2021 in pictures: Striking photojournalism from around the world

A selection of some of the most powerful pictures taken by news agency photographers around the world this year

• BBC

Orphaned mountain gorilla, Ndakasi, lies in the arms of her caregiver, Andre Bauma, shortly before her death in September at a gorilla orphanage at Virunga – Africa’s oldest national park – in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Mr Bauma rescued Ndakasi as a two-month-old in 2007 after poachers killed her parents.

With no relatives, rangers decided it was too unsafe to let Ndakasi back out into the wild, and so raised her at the gorilla orphanage…

• 2021 in pictures…