Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Anne McHelvoy in for Jason Palmer.

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

The task of demolishing vast ships at the end of their useful lives is a tricky and a dirty one.

But now new techniques are transforming the art of ship unbuilding.

Esau and Jacob are still having that family feud, but a new translation of the Hebrew Bible from a renowned scholar

is putting some old stories in a new light.

First up though.

After nearly a week without electricity, power is being restored to parts of Venezuela.

The outages plunged a country already paralysed by severe shortages and hyperinflation deeper into crisis.

Electric pumps stopped working, leaving people desperate for water, while fresh food rotted in the heat.

The government of Nicolas Maduro has been trying to get the power switched back on.

In Caracas, people have been protesting, but there's an overriding sense of helplessness in this

oil rich country of 31 million.

It's really been nothing like I've certainly ever seen here in the last three years that I've

been living in Venezuela.

Stephen Gibbs writes for the economist and lives in Caracas, and he told me how the blackouts

are affecting people. Caracas, the lights have me how the blackouts are affecting people.

Caracas, the lights have begun to come on, but that's been at the cost of the rest of the country.

Now, the effects of that are extremely serious.

Hospitals, many of them entirely without power, because they haven't had power generation systems. That means nurses

have been trying to keep premature babies alive by hand, ventilating them by hand. Anyone requiring

kidney dialysis has been in a very serious situation here because there is no power.

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