Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Noisy, crowded, dark, violent, terrifying. Our correspondent discusses the conditions inside

many of the prisons and jails built in decades past, but architects are updating old designs

to make jails more about rehabilitation than retribution.

And, are you a customer service ninja? Do you have superhero hospitality powers?

Do you bring your whole self to work? We take a look at the increasingly absurd language of job

adverts.

First up, though.

A year ago today, an outbreak of Ebola began in Congo. It's grown into the second worst anywhere ever.

Some 2,600 people have been diagnosed of whom about two-thirds have died.

Last month, the World Health Organization declared a global emergency,

fearing further spread to neighboring countries. The challenges of fighting the outbreak

are telling of the broader troubles of this vast, unstable country.

So we were in Congo pursuing a variety of stories, but one of the things that particularly

interested me was looking at the east of the country, the parts of it that are afflicted both by

Ebola and by conflict. Robert Guest is the economist for an editor.

From the air, you get a sense of how huge Congo is, the rainforest,

savannah, the volcanoes, and it's surprisingly thinly populated. And you see

visible signs of rebels of militiamen hiding in the bush. You see illegal

farms in nature parks. What you don't see is paved roads. There are hardly any in Congo,

and quite often when you're flying over places, you don't see much in the way of light either.

...