Jan 21, 2012
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2012
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
BBC correspondents don't often go out gardening -- perhaps that's because it gives them a guilty conscience! At least it does Kevin Connolly in Jerusalem. He's been losing sleep over his lemon tree. Humphrey Hawksley's been meeting children in India who work, sometimes in poor conditions, to produce goods sold in shops on Western high streets. Owen Bennett Jones is in Pakistan where the agenda of the news anchors ranges from assassination and polical venality to gossip and who's had a hair transplant. Jeremy Bowen, heavily shadowed by government minders, tries to find out the degree of support for the campaign to oust the president Bashar al-Assad and Stephen Sackur has been to report in Yemen where a political vacuum seems to suit an al-Qaeda-backed insurgency.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent. |
| 0:05.0 | You can hear the version of the program broadcast on the BBC World Service by going to the... |
| 0:10.0 | From our own correspondent website, or indeed to that of the BBC World... to the |
| 0:13.3 | own correspondent website or indeed to that of the BBC World Service. But here's the |
| 0:16.9 | edition which goes out on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate A.D. |
| 0:23.0 | Today, the West looks on as Yemen falls apart and Al-Qaeda fills the vacuum. |
| 0:28.0 | The Indian children working in dangerous conditions producing cotton for high street shops in the West. |
| 0:35.0 | Violence, scandal, gossip, hair transplants, all on a packed news agenda in Pakistan, |
| 0:40.9 | and why a lemon tree has pricked the conscience of our man in Jerusalem. |
| 0:45.8 | But first officials in Washington say the United States is considering closing its embassy |
| 0:50.8 | in Damascus because of increasing safety concerns. |
| 0:54.7 | Arab League ministers meanwhile are starting two days of meetings in Cairo to decide the future |
| 0:59.7 | of their monitoring mission to Syria, which has been widely criticized for failing to halt the fighting. |
| 1:05.8 | More than 5,000 people have been killed and many more injured since the pro-democracy campaign |
| 1:10.8 | erupted last March. Jeremy Bowen has just sent us this dispatch from Damascus. |
| 1:17.0 | Someone has pinned a poster up at the foreign passports window at the Syrian border post with Lebanon. |
| 1:22.0 | It shows a dove of peace surrounded by guns, each |
| 1:26.3 | labeled with the name of a foreign news broadcaster. One gun belongs to the BBC. The dove is surrounded and under fire, but the bullets are bouncing |
| 1:36.0 | off its feathers which are the color of the Syrian flag, white, red, green and black. |
| 1:42.1 | As usual, I've had nothing but courtesy since I arrived in Syria, |
| 1:46.0 | even though the official line here set by President Basha al-Assad |
| 1:50.0 | is that its troubles are caused by a foreign conspiracy aided and abetted by the international media. |
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