Correspondent
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Photo courtesy of Sonja Cowan

The past we step into

Deborah Cole Tuesday 23 February 2021

Like a message in a bottle, a blog post here, by longtime Berlin correspondent Deborah Cole, reached a 97-year-old Jewish woman on the other side of the globe, in Australia. In the middle of the pandemic, they began to share their stories about keeping history alive.

 

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  • AFP / Hussein Faleh
  • AFP / Safin Hamed
  • AFP / Haidar Hamdani
  • AFP / Ahmad Al-rubaye

Baghdad: forever on the brink

Ali Choukeir Friday 12 February 2021

Iraq is a country “that lives on the magic of its people, and their mystifying capacity to survive the misery that the last 1,400 years has thrown at them,” writes Ali Choukeir, former deputy bureau chief in Baghdad, who first arrived in the country in 2017. After living side-by-side with Iraqis and covering four years of uprisings, attacks and tragedies, the place and its people have etched an indelible place in his heart.

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  • AFP/ Roberto Schmidt
  • AFP / Oli Scarff
  • AFP / Chandan Khanna
  • AFP / John Wessels

Why AFP capitalises Black in North America – but not elsewhere

Eric Wishart Tuesday 26 January 2021

Following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 and the subsequent protests against police brutality, there was widespread adoption in the US media of capitalised Black to refer to African Americans and other members of the African diaspora. That immediately raised the question of whether AFP, an international news agency based in Paris with a substantial editorial presence in North America, should do the same. Now, as Kamala Harris becomes the first woman and person of colour to hold the office of vice president, Stylebook editor Eric Wishart looks back at how the agency made its decision on the capitalisation of Black.

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AFP / Brendan Smialowski

The mittens

Brendan Smialowski, Jennie Matthew Saturday 23 January 2021

It’s the cult photo that broke the internet and launched a thousand memes. The picture of Bernie Sanders sitting cross-legged, arms folded and wearing mittens at Joe Biden’s inauguration became the most viral image of the day – a global phenomenon in a social media universe often affectionate towards the independent Senator from Vermont.   

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