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AFP / Gerard Malie

When the Berlin Wall came tumbling down

Tuesday 5 November 2019

"A brittle cold gripped the air, and the ink-black sky was dusted with stars. Unlit and pot-holed, the streets of Mitte, the heart of East Berlin, were treacherous to walk on. Ghosts seemed all around me," writes Richard Ingham of the night the Berlin Wall fell. "Blackened buildings still bore the scars of shelling in 1945. A few hundred metres away, the remains of Hitler’s bunker lay entombed in the Death Strip – the no-man’s-land of the Berlin Wall. Everything was grey and menacing, and with the leaden feel of eternity."

"Within hours, all this would change.  It was the evening of November 9 1989, and the world was about to be transformed."

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AFP Photo / Jacques Demarthon

The climate logo Rorschach test

Friday 16 January 2015

"Each year, the country that hosts the UN's conference on climate change dishes out a wad of cash on a logo. The usual request to graphic designers is to provide something cosy. Something planetary. We-are-the-worldish. Whether all the hugginess works is another matter," writes AFP science, health and environment coordinator Richard Ingham. "Take the logo unveiled this week by France, where 195 countries are supposed to seal a historic pact in December. Is it a leaf nibbled by an ant? The Eiffel Tower, melting under a scorching Sun? Or a drop of biofuel, representing a greener, cleaner future?"

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AFP / Xaume Olleros

In Hong Kong, echoes of Berlin

Thursday 2 October 2014

"There are of course plenty of reasons to say Berlin in 1989 and Hong Kong in 2014 are not comparable, yet they share intriguing similarities", writes Richard Ingham, who covered for AFP the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the handback of Hong Kong to China in 1997. "Enclaves, by the quirk of history that made them, are usually special places with a specific identity, often owing more loyalty to themselves than to the country that lays claim to them."

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