Cecil Morella, 46, is from the Philippines and has been with the AFP Manila bureau since 1984. In his spare time he climbs mountains, runs marathons and competes in other distance foot races, both on the road and on the trail. His reading fare tends toward economic history.

Chris Boian is AFP’s Moscow bureau chief. In 20 years with the agency, he has covered stories around the world. Highlights include the fall of Margaret Thatcher, the first Gulf war and the collapse of the Soviet Union. More recent efforts include Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, the succession of Vladimir Putin and the Holyfield-Ibragimov world heavyweight title fight. There was also that surreal Washington story about a stained blue dress that he would like to forget. Prior to joining AFP, he worked in Europe for The Journal of Commerce (1987-88) and the International Herald Tribune (1985-87) and in Boulder, Colorado for the Colorado Daily (1983-84) where he covered municipal politics and counterculture lifestyles. He currently lives in Moscow where he is responsible for AFP operations in Russia and 11 other countries once part of the Soviet Union.

Danny Kemp is AFP's news editor for Pakistan and Afghanistan. After several years knocking on celebrities' doors for the British press, he moved to the AFP Asia newsdesk in Hong Kong in 2004 and was posted to Islamabad later the same year. Since starting in journalism he has covered events ranging from the 2000 Paris Concorde crash, through the 2005 Kashmir earthquake to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in 2007. Highlights include watching a game of goat-carcass polo in Kabul, having tea with an 89-year-old Irish woman-turned-tribal ruler in the wilds of southwest Pakistan and going on a road trip with former Pakistan cricket legend Imran Khan. He currently lives in Islamabad with his wife, a writer, and five-year-old daughter.

Dan Martin hails from Hawaii and has remained in the Asia-Pacific region throughout his career, working as a journalist based at one time or another in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and his island home. He has covered Taiwan's transition to democracy, the Hong Kong handover and other momentous events, the latest being the Beijing Olympics for AFP.

David Brooks is AFP's correspondent for New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. He worked as a journalist in New Zealand, Britain, Australia and Singapore before joining AFP as Asia-Pacific economics editor in 2000. He also worked as an editor in general news, with occasional reporting stints in the region, before returning to his homeland New Zealand in 2004. Reporting a stable peaceful country like New Zealand is one thing and covering the Pacific islands is another. Tropical langour has been regularly puntuated by events including riots and a tsunami in the Solomon Islands, a coup in Fiji, and more riots and a coronation in Tonga.    

David Vujanovic is AFP's Belgrade-based English news editor for six Balkan countries. Born in Australia, he spent his childhood between Bougainville, PNG, and Bosnia, and was starting out in journalism as both places went to war. He joined AFP in Hong Kong around a decade later, and between the independence of Kosovo and capture of Radovan Karadzic, he has been attempting to break the record for the number of elections covered in a year.

Fanuel Jongwe is AFP’s Harare Correspondent. He lives with his extended family in Chitungwiza, the colonial dormitory town for factory workers in the Zimbabwean capital. He worked for various local newspapers before joining AFP. When he is not at work he listens to music, reads picture books with his two children or writes an occasional poem.

Frank Zeller is the AFP English Service news editor in Vietnam. Born in Japan, with his childhood spent in Germany and his youth in Australia, this culturally confused reporter has since lived and worked in Asia, Europe, and North and South America, before opting for the old world charm and communist retro-chic of Hanoi in early 2006. He is married and has a baby boy who calls him Papapa.

Ian Timberlake is AFP's news editor based in Singapore. After years as a crime reporter on newspapers in his native Canada, he quit and followed his dream to be a foreign correspondent. He began his AFP career in East Timor almost a decade ago and then spent several years covering events in Indonesia. After a year in Hong Kong he moved to his current base from where he has been fortunate to cover events throughout the region and as far afield as the Middle East.

Jennie Matthew is AFP's correspondent in Sudan. Before moving to Khartoum, she spent three years in Jerusalem and various stints in Baghdad. She joined the AFP Middle East news desk in 2003 after working for a tabloid in London and a newspaper in Cyprus, covering beauty pagents and cats being butchered in supermarkets.

