AFP journalist Laurence Benhamou explains how she struck up a nearly four-year correspondence with Barack Obama -- or just plain "Barack" to his friends. One thing led to another, including an invitation to dinner not just with the president, but with Michelle and a very special guest. Read all about it...(AFP Photo/Saul Loeb)

Sunday evening, May 6. France and the world are waiting to know whether incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy will keep his job or hand it over to Socialist challenger Francois Hollande, and tension in Agence France Presse’s central newsroom – less than two hours before the last poll closes – is running high. But not just because this is a big story. This year, AFP will do something it has never done before: send out the FLASH before the voting ends. (AFP Photo/Roland de Courson)  

"I decide to drive out far enough to see the cyclists whizz by in a single group, but stop first to fill up the tank at a petrol station. But they don't have any gasoline. Outside of Libreville, I am told repeatedly, diesel rules. 'A 4-wheel drive that runs on gas is useless,' is practically a dictum in Gabon. Good thing I’ve always got a couple of spare cans in the trunk.  As the race sets out, we go through village after village with clapboard houses topped by tin roofs held down by big branches and rocks, creating the illusion that it just rained sticks and stones." Follow AFP's Patrick Fort as he covers the Tropicale Amissa Bongo, one of Africa's premier cycling tourneys...(AFP Photo/Patrick Fort)

“It was like being thrown into a torrential river,” reporter Miwa Suzuki, working in AFP’s Tokyo bureau, said of the moments after a devastating 9.0 earthquake hit Japan on March 11, 2011.  “In order to keep my head above water I needed to swim, and I knew that I swam best in the rapids of breaking news. I was terrified inside, but no other option occurred to me other than staying in the office and bashing out snaps and urgents.” The feeling of terror came, in particular, from the knowledge that her mother and sister were in Ishinomaki, one of several seaside devastated by a terrible tsunami. A year after the worst post-war catastrophe to hit Japan, Miwa returned to her home town to write about the ghosts of those who perished. Here is her account of what it was like living and reporting on an unfolding calamity at the same time. (AFP Photo /Yasuyoshi Chiba)

“What possessed you to ask that question?  Honestly, I can’t believe that this problem interests you more than, say, world hunger.  I bet you were forced to ask that question. Pathetic.” So begins, in 2008, the relationship between Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and AFP’s newly appointed bureau chief in Caracas. Beatriz Lecumberri tells us what it was like living with Hugo. (AFP Photo/Thomas Coex)

A picture taken on May 26, 1981 shows French President-elect François Hollande, then a public servant at the "Cour des Comptes", a quasi-judicial body of the French government charged with conducting financial and legislative audits of public institutions. On May 6 Hollande was elected France's first Socialist president in nearly two decades, promising change in Europe after dealing a defeat to incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy. In the photo, Holland is seen crossing the street in front of the headquarters of Agence France Presse. (AFP Photo/Michel Clement)

A US war correspondent fired from his job for breaking a military embargo and scooping the world on the German surrender in World War II finally got an apology Friday, 67 years after the fact. The Associated Press offered the mea culpa to reporter Edward Kennedy, who defied military censors and filed a dispatch May 7, 1945 on the surrender ending the war in Europe.

To get around a tough French law banning the broadcast on any public media of election results before the closing of voting urns, people on Twitter resorted to coded language -- such as used during broadcasts from London during World War II on “Radio Londres” – to transmit exit poll figures from the first round of presidential elections on Sunday. AFP's Charles Onians explains. (AFP PHOTO/BBC)