Hi there, you've downloaded the BBC Radio programme from our own correspondent.

We make two versions, and if you'd like to hear our World Service programme, you'll find it on the BBC I-player.

This, though, is the edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's presented by Kate Ady.

Today, quadratic equations instead of Kalashnikovs. We're in a school for Colombian fighters who've handed in their guns.

There's a rare visit to Pyongyang as the ailing North Korean leader tries to secure

succession for his son.

Democracy flowers in Kyrgyzstan, but proves more complicated than many imagined.

And we're off to Kuala Lumpur to find out why Malaysia's national ice hockey team has to practice in a shopping mall.

A former army officer in Colombia was this week sentenced to 44 years in prison, in connection with the killing of more than 200 civilians.

Illyrio Antonio Urana was said to have been the leader of a right-wing paramilitary unit,

which carried out assassinations over an eight-year period from the late 1980s.

His victims were suspected of collaborating with left-wing rebels,

against whom the Colombian military has been fighting

a long campaign. Today, those rebels still wage their long guerrilla war, and there are still

powerful rightist paramilitaries. But the violence is not as intense as it once was. Tens of

thousands of Colombian fighters have decided to put down their weapons. Robin

Lustig's been meeting some of them. I met Claudia at a school in the Colombian city of Medellin.

She's 27 years old, the mother of a young child, and a former guerrilla fighter. She was wearing

a purple t-shirt and jeans when we met, with her hair tightly braided. She looked, I suppose, very much like students look the world over, but her story is anything but usual. Before I tell you, Claudia's story, though, I should tell you something about Medellin. You may have heard of it as one of the most dangerous cities in the world, the former stronghold of the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar.

But Pablo Escobar was shot dead by police back in 1993,

and that was when the tide of violence began to turn.

Today, Medellin's a very different place.

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