London-born Jitendra Joshi, today AFP US political and foreign policy correspondent, joined the agency in 1997, in Hong Kong, after cutting his journalistic teeth with the BBC. He is a walking harbinger of doom: his arrival in Asia heralded the region's worst-ever financial crisis. A posting to Tokyo saw the prime minister die, and the Japanese economy lurch from bad to worse. His next assignment to Brussels saw the European Union split asunder by the Iraq war. He now covers US politics and foreign policy out of Washington, witnessing first-hand a potential recession that is evoking comparisons to the Great Depression. He joined the campaign trail with Hillary Clinton just as her White House hopes dimmed. He takes no responsibility for these coincidences.

Julie Clothier is AFP's bureau chief in Dhaka, Bangladesh where she spends a lot of her time stuck in the city's notoriously bad traffic jams. Originally from New Zealand, most of her professional life has been based in Asia and Europe. Despite an early exit by the All Blacks at the 2007 Rugby World Cup in France, working at the event was a career highlight. Like many Kiwis, she's happiest exploring countries other than her own, although she hears from people all over the world how beautiful New Zealand is. She intends to check it out. One day.

Karl Malakunas is AFP's news editor for China based in Beijing, thousands of kilometres from his hometown of Melbourne, Australia, where he began his journalism career as a 17-year-old copyboy for a daily newspaper in 1990. Karl continues to live his dream of being a foreign correspondent, enjoying the adventure of travel while trying to decipher and report fairly on the actions of the powerful. He has lived and worked in much of Asia for the past decade, and has also done stints in the Middle East. Meeting brave dissidents such as the "Moustache Brothers" in Myanmar (Burma) and complex characters such as Thailand's chief executioner have been career highlights.

Kevin McElderry heads AFP Asia news desk, based in Hong Kong, covering the Asia-Pacific region from Tokyo to Delhi, Sydney to Beijing. A native of Northern Ireland, he joined AFP in 1995 from the British regional press and has worked in Paris, Berlin and London as well as reporting assignments further afield. Highlights include accompanying Tony Blair to the US presidential retreat at Camp David, the death pangs of the Mobutu regime in what was then Zaire, and the case of a German cannibal who escaped a murder conviction because his victim had agreed to be eaten. Married, with two children, he tries to avoid getting hurt playing rugby, usually in vain.

Marc Burleigh is AFP’s English-language South America correspondent based in Brazil. After starting out under the bright lights of TV, he took taking up the challenges of reporting for AFP in 1997.  Since then, he has covered the explosive (the attacks in the United States, Madrid and London, and the wars in Iraq, Kosovo and Lebanon), the extraordinary (the deaths of Princess Diana, Arafat and Pope John-Paul II) and the extravagant (the Cannes film festival, Rio’s Carnival).  He spends much of his time in São Paulo, a skyscraping metropolis whose taste for sophistication is unbridled.

Michael Mainville is AFP’s correspondent in the Caucasus, covering Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Before joining the agency in early 2007, he spent five years in Russia covering Vladimir Putin’s presidency, the Beslan school massacre and the revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine for The Toronto Star, The Guardian and other newspapers. He cut his teeth as a crime and city hall reporter at The Gazette in Montreal. His love of Azerbaijani carpets and Georgian food has been difficult on his wallet and waistline.

Midwest Correspondent Mira Oberman is responsible for managing the news out of 17 states, an area her bosses have affectionately dubbed Mirastan and which she likes to remind them is more than six times the size of France. She writes about everything from the auto industry and scientific discoveries to Hurricane Katrina and features on the world’s first single-mom penguin and a casket company that builds oversized coffins for fat people.

Olivier Knox has covered the White House for AFP since December 2000, operating out of the veal pen-sized workspace where they keep him so he doesn't develop any unsightly muscle mass. Prior to chronicling President George W. Bush's tenure, Olivier covered then-vice president Al Gore's White House campaign. From 1998-2000, he covered the US Congress, including then-president Bill Clinton's impeachment and subsequent Senate trial. Before that, he was an editor/reporter on AFP's English Desk in Washington, a job he took after graduate school. Olivier is the son of a French mother and an American father whose French astounds native Francophones. He grew up in Middlebury, Vermont and Paris, France.

