The Week in Photos: April 22-28

Spring is in bloom at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden where cherry blossoms dress a seasonal set. Kin Chan, left, and Cathy Chan from Connecticut enjoy the view. The garden is the site this weekend of the annual Cherry Blossom Festival.  (Carolyn Cole / LAT)

Aubree Reney, 4, and Pedro Espinoza, 5, model fashions from the 1950s before a musical performance at the Sunshine Early Childhood Center in Riverside, a preschool for special needs children. The performance was among the festivities celebrating the center’s 60 years in the community. Sunshine opened in 1947 with 12 pupils; today, it serves more than 250.  (Irfan Khan / LAT)

Grandfather Jacques-Yves Cousteau and father Philippe Sr. left Philippe Cousteau, 27, a formidable legacy. “We’re communicators, explorers and environmentalists,” he said during a visit to Los Angeles to promote his latest project for Animal Planet, “Spring Watch USA” in which Cousteau surfed with sea lions and swam with sea otters and gray whales to show how spring shapes up in the Pacific Ocean. Here he admires the fluid form of a sea lion at the Long Beach Aquarium.  (Damon Winter / LAT)

Nearly 3,000 people, mostly Buddhists from around the world, gathered in Yorba Linda to participate in a fiery 1,300-year-old purification ritual of the Shinnyo-en Order of Japan that organizers say has never been open to the public. During the ritual, ceremonial assistants ignited a grass-covered hearth that stood before a statue of the Buddha. Most Venerable Keishu Shinso Ito blessed prayers written on strips of paper before they were placed into the pit to be burned. The sacred fire is believed to embody the wisdom, kindness and compassion of the Buddha.  (Allen J. Schaben / LAT)

Peter Bell of Los Angeles takes an aerial approach to negotiating a rain puddle while shopping in downtown L.A.’s Fashion District. The storm dropped about half an inch of rain on the city, far short of what’s required to make up the season’s deficit of moisture.  (Mel Melcon / LAT)

A trout shows off at the Mt. Whitney State Fish Hatchery near Independence off U.S. 395. The historic facility produces 160,000 pounds of trout annually for California’s lakes and streams from Bishop to Lone Pine. The egg fertilization takes place in the main building, a 1916 granite stone structure; outside, in long concrete troughs called raceways, the trout bulk up to a catchable size--at least 12 inches long.  (Luis Sinco / LAT)

A 3-week-old orphaned kitten is fed from a small bottle at North Central Los Angeles Animal Services. Every spring city shelters euthanize about 1,000 neonatal kittens that can’t survive on their own. A foster parent bottle feeding program hopes to reduce those numbers in the hope that someone will adopt the survivors, but care is demanding. Kittens must be fed with special formula (unweaned kittens should not have cow’s milk) every two hours and kept warm on a towel-wrapped heating pad or hot water bottle. “Our foster parents are saints,” said one city official. “Or insomniacs.”  (Gina Ferazzi / LAT)

Beachgoers examine a plane that made an emergency landing on Mandalay State Beach in Oxnard after developing engine trouble. Pilot Edward Hotelling had left Camarillo Airport in his T-28 single-engine Korean War-era aircraft with a passenger to take photos of the area. Realizing he wouldn’t make it back, Hotelling headed to the Oxnard Airport, but had to land the plane, designed as a military trainer, on the beach instead. No one was injured in the emergency  (Lawrence K. Ho / LAT)

School children in Baghdad, Iraq, vie for the attention of U.S. Army Specialist Ron Kreiger from Schuylkill Haven, Pa. With the help of Iraqi police, Kreiger and his fellow soldiers delivered school supplies to some area schools. The soldiers are part of the U.S. military surge whose purpose is to help control the violence in the city.  (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

An Iraqi man listens to an interpreter with U.S. soldiers conducting house-to-house raids in Mosul, in northern Iraq. Supported by tanks and combat helicopters, U.S. troops have launched the raids in a restive neighborhood where they have come under roadside bomb attacks almost every day, military souces said.  (Mauricio Lima AFP / Getty Images)

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and his wife, Cindy, arrive at a rally in Portsmouth, N.H., to announce that he is entering the race for president.  (Stephan Savoia / AP)

Partisans for and against legislation to make abortion legal rally in Mexico City. A human rights panel puts complications from illegal abortions as the No. 3 cause of death among women in Mexico’s capital city. Despite protests from the influential Roman Catholic Church and conservative politicians, the new law makes Mexico City one of the rare areas in socially conservative Latin America where abortion is not solely the right of women who have been raped or face health risks.  (Alfredo Estrella / AFP/Getty)

Filipino inmates suffering from boils and infections congregate inside a congested jail in the suburbs of the capital city of Manila. Such congestion renders detainees more vulnerable to skin diseases, infections and heat stroke, particularly in summer. In addition to overcrowding, water is unclean and supplies usually insufficient, increasing the risk of contracting and spreading infectionsl year round, according to the National Center for Disease Prevention and Control.  (Dennis M. Sabangan / EPA)

People gather at the Australian War Memorial in London for the yearly ANZAC memorial service honoring the soldiers of Australia and New Zealand who fought in the two world wars. The service recalls the heroic campaign following the landings at ANZAC Cove in Gallipoli on April 25, 1915 in which the Allies lost 50,000 casualties in their battle with Turkish forces. The new memorial on Hyde Park Corner in central London is engraved with 24,000 names of the hometowns of Australian men and women who served in the world wars. Superimposed on the place names are 47 battle sites representing some of the major theaters of war where Australians served.  (Peter Macdiarmid / Getty Images)

A firefighter tries to extinguish burning cars following an arson attack at a central Athens police station in Greece. Several cars were torched in the incident, the latest in a wave of fire bombings by anarchist gangs in the Greek capital.  (Kostas Koutsaftikis / AP)

Palestinian militants from the Islamic Jihad movement participate in an armed exercise in Gaza City, Gaza Strip. Hamas militants fired a barrage of rockets and mortar shells toward Israel on its independence day on April 24, and said they considered it the end of a five-month truce with Israel.  (Ali Ali / EPA)