CORRESPONDENT

There are still a few months to go, but the sparring has already started. In December, the world's governments will get in the ring in Copenhagen to battle it out over a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty that regulates global greenhouse gas emissions. China's role in the negotiations, as the holder of the little-coveted "world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide title", is uncertain.

One of my AFP colleagues wandered into my office early in June and casually mentioned that a famous footballer called Denilson was coming to Vietnam.
 
The name was vaguely familiar to me, probably from the 1998 World Cup when I first got interested in the sport, and Denilson played for Brazil.

As Twitter evangelist -- or Twitter boor, some may say -- in the Washington office I had just sat down with another victim.

We clambered up a wet, muddy rockface on the Thai-Myanmar border, surrounded by lush green forests and sheer limestone cliffs, joking over how much this experience would cost the average backpacker.

An elderly Karen man dressed in colourful traditional cloth, his mouth stained bright red from chewing betel nut, carried my video camera in a waterproof bag as I focused on staying upright along the boggy path.

Turmoil is consuming Iran, Iraq is convulsed by a wave of violence, and Washington has just promised to send an ambassador back to its arch foe Syria.

But what was the most animated exchange in yesterday's daily White House press briefing all about?  A supposedly 'planted' question in President Barack Obama's big news conference on Tuesday.

With the World Cup taking place in Africa for the first time next year, I'm in the Nigerian capital Abuja to train football journalists - struck by their professionalism, and their occasional feelings of frustration.

These courses are aimed at improving the skills of journalists from the continent who follow the world's most popular game.

Hard as it is to believe, almost no one in Malawi knows that Madonna has recently divorced, or been linked romantically to a Brazilian model less than half her age.

They've never seen her documentary film "I Am Because We Are" about poverty in Malawi, nor seen the concerts where the country's grim AIDS statistics flash on screens while she performs.

Here, she's simply known as the only wealthy person in the world who has cared about the plight of the hundreds of thousands of AIDS orphans struggling to survive in one of the world's poorest countries.

Chet gripped my arm as he struggled to get a stable foothold in the thick sand.

"I don't like fireworks," he whispered in my ear as flashes of red, green and gold illuminated the sky over Utah beach in Normandy, France, to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings.

Gun salutes rang out and a squad of fighter jets roared past above the American war cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer. America's superstar president Barack Obama had delivered his short tribute to the D-Day heroes with gusto, while the leaders of France, Britain and Canada put in decent supporting performances in the clifftop ceremony marking 65 years since the World War II invasion.

Every fatal plane crash is a tragedy. Usually, though, there are some answers as to what causes them -- some keys that can provide closure for relatives and lessons for airlines or plane-makers, very often in the black boxes when they can be recovered.

In the case of Air France flight AF 447, which went down in the Atlantic between South America and Africa early June 1, the chances of finding those answers look very remote. The black boxes, if they survived, are at the bottom of the Atlantic at a depth of anywhere between 3,000 meters and 6,000 meters. Even though French subs on their way can dive that deep, the main problem is that the seabed there is as broken up as the Grand Canyon, and as dark as Hades.