Academy Awards president ‘happy’ about 6 black actor nominations

A large fire burns near an entrance to a besieged Hong Kong campus after protesters threw Molotov cocktails to fend off a police advance on the university, according to AFP reporters at the scene.

Leo Ramirez, Hector Retamal and Sebastien Ricci, reporters with Agence France Presse, are among the few journalists who covered the new Coronavirus outbreak from the epicentre of the disease in Wuhan, China, before being repatriated to France and quarantined at the Carry-le-Rouet centre.

Hundreds of mourners attend the funeral of Nabil Hasan al-Quaety, a Yemeni journalist who contributed to AFP, two days after he was killed in the southern city of Aden. Raising his portraits and describing him as a "martyr", angry crowds shouted slogans against groups that are hostile to freedom of expression in Yemen, praising the talents of the young photographer and videojournalist who died aged 34, leaving behind young children and a pregnant widow.

In an exclusive interview with AFP in Rome, Italian Prime minister Giuseppe Conte remembers the first days of the COVID-19 pandemic and addresses the Black Lives Matter movement saying 'internal policies' need to be put in place to stop racism and discrimination from occurring, while also commenting on the M5S fundings allegations and the future of the EU as he sees it. President of the Council since June 2018, at the head of a coalition first with the far-right, and today with the centre-left, Giuseppe Conte, 55, a law professor still unknown two years ago, has emerged stronger from the coronavirus pandemic.

AFP photographer Saul Loeb captured some of the most iconic photos from inside the US Capitol when a mob of Donald Trump supporters stormed Congress. In an interview outside Congress the day after, he talks about his eventful day, starting with a security officer telling him how quiet it was in the morning to initially thinking only a dozen protesters made it inside, and finally what happened when "hundreds and hundreds of protesters [were] streaming into the Rotunda from seemingly every direction." Loeb then describes what it was like inside Nancy Pelosi's highly-secure office after it was breached, where he captured a rioter with a foot on a desk and a note left behind that read "We will not back down."