The past year witnessed bloodshed in Syria and Iraq, turmoil in Egypt, anarchy in Central Africa, threats by a nuclear-armed North Korea and Chinese military posturing, but as 2013 ends a global poll finds that the country seen as representing the greatest threat to peace today is ... the United States. Not only did the U.S. top the list with an aggregate of 24 percent, but the runner-up threat country, Pakistan, was way behind at eight percent. China was third at six percent, followed by North Korea, Iran and Israel at five percent each.

Mari Saito & Antoni Slodkowski ■ Seiji Sasa hits the train station in this northern Japanese city before dawn most mornings to prowl for homeless men. He isn't a social worker. He's a recruiter. The men in Sendai Station are potential laborers that Sasa can dispatch to contractors in Japan's nuclear disaster zone for a bounty of $100 a head. "This is how labor recruiters like me come in every day," Sasa says, as he strides past men sleeping on cardboard and clutching at their coats against the early winter cold. It's also how Japan finds people willing to accept minimum wage for one of the most undesirable jobs in the industrialized world: working on the $35 billion, taxpayer-funded effort to clean up radioactive fallout across an area of northern Japan larger than Hong Kong. Almost three years ago, a massive earthquake and tsunami leveled villages across Japan's northeast coast and set off multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear plant. Today, the most ambitious radiation clean-up ever attempted is running behind schedule. The effort is being dogged by both a lack of oversight and a shortage of workers, according to a Reuters analysis of contracts and interviews with dozens of those involved.

Photographer David Tipling charts the life of a King Penguin colony. He charts one pair of adults' journey to rear their young chick. The images were captured in Right Whale Bay, South Georgia. ● One glance at these heart-warming pictures and it is clear why penguins make the perfect parents. Mothers and fathers are seen struggling to raise their offspring in the midst of harsh blizzards and freezing conditions. This colony of King Penguins were captured huddling together during a storm in Right Whale Bay, South Georgia island. ● In his new book Penguins: Close Encounters, photographer David Tipling documents a penguin parent's struggle against adversity to raise their chick. The collection of 130 photographs showcases the birds in their natural habitat. Photos of each of the world's 17 types of penguins are included in the book. The couple are pictured creating a heart shape, craning their heads over their offspring. Meanwhile another shot captures a group of young penguins huddling together to protect themselves from the icy winds. And a tiny baby seeks shelter on its parent's feet while another image shows a line of adults making the arduous march back to the sea for food. To capture the series of images Mr Tipling said he trekked to some of the most remote and beautiful locations in the world. Renowned wildlife photographer, Mr Tipling, who has worked freelance since 1992, said: 'My latest book is a visual celebration of a group of birds that have given me more pleasure to observe and photograph than any other.' (Photo: David Tiplimg/NPL/REX)

The NSA's TAO hacking unit is considered to be the intelligence agency's top secret weapon. It maintains its own covert network, infiltrates computers around the world and even intercepts shipping deliveries to plant back doors in electronics ordered by those it is targeting. ● This TAO unit is born of the Internet -- created in 1997, a time when not even 2 percent of the world's population had Internet access and no one had yet thought of Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. From the time the first TAO employees moved into offices at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, the unit was housed in a separate wing, set apart from the rest of the agency. Their task was clear from the beginning -- to work around the clock to find ways to hack into global communications traffic. To do this, the NSA needed a new kind of employee. The TAO workers authorized to access the special, secure floor on which the unit is located are for the most part considerably younger than the average NSA staff member. Their job is breaking into, manipulating and exploiting computer networks, making them hackers and civil servants in one. Many resemble geeks -- and act the part, too. The NSA's hackers have been given a government mandate for their work. During the middle part of the last decade, the special unit succeeded in gaining access to 258 targets in 89 countries -- nearly everywhere in the world. In 2010, it conducted 279 operations worldwide. Indeed, TAO specialists have directly accessed the protected networks of democratically elected leaders of countries. They infiltrated networks of European telecommunications companies and gained access to and read mails sent over Blackberry's BES email servers, which until then were believed to be securely encrypted. Achieving this last goal required a "sustained TAO operation," one document states.