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Choosing to forget

Laurie Chen Sunday 4 April 2021

Travelling to Wuhan to cover an international probe into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, Beijing correspondent Laurie Chen found a city labouring under an unspoken divide between those who choose to remember the city’s traumatic initial outbreak, and those who choose to forget.

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  • AFP / Kazuhiro Nogi
  • AFP / Str
  • AFP / Kazuhiro Nogi
  • AFP / Str

Remembering Japan's tsunami disaster

Sara Hussein Saturday 13 March 2021

Tokyo - In March 2011, one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded struck off Japan’s northeast coast, causing a deadly tsunami that triggered a nuclear meltdown.

AFP’s Tokyo bureau mobilised quickly, and journalists have spent years reporting from the affected Tohoku region. A decade after the disaster, which left around 18,500 people dead or missing, AFP journalists returned to the area to report a series of stories ahead of the anniversary.

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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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