Peter Cunliffe-Jones heads the AFP English-language multimedia service, and edits the blog. He started in AFP as night news editor in London and in nearly two decades in journalism has worked as a reporter in the Balkans, a bureau chief in West Africa and regional editor for Asia. He recently compiled the AFP English service stylebook. Career highlights include covering the end of the Bosnian war, trekking to report on a rare breed of monkeys in West Africa and driving up the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan. From Europe, to Africa to Asia, his career has made him a firm believer in the importance of an open media. He lives, today, in London with his wife and son.

Phil Chetwynd is AFP's chief editor for Asia. Based now in Hong Kong, Phil has spent the best part of the past decade reporting, editing and managing news from across the Asia-Pacific. Working at AFP has taken him to virtually every part of the region, from New Zealand to Afghanistan. Career highlights have included reporting from the subway of the North Korean capital Pyongyang and covering elections on horseback on the Mongolian steppe. He also ran the agency's coverage of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Phil joined AFP in 1996 and spent the first two years working in the Middle East.

Phil Hazlewood joined AFP as a general reporter in the London newsroom in 2007 after years providing a daily diet of gloom for the British media. He has since sweltered in a flak jacket in Iraq and Afghanistan, got sunburn in the Sahara outside Colonel Kadhafi's tent and been drenched in a tropical storm in Sierra Leone following prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown around the world. He is now at AFP in Mumbai, covering general news and features, the odd bit of cricket and a smattering of Bollywood.

P. Parameswaran is AFP's Asian affairs correspondent in the Washington bureau. He began work in the Malaysian media in 1975 before joining AFP in Kuala Lumpur in 1992, proceeding to stints in Singapore as news editor and in Manila as bureau chief. Param travelled extensively in the region, covering political, economic and security issues, including the Asian financial turmoil in 1997-98 and the political and economic fallout across the region, as well as summits involving the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). From Washington, Param provides specialist coverage for AFP's millions of Asian readers of wide-ranging issues linked to the region. 

Richard Ingham is AFP's international coordinator of science, health and environment coverage. His special interests are climate change, AIDS, space exploration, genetics and bird flu. He spent 10 years as a reporter in Brussels and Berlin and as regional news editor in Asia, covering the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Czechoslovak revolution and the Hong Kong handover. In a 25-year career, he has filed from places ranging from East Timor, Goose Bay and Lhasa to French Guiana, Ouagadougou and the slums of Nairobi.

Sarah Stewart joined AFP a dozen years ago in Sydney and after stints in teeming Hong Kong and Bangkok is now based in sleepy Kuala Lumpur where she is rediscovering blue skies, trying to remember how to drive a car, and getting quite adept at chasing monkeys out of the house.

Shaun Tandon is AFP's deputy bureau chief and news editor for Japan. Born and raised in a small town in Wisconsin, his long journey to the world's largest metropolis started one boisterous night at university when he found out that a press pass was a magic ticket to a rock concert. He has since moved on to nobler pursuits in journalism across Asia and the Middle East including hiking through the mountains of Nepal to meet rebels, covertly mingling with dissidents on a Maldivian beach and covering enough disasters -- natural and manmade -- to trigger unhealthy levels of reflection on the state of the world. But he still finds time to pull the occasional all-nighter interviewing a Japanese gigolo.

Stephen Collinson joined AFP in 1997, in Hong Kong. While in Asia, reported from across the region, notably on the Asian financial meltdown, violence in East Timor in 1999, and political turmoil inside Myanmar. He has covered national elections from India to Israel and Canada to Switzerland, and missions to Asia, the Middle East and Europe by presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. Now on the campaign trail in his third US presidential election, Collinson, in seven years in the United States, has specialized in foreign policy and politics, covered the disputed 2000 election and the September 11 attacks the following year, and currently serves as Political Correspondent in Washington.