Abortion is a deeply divisive issue in the United States that spans the law, religion and women’s rights. It has been a legal right for almost 50 years. Now, the Supreme Court – the top court in the country – is expected to overturn the law and rule that abortions can banned. It’s put abortion back towards the top of the political debate and we reflect some of the conversations taking place among those affected. Two women share their experiences and personal reasons for terminating their pregnan...
May 14, 2022•24 min
Kim Tserkezie meets Danny Hibbert, the mastermind behind Switch, a sport of sports consisting of football, basketball, volleyball, netball and handball. She learns how the game is crossing generational and cultural divides in White City, a fast-changing area of west London, and giving opportunities to many, where more established sports are failing. Through speaking to those who Switch has impacted, Kim comes to understand how important Switch, and Danny, are to this diverse community.
May 14, 2022•19 min
While some countries fight to reclaim antiquities that were stolen centuries ago, Cambodian investigators are dealing with far more recent thefts. Many of the country’s prized treasures were taken by looters in the 1980s and 1990s and then sold on to some of the world’s most prestigious museums, including the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert museum, in London. At the centre of many of the sales was a rogue British art dealer. Celia Hatton joins the Cambodian investigative team and ga...
May 12, 2022•26 min
Alan Dein's series of global conversations is now a decade old. Via social media he has crossed the word and heard true stories of love, pain and downright craziness. In those 10 years many of those he first encountered have become digital friends. Now in this time of war and upheaval he reconnects with Daria in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, who has unexpectedly found love.
May 11, 2022•28 min
BBC World News anchor Laura Trevelyan discovered her family’s slave owning past only after the University College London database of slave ownership in the British Caribbean was published in 2013. Back in the 18th Century, the Trevelyan family were known as absentee slave owners on Grenada. The family never set foot on the island, but owned hundreds of slaves and profited for years from the sale of sugar harvested from five different sugar cane plantations. To try and learn more about the legacy...
May 10, 2022•27 min
Kim Tserkezie soars into the skies with the drone racers to learn about a technology that is increasingly shaping the world, both for good and bad. With the help of racing pioneers, she discovers how this young sport is accessible to many. Determined to have a go herself, Kim goes in search of "flow state", the out-of-body experience described by so many who fly drones. But will she even be able to take off?
May 07, 2022•18 min
Ukrainians have been living with the horrors of war, amid attacks from Russian troops, for more than two months. We hear from three Ukrainian women who have decided to take on a dangerous task, to try and make their country safer. They each decided to do an 18-day training course in Kosovo to learn how to clear landmines. We also cross into Moldova, which is the smallest of seven countries bordering Ukraine. It has taken in more than 437,000 Ukrainian refugees. There have been concerns that its ...
May 07, 2022•24 min
Resistance and division among Mexico’s indigenous Yaqui people. Anabela Carlon is a legal advocate for the indigenous Yaqui of Sonora – a fierce defender of her people’s land. And she is no stranger to the immense dangers that face her in northern Mexico, a region dominated by organised crime. In 2016, she and her husband were kidnapped at gunpoint by masked men. And now one of her biggest cases is representing the families of 10 men from her community who disappeared last year. In Mexico, the Y...
May 05, 2022•27 min
More than 10 years and one billion dollars in the making, the Grand Egyptian Museum is the sort of big statement architecture the Pharaohs would surely have respected. Built on a 120-acre site, just 2km from the pyramids of Giza, and housing 55,000 objects, this will be the world’s largest archaeological museum, served by a purpose-built international airport. It is hoped this prestige project will place Cairo back on the global map as the Egyptian government encourages the revival of mass touri...
May 03, 2022•24 min
We bring together three Ukrainian students, who studied at different universities in Kyiv before the war, to hear about how they are continuing their education. One decided the solution was to do her exchange year abroad early, but the others have remained in the country and it’s not always easy to study. Plus, three Ukrainian women come together to share their stories of leaving their homes with young children. Single parent Sonia is now in Portugal with her daughter, after driving across multi...
