Bluster, Brazenness and Charm
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 27 October 2018
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kate Adie introduces stories from around the world.
Saudi Arabia's investment conference put on quite a show - and unlike many foreign investors scared off by the aftershocks of Jamal Khashoggi's death, Sebastian Usher was there to see it for himself.
Lyse Doucet was in Afghanistan to cover its parliamentary elections, and found many changes to the streetscape in Kabul - as the city survives a rising tide of attacks. Airport security measures provided clues of their own to the way life is changing.
Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, was sometimes hyped as the "next Dubai" in the 2000s - but Samira Shackle found that many of its building sites, supposed to give rise to four-star opulence, are now abandoned shells occupied by internally displaced people who fled the advance of the so-called Islamic State.
Tequila? No, mezcal - a smoother, smokier, and arguably more authentically Mexican product. Graeme Green takes a tipple or two in the state of Oaxaca, to hear how its aficionados and producers are torn between excitement and apprehension as their drink grows more famous abroad.
And BANG goes the auctioneer's whalebone hammer at the Hotel Druot, a storied Paris auction house which sells everything from randomly-baled belongings from house clearances to great works of art. Hugh Schofield went along ... and picked up a thing or two.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:04.6 | Hello. |
| 0:05.9 | Today, security in turbulent Afghanistan's main airport revealed by our |
| 0:11.6 | correspondence butter knife. Nowhere to go, the displaced families |
| 0:15.7 | now sheltering in half-built luxury properties in Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. We journey to |
| 0:22.4 | the heartland of Mescal, the most |
| 0:24.5 | soulful cousin of tequila in Mexico, and our man in Paris is seduced to bid for |
| 0:30.0 | a little piece of art in a historic auction house. To Saudi Arabia, amid the |
| 0:36.3 | uproar over the death of Jamal Keshoji, many of the former allies of the |
| 0:40.8 | kingdom have been scrambling to distance themselves from it last week. |
| 0:45.6 | One delegate after another pulled out of attending the so-called Davos in the desert conference. |
| 0:51.0 | Riered had hoped to use it as a showcase for its supposed reforms to suggest a more forward-looking |
| 0:56.8 | nation. |
| 0:58.3 | Little chance of that as the international media relayed each gruesome new twist of what happened in Saudi Arabia's consulate in Istanbul. |
| 1:07.0 | Sebastian Usher did attend the event in Riyadh and witnessed an unapologetic show of confidence regardless of the outside world's concerns. |
| 1:16.0 | The vast facade of Errit's Carlton rises from the escarpment on the road to Mecca, |
| 1:21.0 | but the lavish conference just |
| 1:22.8 | stage here was meant to be all about the future of Saudi Arabia, not its |
| 1:26.5 | past. In the end, it was neither. Instead, it was deadlocked in the very tricky |
| 1:31.2 | present which the country has been experiencing since the killing of |
| 1:34.4 | Jamal Hasjoggy. |
| 1:36.3 | All the focus from the very start was on one man, crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, rumors abounded |
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