A Different Yemen
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2019
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The BBC's Paul Adams returns to the country he roamed 35 years ago - and it's much changed. Kate Adie introduces this and other stories from around the world.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, there's plenty of grief to go around, and it's important to show your emotions at funerals - so much so that one entrepreneur is setting up an agency for paid mourners to cry on demand, and give the deceased a proper send-off. Olivia Acland met him and one of the hopeful applicants for the job.
The ash cloud following the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010 showed that Iceland's volcanoes have the power to disrupt the entire world's air traffic - as well as to put Icelanders' lives and communities at risk. Andy Jones saw how the village of Vik is making contingency plans in case its own volcano, Katla - already well overdue to blow - causes even more disturbance.
In South Africa, Lindsay Johns explores the fault lines between Cape Town's long-established Coloured (mixed-race) community and the increasing number of immigrants from other African countries.
And Jane Wakefield reveals what the 'death' of a robot hitch-hiker, whose journeys through Canada and the USA came to an abrupt end at human hands, reveals about the complicated relationship between man and machine.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:03.7 | Good morning. Today, do not go quietly. The funeral business in eastern Congo will deliver |
| 0:09.8 | wailing on demand to give you a proper send-off. |
| 0:13.6 | When will it blow? |
| 0:14.7 | We know that Icelandic volcanoes can bring global air traffic to a standstill. |
| 0:19.2 | So what's it like to live next to one which is overdue for an eruption. |
| 0:24.1 | Tension on the streets of Cape Town, |
| 0:26.2 | as South Africans of all colours weigh up the costs |
| 0:28.8 | and benefits of immigration. |
| 0:31.0 | And can a robot die? We have some unsettling insights into the relationship |
| 0:36.6 | between man and machine. The damage inflicted by war on Yemen is incalculable. |
| 0:43.6 | Since 2015, when the Saudi government intervened in the conflict between Yemen's then government |
| 0:48.9 | and the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, more than 10,000 Yemenis have been killed and 60,000 injured. |
| 0:56.4 | Hundreds of thousands more have been displaced and the UN announced in December that more |
| 1:01.1 | than 14 million people were at risk of famine. |
| 1:04.0 | More than 50,000 children have died from the effects of the conflict last year, |
| 1:10.0 | mainly from starvation and disease. |
| 1:12.0 | Paul Adams has returned to a country which he remembers well |
| 1:15.9 | from earlier days. When you go back to a place after an absence of 35 years, a military facility is probably not the best way to go. |
| 1:26.9 | As a young English teacher in the 1980s, I was free to roam around Yemen more or less at |
| 1:31.3 | will. |
| 1:32.3 | Occasionally, armed men, or less at will. Occasionally armed men, ornate ceremonial |
... |
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