Cox said of the overall winning image, The Embrace: "It's a scene like no other; a unique glimpse of an intimate moment deep in a magical forest. Shafts of low winter sun highlight the ancient fir tree and the coat of the huge tigress as she grips the trunk in obvious ecstasy and inhales the scent of tiger on resin, leaving her own mark as her message. It's also a story told in glorious color and texture of the comeback of the Amur tiger, a symbol of the Russian wilderness."



Trump to Release 80,000 Pages on JFK Assassination 

Newly-elected President Kennedy posed for first pictures at his White House desk, Jan. 21, 1961, before plunging into a busy round of conferences. (AP)
Newly-elected President Kennedy posed for first pictures at his White House desk, Jan. 21, 1961, before plunging into a busy round of conferences. (AP)
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Trump to Release 80,000 Pages on JFK Assassination 

Newly-elected President Kennedy posed for first pictures at his White House desk, Jan. 21, 1961, before plunging into a busy round of conferences. (AP)
Newly-elected President Kennedy posed for first pictures at his White House desk, Jan. 21, 1961, before plunging into a busy round of conferences. (AP)

President Donald Trump plans to release about 80,000 pages of material related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Tuesday, seeking to honor his campaign promise to provide more transparency about the shock event in Texas.

"It's a lot of stuff, and you'll make your own determination," Trump told reporters about the pages on Monday. Trump signed an order shortly after taking office in January related to the release, prompting the US Federal Bureau of Investigation to find thousands of new documents related to the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.

Kennedy's murder has been attributed to a sole gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. The Justice Department and other federal government bodies reaffirmed that conclusion in the intervening decades. But polls show many Americans believe his death was a result of a conspiracy.

Experts doubt the new trove of information will change the underlying facts of the case, that Lee Harvey Oswald opened fire at Kennedy from a window at a schoolbook deposit warehouse as the presidential motorcade passed by on a Dallas highway.

"People expecting big things are almost certain to be disappointed," said Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, who authored a book about the assassination.

He said some of the pages could simply be the release of previously published material that had a few words redacted.

Trump has also promised to release documents on the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy, both of whom were killed in 1968.

Trump has allowed more time to come up with a plan for those releases.

Trump's secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of Robert Kennedy and nephew of John F. Kennedy, has said he believes the Central Intelligence Agency was involved in his uncle's death, an allegation the agency has described as baseless.

Kennedy Jr. has also said he believes his father was killed by multiple gunmen, an assertion that contradicted official accounts.

One revelation the documents could contain is that the CIA was more aware of Oswald than it has previously disclosed. Questions have remained about what the CIA knew about Oswald's visits to Mexico City six weeks before the assassination. During that trip, Oswald visited the Soviet embassy.

"People have been waiting for decades for this," Trump said. "It's going to be very interesting."