CORRESPONDENT

They say sport mirrors life, and in Iraq, that is certainly true -- take the ongoing row over the election of a new president for the Iraqi Football Association, for example.
 
If I had told you that we were covering an election in which there were two distinct camps, each with their own leader-in-waiting, who refused to reconcile their views despite pressure from international bodies, and eventually decided to postpone any decision-making rather than reconcile their differences, you'd probably have guessed that I was talking about Iraq's fractuous national politics.

Instead, I'm talking about football, which is immensely popular in Iraq.

Kandahar Airfield is a vast, sprawling maze of dust and gravel at the heart of operations against the Taliban and other assorted insurgents in southern Afghanistan.

The airport operates around the clock, as those sleeping in tents nearby are all too well aware, with a variety of aircraft ferrying people and vital supplies to and fro.

The Philippines is a great place for politicians to get rich, though not through their salaries. Even the president only gets an official income equal to about 1,300 US dollars a month. A local village mayor gets a small fraction of that.

They would have you believe that their money is generated legitimately through independent business dealings in which they have in no way abused their power. They say they would certainly not deliberately do anything illegal.

But in the Philippines, ranked by Transparency International as one of the world's most corrupt, politicians are infamous for using graft, violence and even murder to hold on to power and fatten their bank accounts.

A celebrity sex video scandal that has broken out in Indonesia is being used to revive a once-stalled debate this mainly-Muslim country about imposing controls on 'suspect' parts of the Internet.

Indonesia has been titillated and scandalised in equal measure by the appearance on the Internet of two explicit clips apparently showing a popular local rock singer having sex with two models and TV presenters.

Helen Thomas has been firing off questions at the White House longer than most of her colleagues -- and Barack Obama -- have been alive.

But a trail-blazing journalism career, which put presidents on the spot and tore down the cozy boys club of White House journalism is now done, tarnished by the 89-year-old's explosive tirade against Israel.

Thomas, a veteran of the golden age of wire service journalism, is the latest casualty of the YouTube age, when any ill-advised comment can spell instant disaster.

How does the media report on events such as the tragic mass-shooting of 12 people in the Lake District by taxi-driver Derrick Bird last week - without increasing the risk of copy-cat mass-murders?

It is a question posed many times in recent years, and for which there are, as yet, no clear-cut answers.

War reporting presented me with a new theatre of words when I came to Afghanistan for the first time last year.

Embedded with the US Marine Corps I tried to hide my rookie status in the "bang bang" arena by letting my more experienced photographer colleague David Furst do most of the early talking.

The 2010 Cannes Awards have been announced, after a 12-day film festival that critics have called a lacklustre and somewhat sombre affair.

The awards offered a few surprises. Read here how AFP's coverage unfolded:

Welcome to Cannes! British director Mike Leigh, a Palme d'Or winner in 1996, and Frenchman Xavier Beauvois are considered strong contenders for the top prize. They are up against 17 other films from around the world, largely set against backdrops of war, financial crisis and fundamentalism.