From Our Own Correspondent

BBC Radio 4
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Oct 29, 2016 • 28min

Awkward Questions

Kate Adie introduces correspondents' stories. Today: Karen Allen is caught up in the anger of the student protests in South Africa. After the latest terror attack in Pakistan, Shahzeb Jillani wonders why no-one wants to ask the difficult questions. Bill Law, from Canada, tells us how despite a fascination with the US Presidential race, it's sometimes best to leave politics aside and stick to the diving. Gavin Lee, who has been reporting from the Jungle migrant camp for several years, explains about the dog and the wolf, and the sights and scents that will linger. And, watch out on the hillsides of Montenegro - you really might catch your death, as Elizabeth Gowing hears.
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Oct 27, 2016 • 28min

Linguistic confusion and mass killers

Kate Adie introduces correspondents' stories. Damien McGuinness is in Berlin where the politicians are frustrated that British politicians don't seem to understand that no means no. Jake Wallis Simons returns to the scene of the terrorist attacks in Paris last year. James Jeffrey is in Addis Ababa, under a state of emergency, where there's confusion about what really is going on but people are partying as hard as ever. Lindsay Johns travels from Harvard to Harlem in a divided America. And Chris Carnegy meets one of the world's most prolific killers, in the South Atlantic. But his targets are mice.
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Oct 22, 2016 • 28min

Memento Mori

In a week of remembrance and recollection, Jannat Jalil explains how the French authorities - who are preparing to remember those killed in last November’s Paris attacks - find other deaths on the capital’s streets more than fifty years ago far more difficult to commemorate. Adam Easton in Warsaw reflects on how Poles saw their country’s recent history in the life and work of one of their leading film directors, Andrzej Wajda, who died this week. Carrie Gracie in Beijing joins one of the Chinese Communist Party’s new pilgrimage tours to revolutionary martyr sites from the civil war era of the twentieth century which President Xi Jinping wants party members to attend in order to rekindle ideological fervour. Robin Denselow reports on how Turkey’s volatile political situation is having an effect on Islamic cooperation even at Sufi festivals, like the famous one he visited at Konya. And we remember Chris Simpson, a long-standing and distinguished contributor to "From Our Own Correspondent", who died suddenly this week. We hear again a characteristically witty and perceptive dispatch he recorded in the Central African Republic in 2010.
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Oct 20, 2016 • 28min

A Sense of Place

Recollections of working in Warsaw thirty years ago prompt Kevin Connolly to consider how life there then informs Poles’ support now for freedom of movement within the European Union. Bethany Bell visits the birthplace of Adolf Hitler, the town of Braunau, and discovers Austrians are divided over whether or not his childhood home should be torn down. James Longman finds that Lebanon’s capital exerts a special attraction for him as Beirut Correspondent – even though he already knows it well. Adam Shaw visits one of the world's wealthiest men, Carlos Slim, in Mexico City and finds migration very much on the telecoms mogul’s mind. And Jane Labous gets parenting advice from her Senegalese mother-in-law. The programme is introduced by Kate Adie.
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Oct 15, 2016 • 28min

Treading Carefully

We travel to Hawai'i, The Gambia, France and India-administered Kashmir this week. The programme begins in Australia where the plans of the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, to hold a national plebiscite on the issue of same-sex marriage have run into difficulties. Phil Mercer explains why, although his opponents agree with the premier’s objective, they don’t support his approach for achieving it. Chris Simpson is in The Gambia, the smallest country on the African mainland. Elections are due in December and the opposition parties agreed only yesterday to field a single candidate against the sitting president. But what are the prospects of the long-serving head of state losing power? Chris Bockman is in Toulouse following the story of a plane and its erstwhile owner. Colonel Gadaffi of Libya, the fifth anniversary of whose death falls next Thursday, hated flying but nevertheless acquired and fitted out in grand style an Airbus A340. But disagreements between the new Libyan authorities and creditors claiming that bills racked up by the former leader have been left unpaid in France mean the plane is parked at Perpignan airport. What will happen next? Kashmir is one of the most militarised regions of the world with India and Pakistan administering parts of it while both claiming all of it. Melissa van der Klugt journeyed to Attari to meet the station superintendent who manages the daily routine of journeys between Delhi and Lahore under the shadow of nuclear weapons held on both sides. And Simon Parker is fascinated by the active volcanoes on Hawai'i, particularly Kilauea. He decides to get up close and personal with the lava-spewing natural wonder – but will his feet be able to endure the trek
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Oct 13, 2016 • 28min

