Photos from Talita Oliveira, monkeypike, Arrigo Ceramista, ben mauzé, Natalia Juliao, laverrue, and Alexandre Schulter.

Happy Memorial Day 2011 to all our members in the US. And, of course, a good day to everyone else around the globe, even if it’s not a public holiday today where you are.

Photos from Paul Marotta, Eric Henderson Photography, thrunance’seyes, Red~Star, and Beau Gentry.

See more lines of all kinds in the Linear Love group. Photos from Zen Roxy, Cocobell, htakat, and Bulsti.

To find out more about the recent protests in Spain check out Yahoo! News.

Photos from acampadabcnfoto, CarolineBach, and Alois Glogar.

We here at Flickr are photographers just like you and we know how important it is to feel your photos are safe once you upload them to the web. Today, we wanted to give you a little info on the policies and systems in place at Flickr to take care of your photos and data.

* Multiple copies of your photos and data: When you upload a photo, Flickr creates multiple copies of it, along with any data on tags, groups or sets you specified on upload. All of that information is stored in multiple locations on multiple machines across the United States. For those of you who are interested in learning a little more about this from a technical perspective, there are a couple Flickr alums have written technical manuals in part based on their experiences here.

* If your Pro account expires nothing is deleted: If your Pro account expires or you forget to renew, don’t worry! Your photos and videos are not deleted from our servers. We continue to store your images until you decide to delete them and everything will be waiting for you if you decide to upgrade again.

*NEW* 90 day delay in erasing content after an account is deleted: We’ve now instituted a 90 day delay in deleting the content, including the photos, metadata, comments, and all the bits of an account, after it’s deleted. The data is no longer available publicly but it is kept on our servers, just in case you want to restore it. After that ‘buffer’ period, we erase it from our servers, ensuring your privacy. For more information on what happens after an account is deleted, check out this FAQ.

* You own your photos: When you upload a photo to Flickr, you retain all the rights and ownership over that photo. You can easily change the type of license you want to apply to your photo with a Creative Commons License and allow for certain uses of the image by others, but by default, your photo is set to “All Rights Reserved”. For more details, check out this recent post.

We know that Flickr is more than just photos, it’s the stories behind those photos, the fun conversations you have and the awesome people you meet. It’s a priority for us to keep Flickr a reliable place where you upload your photos and share your stories.

" … is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have." – Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

If you are carrying around a towel today in celebration of Towel Day, don’t miss the chance to take a photo and send it to the towel day – tribute to Douglas Adams group.

Photos from hufse, ☆stegodino☆, Hohlkörper, Karl Gunnarsson, ChernobylBob, and Johanna Bocher

Otherworldly scenes have been appearing from members in Iceland over the past 48 hours. The Grimsvötn Volcano began erupting at the weekend shooting plumes of ash clouds, steam and smoke up to 12 miles into the air. Explore more photos in our search results.

Photos from Sverrir Thor, Agust Gudbjornsson, NASA Goddard Photo and Video, sigurlauglinnet93 and orvaratli.

“A monster tornado nearly a mile wide killed at least 116 people in Joplin, Missouri when it tore through the heart of the small Midwestern city, ripping the roof off a hospital and destroying thousands of homes and businesses. U.S. weather officials said the tornado that hit the city of 50,000 at dinnertime on Sunday was deadliest single tornado in the country since 1953.”

For more information, see the full article on Yahoo! News.

On the ground photos from Frank Miller (knarfmo), Aaron Fuhrman, FLAG Church, and Cloven Life.

Meeting a gentle giant, getting the low-down on the hutong hype, and sleeping on a concubine’s bed…

This and more in theshanghaieye‘s set BEIJING and beyond. (2007) from which you can see some photos above.

Inspired by the Gallery Ballet curated by Dunstan. Photos from Klementin, maneeacc, and Ohabigail.