Apr 30, 2022•24 min
What is fake, what is real? BBC disinformation reporter Marianna Spring speaks to people caught up in the battle for the truth in the information war over Ukraine. Families and friendships are being torn apart not only by the fighting, but by the radically different versions of reality that Ukrainians and Russians are being presented with, on TV and online. And social media has become a battleground for competing versions of truth.
Apr 30, 2022•51 min
For weeks Volodymyr Zelensky has been leading his nation against a devastating invasion by Russia. As Ukraine continues to resist one of the most powerful armies in the world, President Zelensky has been lauded as the man of this moment. Yet the man who had spent most of his life telling jokes was a political novice when first elected. The BBC’s correspondent in Ukraine, Jonah Fisher, first met Volodymyr Zelensky in January 2019 when he was known as a comedian and actor. He charts Zelensky's inc...
Apr 30, 2022•28 min
Kim Tserkezie discovers the fast-paced sport of korfball, which lays claim to being the only full gender-equal team sport in the world. Kim learns about the positive impact korfball has had and explores what other sports could learn from its pioneering approach to gender equality.
Apr 30, 2022•19 min
A form of oral poetry accompanied on the accordion is the basis of a wildly popular form of music in Lesotho, southern Africa. But jealousy between Famo artists has triggered warfare that’s killing hundreds. Some of the genre’s best-known stars became gang bosses, and their rivalry has helped make rural, stunningly beautiful Lesotho the murder capital of Africa, with the sixth highest homicide rate in the world. Musicians, their relatives, producers and DJs have all been gunned down. Whole commu...
Apr 28, 2022•27 min
On Queensland’s Western Downs the Penfold family, Dan, Karen and their four daughters run 40,000 hectares of beef cattle. The farm has been in the family for four generations and with no sons, it is now the girls who will take over the family business and stay on the land. But they plan to do it differently, embracing the shifting cultures of 21st Century agricultural life; caring for the environment, international trade and sustainability.
Apr 26, 2022•28 min
Reporting from a war zone is always challenging and accurate information can be hard to establish, but it’s estimated that thousands have been killed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Among them are journalists – more than 20 - from different parts of the world. In this edition, we hear from those who are trying to tell the story of this war as it happens in the place they call home.
Apr 23, 2022•24 min
Dr Kat Arney takes a deep dive into our genetic make-up and tells the story of four pieces of human DNA: the fat gene, the Huntington gene, the CCR5 gene associated with HIV resistance, and PAX6, the eyeball gene.
Apr 23, 2022•50 min
Kim Tserkezie faces up to her lifelong dislike of combat sports by exploring Dambe boxing, a Nigerian sport with a history that is said to go back as far as the 10th Century. Kim speaks with promoters and fighters from the African Warriors Fighting Championship, as well as their family members, to find out why Dambe boxing is so important to the Hausa community and whether it can one day become one of the world’s global combat sports.
Apr 23, 2022•18 min
Myanmar is now in a state of civil war. What started in February 2021 as a mass protest movement against the military coup is now a nationwide armed uprising. The junta is under attack across the country from a network of civilian militias called the People’s Defence Forces who say they’re fighting to create a democratic Myanmar. The BBC gained rare access to the jungle training camps where young protests are being turned into soldiers. We follow a single mother and a student who have sacrificed...
Apr 21, 2022•27 min
Australia is famous for its unique wildlife and landscapes. But Australia also has the highest mammal extinction rate in the world, and there are big declines in frogs, reptiles, and birds caused by introduced predators and land clearing. Some species are hanging on in small numbers on private land. Could paying farmers and indigenous landowners to return parts of their properties to nature or turn them into carbon farms help solve Australia’s biodiversity crisis? ABC producer Belinda Sommer tak...
Apr 19, 2022•28 min
The United Nations’ children agency, Unicef, has said that almost two thirds of Ukraine’s 7.5 million children have been displaced during the six weeks since Russia’s invasion. One of Russia’s key targets has been the southern port city of Mariupol. Thousands of civilians are dead, many more have been left trapped and face an horrendous struggle for survival. Pastor Gennady Mokhnenko is a chaplain from Mariupol. He describes what he has seen and heard in the city, and his efforts to help childre...