Battle Lines

Today, twenty years after the Taliban took control of the Afghan capital, Kabul, Kate Clark, who was the only Western reporter in the country during their final years in power, reflects on what has changed there during the last twenty years. In Ethiopia, the government has this week declared a six-months-long state of emergency after violent protests in one of the nine ethnically-based states. James Jeffrey in Addis Ababa has been looking at the ethnic tensions which beset the country. The US presidential election campaign has been full of melodrama and incident more befitting a reality television show than a political debate. Gabriel Gatehouse passed through Washington en route to the rustbelt to gauge how far reality and the peculiar 2016 campaign are in alignment. Albania wants to be on everyone's tourist destination list after ending its long period of reclusive communist dictatorship. But Rob Stepney has found some national habits are so ingrained that making such a radical change isn't straightforward. The tentacles of corruption have inveigled their way deep into Mexican life, in part thanks to the drug trade. Antonia Quirke has been to the Caribbean coast to discover just how far they now reach and what effect they have on daily life.
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Oct 8, 2016 • 28min

Bitter Harvests

Kate Adie introduces tales of fear, bravery and love from around the world. Justin Rowlatt is in Bangladesh, asking whether security is as important to the country’s leadership as going after its political enemies. In Michoacán state, one of the centres of Mexico’s war on drugs, Linda Pressly visits a community which rebelled against intimidation and organised crime to protect its forests as well as its people - and decided to shut out national police and political parties too. As Milton Nkosi has reported on South Africa’s student protests this week, he’s been moved to reflect on how young people’s political goals have changed since the apartheid era. Stephen Evans is staying calm under pressure, just like his South Korean neighbours - whether they’re navigating the nightmarish road traffic in Seoul or studiously refusing to be panicked by nuclear threats from Pyongyang. And Juliet Rix has some myths to dispel in Verona, as she sifts history from legend in the courtyard which many tourists believe really was the setting for Romeo and Juliet’s great romance.
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Oct 6, 2016 • 28min

Peeling Back the Layers

Stories of surface image - and underlying reality - from around the world, introduced by Kate Adie. In Moscow, the alleged killers of liberal politician Boris Nemtsov are on trial, but questions remain about who was really responsible for his murder. Sarah Rainsford, who remembers Nemtsov as one of the poster boys for the newly democratic Russia of the 1990s, describes seeing the legal process unfold in court. In Ethiopia, some of the country's finest farmland is drying out as drought threatens the food supply for almost 18 million people - and Nicola Kelly's left unsure that traditional methods of weather forecasting, like reading signs in the livers of slaughtered goats, can work in these conditions. While travelling in Costa Rica's verdant forests, Tim Hartley also dug into the causes of a rot creeping across the country: corruption, on both the small and large scale. Bob Walker's been trudging a pilgrimage path in the footsteps of St Olaf through rural Sweden, and stepped into some ongoing debates about how many migrants the country could or should shelter. In Morocco, it's not easy for women to walk unmolested and Morgan Meaker hears from some who'd like to put an end to the endemic harassment on the streets.
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Oct 1, 2016 • 28min

The Last of the Founding Fathers

Kate Adie introduces dispatches from around the globe. This week, Kevin Connolly in Jerusalem recollects his last meeting with Shimon Peres, and assesses the late president’s legacy; John Sweeney, trying to cover the bloody conflict in Syria, calls on unorthodox sources in Aleppo to do it; Mary-Ann Ochota explores the reality of contemporary life amid the yaks and motorbikes in the thin air and vast expanses of Tibet; Nick Thorpe in Budapest considers this Sunday’s referendum in Hungary on EU migrants and how likely it is the country’s prime minister will win the vote he has called; and Mary Margaronis travels to the Western Pyrenees to learn about the language which has so many words for rain.
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Sep 29, 2016 • 28min

The Wilder Shores

Kate Adie introduces dispatches from writers and correspondents around the world. In this edition: Tim Ecott reports from the Seychelles in the week the president shocked the affluent island nation by his resignation; amid the growing lawlessness in Venezuela, Jake Wallis Simons is taken to the lair of a gangland boss who explains why he orders so many kidnappings in the district of Caracas where his group's writ runs; Chris Simpson in Mauritania considers the reasons for the persistence of the historic racial divides which characterise its society; Jane Labous reflects on the splendid September spectacle of gathering shell-fish on the Normandy shores - and the colourful characters who do it; while Philip Sweeney samples both the cuisine and the political temperature in Iran now that direct flights between London and Tehran have resumed.

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