“Lens,” Public sightings of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s once and perhaps future president, have dwindled in the days since his political party was hammered in parliamentary elections on December 4. Putin’s party, United Russia, took a little over 50 percent of the vote—down from 64 percent four years ago—and even those results were marred by charges of electoral fraud and massive protests. Putin’s visage did make an appearance at this pro-United Russia rally in central Moscow, photographed by the New York Times’s James Hill. Photo by James Hill, New York Times

Tens of thousands in Moscow and other Russian cities turned out to denounce the election results—the biggest protests the country had seen since the fall of Soviet regime two decades ago. Observers noted that this time around much of the dissatisfaction came not from the poor or the intelligentsia, but from young urban professionals, and on Monday one of the country’s richest and most glamorous men, Mikhail Prokhorov, declared that he would run against Putin in the presidential election next March. Russians, said Prokhorov, had “woken up.” In this shot, security guards in Moscow are seen detaining an activist from a women’s rights group that was protesting what it said were election improprieties. Photo by Denis Sinyarkov/Reuters “Framework,” Los Angeles Times

Meanwhile, Russia’s current president, Dmitri Medvedyev, carried on with the lonely job of leadership. This awkward moment came during a Kremlin ceremony in which Medvedyev handed flags to a modern Cossack group. Photo by Mikhail Klementyev/AFP/Getty Images “Lens,” New York Times

Weeks of tough negotiations led to the fiscal pact adopted in Brussels last week. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicholas Sarkozy, seen together here while holding meetings in Paris, seemed to agree that Europe, mired in a debt crisis, had only one way to go. Photo by Ian Langsdon/EPA “Lens,” New York Times

In Brussels, Germany’s Merkel persuaded every current member of the European Union (except Britain) to endorse a new agreement calling for tighter regional oversight of government spending. Bloomberg Businessweek put the sober new face of European leadership on its cover. Photo by Martin Schoeller Bloomberg Businessweek.

For its January issue, Vanity Fair sent photographer James Nachtwey to Japan to document workers who have been cleaning up damage at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, which suffered a meltdown following last March’s massive tsunami. Nachtwey’s pictures captured the fatalistic heroism of those who labor daily in a deadly radioactive zone of exclusion. Photos by James Nachtwey. Vanity Fair

It looks like a scene from a Star Wars movie—just another battle on an ice planet—but in fact these are Mongolian tribesmen taking part in a camel race during the winter Naadam festival in Hulun Buir, north China’s Inner Mongolia region. Oddly, Hulun Buir sounds like a far, far away outpost in a Stars Wars movie. Photo from STR/AFP/Getty Images. “Lightbox,” Time

This week Newsweek reports on the end of cancer and the rise of Newt Gingrich in Republican presidential primary polls, which some might see as a break-even proposition at best. Jake Chessum’s cover photo captures the self-inflating aura of the former congressman, who has never been less than audacious. Photo by Jake Chessum. Newsweek

The New York Times paid high-concept tribute to villainy in last Sunday’s issue. Film critic A.O. Scott noted that 2011 saw the death of both Lord Voldemort, the preeminent cinematic villain of the past decade, and the death of Osama bin Laden, the decade’s great real-life bad guy. “Whether or not we are wired, as a species, to dream up boogey­men, we are habituated, as a culture, to seeking them out in shapes that conform to our collective anxieties,” wrote Scott. Meanwhile, photographer Alex Prager turned a number of Hollywood stars—including Kirsten Dunst, George Clooney, Glenn Close, and Ryan Gosling—into reasonable facsimiles of iconic movie malefactors. Brad Pitt channeled the very, very troubled lead character from the 1977 cult favorite Eraserhead. Photo by Alex Prager. New York Times Magazine

The photo scandal of the week? Those nudes of Lindsay Lohan shot by photographer Yu Tsai for Playboy. The pictures themselves—shot in the style of Tom Kelley’s famous 1949 pinup photos of Marilyn Monroe—weren’t the cause of the sturm und drang. Rather, it was the fact that they were leaked on the Internet before the magazine hit it newsstands. Chief playboy Hugh Hefner, upset at having suffered from a case of premature publication, decided to release the January/February issue early, but by then investigative journalists across the media landscape were pawing furiously at the story. FOX News reported that the hacked photos came from a file-sharing website based in Eastern Europe. The Huffington Post flashed an update noting that the offending hacker had "downloaded over two hundred files" and "reassembled them page by page." The TMZ website reported that that the photo session had taken place the weekend before the images appeared on the Internet. TMZ also disclosed that Playboy had offered Lohan a palty $750,000 to pose, presumably because she had already appeared nude in a 2008 New York magazine tribute to photographer Bert Stern’s iconic “Last Sitting” images of Marilyn. Lohan and the magazine eventually settled on a fee of $1 million, said TMZ. Photo by Yu Tsai. Playboy

Scarlett Johansson slipped out of the tabloids and into something a little more stylish this month, appearing on the cover of Interview magazine wearing a Dolce&Gabbana body suit. Johansson, recently divorced and the victim of a hacker who uploaded private nude photos of her onto the Internet, is “coming off one of those years that young actresses seem to have frequently these days, but which she had, until now, miraculously managed to avoid,” wrote Arianna Huffington, who interviewed her for the magazine. Photo by Solve Sunsbo. Interview

Sisters Elle and Dakota Fanning have grown up in front of movie cameras, and our eyes. Being photographed by Mario Sorrenti for W is a lovely rite of passage. Photos by Mario Sorrenti. W

Is there any cuter than a panda? The answer is no, so we sign off on 2011 with this picture. It shows a giant panda named Yang Guang inside a big FedEx shipping container at the Chengdu Shanghai International Airport, awaiting a flight to Scotland and a new life at the Edinburgh Zoo. Shooting through a hole in the container, the uncredited photographer captured the bear munching on bamboo branches, which is more than I got when I flew from New York to California recently. Photo from Reuters. “Lightbox,” Time