In August of 2023, the tourist epicentre of the Hawaiian island of Maui caught fire and the blaze engulfed 2,000 houses, 800 businesses and took the lives of at least 115 people. But the history of the town of Lahaina means it did not go from being the lush and prosperous capital of Hawaii it once was, to disappearing through flames overnight. Born and raised on the island of Maui, Pūlama Kaufman returns there and, with cultural leader Hokulani Holt. They ask questions about the hidden stories o...
Aug 18, 2024•49 min
India's ancient caste system can result in controversy and discrimination in the country. But a new trend has sprung up of young women flaunting their caste on social media. Our Delhi correspondent Divya Arya has met some of these women, to try and find out why they are so keen to express 'caste pride'. Plus BBC Mundo's Laura García meets the residents of a Parisian retirement home who have found their own way of embracing the Olympic spirit.
Aug 17, 2024•27 min
International condemnation followed the elections in Venezuela at the end of July that saw President Maduro declared the winner for a third consecutive term. Those who oppose him have been protesting. There has been violence, many injuries and hundreds arrested and detained. We bring together Venezuelans inside the country and those aboard. You can hear the pride and hope that people have for their country, but also their underlying fears. We hear from a family that is spread across the world. T...
Aug 17, 2024•23 min
Despite some opposition from within their own faith communities, Muti’ah and Angelica are on a mission to teach other Muslim women how to have healthy and safe sex lives. Geeta Pendse meets them both and finds out how to deliver sex education that is both useful and appropriate for their students. Presenter: Geeta Pendse Producer: Linda Walker Series producer: Rajeev Gupta Production co-ordinator: Mica Nepomuceno
Aug 16, 2024•27 min
In 2015, the United Nations and the World Health Organisation set out their blueprints to eradicate Tuberculosis by 2030. TB is a potentially deadly bacterial disease that, despite being preventable and curable, kills just over a million people around the world every year. The disease is prevalent in India, where one person dies every 90 seconds from TB. In 2017, the Indian government announced their plans to eradicate TB by 2025. But with that date looming, can the country with the highest glob...
Aug 15, 2024•27 min
Air Pollution is responsible for around seven million deaths every year. Governments around the world have been trying to tackle it with a variety of measures. But now, the fight against air pollution is increasingly catching the imagination of artists and designers. In Al Hudayriyat Island in Abu Dhabi, a 7m high installation, Smog Free Tower by Dutch Studio Roosegaarde, bills itself as "the world's first smog vacuum cleaner." It purifies 30,000 cubic metres of air per hour and the dirt filtere...
Aug 14, 2024•23 min
The so-called ‘parents’ revolution’ is happening in America - and it’s a revolt against the public education system. School choice campaigns are gaining ground across the country, fighting for tax-funded vouchers giving parents the opportunity to select their preferred school. More and more families are ditching institutions altogether, with homeschooling reportedly the fastest growing form of education in the US. Why are families turning away from traditional schooling, and what does this mean ...
Aug 13, 2024•27 min
The Norwegian artist Edvard Munch is best known for his expressionist painting The Scream. A pastel version of it fetched $ 120 million when it was last auctioned in 2012, making it the most expensive piece of art ever sold at an auction. The art exhibition Edvard Munch: Trembling, shifts the focus to his landscape paintings, revealing a very different side of the artist and showing the vivid colours he used. Presenting this exhibition on both sides of the Atlantic - in the US, then in Germany a...
Aug 12, 2024•26 min
The US is home to around seven million undocumented migrants from central and south America. Many have been in the US for years, providing a vital workforce for many sectors of the US economy. But they have no health cover, or workplace benefits and many live under the constant threat of deportation back home. As Americans prepare for another presidential race where immigration is likely to figure high again on the agenda, Mike Lanchin travels to the state of Maryland, to hear about the lives of...
Aug 11, 2024•26 min
According to the UN, from 2008-2018 over 18,000 Vietnamese citizens a year married foreigners. The vast majority of them are women, and many find their foreign husbands through special matchmaking agencies. Thuong Le from BBC Vietnamese has been looking into this profitable and controversial business. Produced by Caroline Ferguson, Hannah Dean and Alice Gioia. (Photo: Faranak Amidi. Credit: Tricia Yourkevich.)
