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Day in Photos: Aug. 13, 2010

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Mezzo soprano Kelly O'Connor prepares for her Edinburgh International Festival debu and turns some heads as she steps out at the Usher Hall in a special gown made out of International Festival program covers. O'Connor is performing the opening concert of the Festival, El Nino at the Usher Hall.

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People watch the giant flower carpet at the Grand Place in Brussels, capital of Belgium. The biennial flower carpet is made up with about 600,000 begonias.

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Meteors streak past stars in the night sky over Stonehenge in Salisbury Plain, southern England. The Perseid meteor shower is sparked every August when the Earth passes through a stream of space debris left by comet Swift-Tuttle.

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Carey Feledman, 39, (L), dressed as Shaak Ti, Andrew Feldman, 49, (C), dressed as Darth Maul, and their daughter Emily, 9, (R), as Ahsoka Tano from Waterdord, Conn. pose at the opening day of the Star Wars Celebration V in Orlando, Fla.

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Indian school boys perform Bhangra, the folk dance from the state of Punjab as they take part in full dress rehearsal for India's Independence Day celebrations and parade in Amritsar, India. India's 64th Independence Day is celebrated on Aug. 15 to commemorate its independence from British rule and its birth as a sovereign nation on that day in 1947.

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Participants attend the human dominos event during the Nadam Fair in Ordos, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. More than 10,000 people have set a new Guinness World record for human dominos in China's Inner Mongolia, toppling a record set a decade earlier in Singapore by more than several hundred.

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A Pakistani flood survivor sleeps on a hammock in a flooded area of Shah Jamal village. Water levels receded in Pakistan but survivors of record floods endured grim conditions in makeshift tent cities, as the UN appealed for $460 million in urgent foreign aid. Pakistan's government says 14 million people face direct or indirect harm from the floods. The United Nations believes 1,600 people have died in the floods, while Pakistan has confirmed 1,243 deaths.

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Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders high kick before the preseason game against the Oakland Raiders at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas.

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Canal worker Michael Heinzmann checks the brick wall of one of the oldest parts of the underground canal system of Frankfurt. The canal system needs to be checked regularly in order to be prepared for possible flooding.

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Chu Chung Shing of Prestige Crafts standing with carved mammoth tusks in Hong Kong. Not to be stumped by a ban designed to save elephants from extinction, Hong Kong's master carvers turned to a long dead species that left thousands of tons of frozen ivory in Siberian mass graves. Mammoth tusks, intricately carved to depict anything from devotional Buddhist scenes and teeming wildlife to bizarre erotic fantasies, now make up most of the ivory for sale in the city.

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A view shows Qingping Township of Mianzhu in Sichuan province after heavy rain triggered mudslides in the area. Mudslides triggered by torrential rains have left five people dead and 500 others trapped in parts of southwest China's Sichuan province.

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Fishermen drink and watch a newly married couple kiss on a bank of the Yenisei River in Divnogorsk, south of the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. Local couples traditionally visit the river bank in Divnogorsk on their wedding day.

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Pre-flight preparation goes smoothly at the at the 15th annual Wild West Balloon Festival in Cody, Wyo.

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A 102-person formation during the parachute jumping festival Euro Big Way Camp 2010 on the airfield Kruszyn in Wloclawek, Poland. Festival participants succeeded in setting a new European record for a skydiving formation. They beat the previous record by three people.

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A firefighting plane dumps water over a forest fire in Fornelos de Montes, in the northwestern Spanish region of Galicia. Two firefighters have been killed in the forest fire in northwest Spain. The blaze broke out on Thursday night in Fornelos de Montes.

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Francis Gamichon (R), who opened one of first horse thalassotherapy centers in 1989, rides a horse on the beach of Saint-Martin de Brehal. Aimed to cure injuries or as part of a training program for competition horses, the thalassotherapy center of Francis Gamichon has hosted for 17 years competition horses of the French horse show national team.

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Mike Mason takes part in a practice session of the Red Bull X-Fighters motocross championships in front of London's iconic Battersea Power Station.