Thursday: The day In photos

A sunrise memorial in Shanksville, Pa., honors United Airlines Flight 93.  (Gene J. Puskar / Associated Press)

French table tennis player Christophe Durand poses with his gold medal at the Beijing 2008 Paralympic Games.  (Rolf Vennenbernd / EPA)

Proteas, the national flower of South Africa, for sale on a roadside in Cape Town. Scientists estimate that climate change will reduce the plant by more than 60% by 2050.  (Nic Bothma / EPA)

Trevor Simpson, a service center manager, looks up funeral records at Frederick W. Paine Funeral Directors in London. The Kingston branch of the business has been open for 100 years; it will give tours to the public this weekend as part of Heritage Open Day, when hundreds of buildings open to the public for free.  (Peter Macdiarmid / Getty Images)

Beatles impersonators at the opening ceremony of the Beatles-Platz square in Hamburg, Germany.  (Axel Heimken / Associated Press)

The sun rises Thursday in Corpus Christi, Texas. Hurricane Ike is expected to make landfall along the Texas coast Friday.  (Eric Gay / Associated Press)

A bunker built in the 1950s for communist leaders in Budapest, Hungary, was briefly opened to the public. The unmarked bunker is some 130 feet under an apartment building and was designed to shelter 3,000 people.  (Bela Szandelszky / Associated Press)

Police officers from the central Indian state of Utter Pradesh protest after hundreds of them were dismissed from their jobs; they strip and hold alms bowls to symbolize their loss of livelihood.  (Saurabh Das / Associated Press)