Aug 10, 2024•19 min
After weeks of student-led demonstrations and violence across Bangladesh, which caused the deaths of hundreds of people, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has fled to India and resigned after 15 years of controversial rule. Many of those left behind are celebrating what they are describing as a second independence. The man brought in to temporarily lead the country – the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus – has called on young people to help rebuild the South Asian country. Generation Z, who a...
Aug 10, 2024•23 min
New digital technologies including AI have started to find a place in the grieving process, sometimes alongside more traditional religious rituals. 'Grief tech' concepts are springing up across the world, aiming to mask the finality of death for those left behind. Nkem Ifejika, who lost his mother three years ago, samples some grief tech products. He meets Stephen Smith, creator of StoryFile, a system which enables him to interact with his late mother almost as if he was interviewing her on vide...
Aug 09, 2024•26 min
A bonus episode from The Global Jigsaw looks at how the Taliban's return to power in Afghanistan has led to the erasure of women from public life. There’s a UN-led campaign to recognise it as “gender apartheid”, but the international community is divided and lacking leverage. Three years after the group took the capital Kabul, our experts explain what life is like for half of the population and why women have become a proxy for the nation’s image of itself. Producer: Kriszta Satori, Elchin Suley...
Aug 08, 2024•37 min
This is a bonus episode for The Documentary of The Engineers: Intelligent Machines. This year, we speak to a panel of three engineers at the forefront of the 'Machine Learning: AI' revolution with an enthusiastic live audience. Intelligent machines are remaking our world. The speed of their improvement is accelerating fast and every day there are more things they can do better than us. There are risks, but the opportunities for human society are enormous. ‘Machine Learning: AI’ is the technologi...
Aug 08, 2024•49 min
A killer fungus is ravaging plantations of the Cavendish banana worldwide. It travels through the soil at lightning speed and chokes the banana plant so its leaves shrivel up and die. The disease is known as Tropical Race 4, or TR4 for short, and it has spread across the globe from Australia, to the Philippines, Pakistan and Mozambique. Now TR4 is widespread across Latin America. In Colombia where 30,000 people are employed in banana plantations, the government declared a state of national emerg...
Aug 07, 2024•23 min
The Italian town of Monfalcone on the Adriatic coast has an ethnic make-up unique to the country. Of a population of just over thirty thousand, more than six thousand are from Bangladesh. They’ve come to help construct huge cruise ships, providing labour to do the type of manual jobs which Italians no longer want to do. For years, they worshipped at two Islamic centres in the town. Then, in November, the town’s far right mayor, Anna Maria Cisint, tried to effectively ban collective prayer there,...
Aug 06, 2024•27 min
Known to many as breakdancing, breaking sprung up in the economic and social unrest of 1970s New York, as a form of expressive protest. Today, it is also a globalised and dizzyingly virtuosic competitive dance sport - and now it is making its debut at the Paris Olympics. We follow Australian competitor Rachael Gunn (B-girl Raygun) as she hits pause on her day-job as a university lecturer and prepares for her debut on the Olympics stage. In conversations across the final 100 days, as she practise...
Aug 05, 2024•26 min
Hong Kong's history is being revised and erased - it's early origins, colonial legacy, post 1997 handover period and the crucial years since the mass 2019 democracy protests are being uprooted, overturned and rewritten by a government guided by the ruling Communist Party in Beijing. This 'rewriting' of history is being enforced in schools, universities, libraries, the local media and online. This process has seen library shelves raided, museums closed for 'review', art galleries censored, media ...
Aug 04, 2024•33 min
Three years ago the Taliban took control of Afghanistan. BBC Afghan journalists Shekiba Habib and Shoaib Sharifi were living and following the events as they unfolded and continue to do so. Produced by Caroline Ferguson and Alice Gioia. (Photo: Faranak Amidi. Credit: Tricia Yourkevich.)
Aug 03, 2024•27 min
It began as a peaceful student protest against the way some government jobs are reserved for war veterans and their families. The violence that followed is some of the worst the country has witnessed in recent years. More than 200 people are reported dead, with most blamed on police gunfire. Host James Reynolds speaks with those in Bangladesh and hears stories of what they have witnessed; their fears for their safety and that of friends and family. They describe being afraid to leave their homes...
