Top 10 Photos of 2008

1. Campaign Reflections

The long hard-fought Presidential campaigns were marked by vast stretches of downtime, like this moment of respite enjoyed by Cindy McCain in a hotel room in Dallas, Texas. As her husband John worked on a speech, TIME photographer Christopher Morris grabbed this shot of her enjoying a glass of white wine.

2. The Phelps Surge

At the Summer Olympics in Beijing, U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps held the spotlight, as he pursued a record for gold medals at the Games. On Day 8, he hit the water in search of his seventh win, in the 100M Butterfly. Trailing Serbian Milorad Cavic for most of the race, Phelps (left) caught up with him in the last few meters, miraculously beating him to the wall by .01 second.

3. The Children of Zion

In April, Texas authorities raided the The Yearning for Zion Ranch, home to several hundred members of a breakaway group of polygamist Mormons, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The state, which had received a "tip" that suggested that some of the children living on the compound were the victims of sexual abuse, proceeded to remove hundreds of kids from the Ranch. In June, photographer Stephanie Sinclair was given a rare opportunity to document the daily lives of the sect. In this frame, Teresa Jeffs, 16, a daughter of FLDS founder Warren Jeffs, shows off some of her best trampoline moves in a house they had moved into in New Braunfels, Texas, while the courts sorted through the complex legal issues presented by the case.

4. Line in the Sand

After years of discussion, construction of the $1.2 billion fence on the border of the U.S. and Mexico began in earnest. Engineers projected that 650 miiles of the wall, about one-third the length of the entire border, would be completed by the end of 2008. This section, watched over by agents of the U.S. Border Patrol stretches across the desert near San Luis, Arizona.

5. Washed Away

Iowa was ravaged by floods in June. The rising waters carried these boat houses downstream until they collided with a railroad bridge in Cedar Rapids.

6. Pancaked

Earthquakes in China's Sichuan Province claimed the lives of more than 87,000 people. For several days, emergency workers labored to find survivors in the rubble. This team of rescuers carried a wounded man out of a collapsed building in Mianyang.

7. Untended

Ethnic and nationalist tensions boiled over in South Ossetia in August, as Russia and Georgia fought for control of the separatist enclave. These coffins, containing the bodies of Georgian soldiers killed in the fighting, remained unburied for five days. When TIME photographer Yuri Kozyrev asked a local official why the coffins had not been interred, he was told that no digging equipment was available. Later in the day, he watched backhoes destroy homes that he was told belonged to ethnic Georgians.

8. Masked Man

Fighting returned to the Democratic Republic of Congo in the fall. Rebels battled government soldiers, above, all across the eastern portion of the country, forcing the relocation of tens of thousands of civilians.

9. Handshake

The United States and Iraq negotiated a new security agreement that foresees the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. In September, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, center, met with reporters at Camp Victory in Baghdad, while a sandstorm swept across the city.

10. Mother and Child

Siamoy, an Afghan woman from remote Badakhshan province in Afghanistan, feeds her one-month old baby. The remote, mountain region has the highest maternity mortality rate in the world.