Apr 16, 2022•24 min
Beirut, 1974. It is the height of the Cold War. A prominent Yemeni politician is shot dead in his car. Some say, had he lived, Yemen would be a different country today. The killer was never caught, the assassination never investigated. Political assassinations in the Middle East are almost always unsolved, and reliable evidence can be extremely hard to find. The lack of accountability in these cases is often seen as the reason for the pervasiveness of assassinations in the region. In Yemen, powe...
Apr 16, 2022•1 hr 2 min
Hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled abroad since its invasion of Ukraine, afraid of growing repression in their country, and increasing international isolation. Most of the new exiles are young, well-educated professionals – writers, teachers, artists, IT workers – who fear they could be arrested and jailed for expressing opposition to the war, and even drafted into the army. Tens of thousands have escaped to Russia’s neighbour Georgia, where some are involved in humanitarian efforts to ...
Apr 14, 2022•27 min
In the forests surrounding Biamanga, a sacred mountain for the Yuin people of south-eastern Australia, traditional indigenous fire practitioners are preparing to bring fire back into the landscape. Not the raging fires that threatened to destroy it in the deadly Black Summer bushfires of 2019, but cool fires that will help protect and revitalise the land and help restore habitat for the elusive population of koalas who have survived in this forest against the toughest of odds.
Apr 12, 2022•28 min
With Russian forces withdrawing from some areas of Ukraine, details are emerging of the death and destruction they have left behind. In Borodyanka, 60 km north-west of Kyiv, the main road through the town is lined with destroyed and burnt-out buildings, vehicles and tanks. Olga and Ira lived there and have sent us messages, describing how their homes were bombed. We hear from Vitaliy Shevchenko, the Russian Editor for BBC Monitoring, who as well as covering the war for us, has been trying to get...
Apr 09, 2022•24 min
It is 60 years since the Algerian War of Independence. But it still casts a shadow over the present. As France goes to the polls to elect a new president, Edward Stourton presents stories from the country's colonial past which still affect day-to-day life. He tells the surprising story of how, in the 1870s, a tiny insect called phylloxera created the climate for the Algerian War. He hears about the intriguing story of a knife abandoned in a house in Algiers on a night in March 1957. And he talks...
Apr 09, 2022•51 min
Just before Christmas, 2021, Joel Vilard was driving his cousin home on a dual carriageway just south of Rennes in Brittany. Suddenly, a bullet flew through the window and hit the pensioner in the neck. He later died in hospital of injuries accidentally inflicted by a hunter firing a rifle from a few hundred metres away. A year earlier Morgan Keane, was shot dead in his garden, while out chopping wood. The hunter says that he mistook the 25 year old man for a wild boar. Mila Sanchez was so shock...
Apr 07, 2022•28 min
The ocean is central to the Esperance community’s lifestyle and identity. But three fatal shark attacks in three years have had a profound impact on this remote western Australian coastal town. As this small community slowly comes to terms with these recent fatal attacks, they are also navigating their relationship to the ocean and the apex predator that swims within it. ABC producer Fiona Pepper travels to Esperance to hear how this coastal town is grappling with the impact of the great white s...
Apr 05, 2022•28 min
An estimated four million people – mostly women and children – have escaped from Ukraine and its war. Host Karnie Sharp hears from two Ukrainian mental health professionals who discuss the impact of war on the minds of children. One is a psychiatrist who remains in the capital Kyiv, and the other a child psychologist who fled the country a few weeks ago and is now safe in Germany with her family.
Apr 02, 2022•24 min
What are the big mysteries that people want to understand about life? How to be happy. How to accept old age and death. Wit questions sent in from all over the world, Buddhist nun Sister Dang Nghiem and Sufi Imam Jamal Rahman offer their wise words on some of life’s eternal questions.
Apr 02, 2022•31 min