Aug 03, 2024•23 min
Injuries meant wrestler Dan Russell missed out on two opportunities for glory at the Olympics back in the 1990s. But missing the chance to fight for gold twice was not what left him feeling empty when he retired from the sport. Dan had a difficult childhood, suffering abuse from neighbours and enduring a brutal training regime, being made to wrestle all day, every day, by his father. Once retired, Dan’s past traumas began to haunt him, leading to a deep depression. Dan had trophies and medals fr...
Aug 02, 2024•26 min
In a bonus edition of World Book Club following the death of the acclaimed Irish author Edna O’Brien, who died aged 93 in July 2024, we look back to an interview with Edna from 2008. Edna O’Brien was born in rural County Clare in 1930, and found her education by nuns suffocating. She moved to Dublin, and subsequently spent much of her life in London. The Country Girls tells the story of two girls from rural Ireland growing up in a convent school before moving to Dublin to begin their adult lives...
Aug 01, 2024•27 min
In a bonus episode of The Global Story podcast - Divorce: The art of breaking up. The Global Story brings you one big story every weekday, making sense of the news with our experts around the world. Insights you can trust, from the BBC World Service. For more, go to bbcworldservice.com/globalstory or search for The Global Story wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Divorce rates have been in decline across the West for decades. Experts put this down to a variety of factors, from fewer marriages to...
Jul 31, 2024•25 min
In a special edition of HARDtalk Stephen Sackur looks back at some of the guests who have risked their personal freedom to disclose secret information. What motivates these whistleblowers? This is a bonus episode from HARDtalk, a show that brings you in-depth, hard-hitting interviews with newsworthy personalities. For more episodes search for HARDtalk wherever your get your BBC podcasts.
Jul 30, 2024•24 min
Dr Willard Wigan MBE creates the smallest handmade sculptures in the world. He uses high powered microscopes and custom-made tools formed from shards of diamond, hypodermic needles, and paintbrushes made from eyelashes. Willard’s talent and determination propelled him to international acclaim. His work sells for six-figure sums, and he has exhibited internationally. However, his path to success has been far from easy. As a schoolboy, he struggled with reading and writing due to unrecognised auti...
Jul 29, 2024•26 min
We visit the Las Patronas women 30 years on from when the young Romero Vazquez sisters first threw a loaf of bread onto the infamously dangerous La Bestia train. A train meant only for cargo, but which has become a dangerous mode of transport for more than 400,000 migrants every year. It begins from near the border of Guatemala, and along its 2000 mile journey migrants from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Mexico itself cling to its roof, heading north to America. Norma Romero gui...
Jul 28, 2024•26 min
In countries like Somalia and Iran, where women are largely expected to present themselves with modesty, what role can make-up play? Bella Hassan of BBC Focus on Africa is from Somalia and Mina Joshaghani of BBC Persian is from Iran. They tell us about how make-up functions in a conservative society. Produced by Caroline Ferguson and Hannah Dean. (Photo: Faranak Amidi. Credit: Tricia Yourkevich)
Jul 27, 2024•28 min
Could a woman of colour be the next president of the United States? That is what much of America has been asking this week and it is at the heart of our conversations. Race remains a major political and social issue in the US and there is plenty of discussion about Ms Harris’s background as a black and Asian-American woman. We bring together three black women Democratic party supporters: Kay in New York, Ashley in Oklahoma City and Keosha in Washington DC. With President Biden standing down, we ...
Jul 27, 2024•23 min
On a busy street in Los Angeles a group of people in yellow vests are holding a ladder against a lamppost. Up the ladder, 34-year-old Evan Clark is ripping down a sign that is nailed to the post. It reads “Jesus: The way, the truth, the life”. These are members of the Atheist Street Pirates, local activists who track and remove religious signs affixed to public property. This group say that there are laws that forbid the erection of religious messages on public property. Nastaran Tavakoli-Far tr...
Jul 26, 2024•26 min
In the industrial town of Haryana in Northern India, young girls are breaking barriers training hard to become the next generation of gold medal-winning wrestlers, following their idols who have tasted Olympic glory abroad and made a stand against attitudes to women at home. But their success has come at a price. BBC journalist Divya Arya looks at what it takes for these girls to become an Indian wrestling heroine.
Jul 25, 2024•26 min
