Russia Burning

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 August 2019

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Fires are blazing in the far reaches of Siberia - an area the size of Belgium is on fire. Steve Rosenberg goes to have a look, a seventeen hour drive through forests of birch and cedar. But is Russia also burning socially and politically?

The Italian island of Lampedusa - halfway between Tunisia and Malta - has long been at the centre of the "migrant crisis"; a welcome haven for the occupants of leaky boats. Dr Pietro Bartolo has been working with migrants for many years but now, as Emma Jane Kirby reports, he's adopted a different approach.

The announcement from Delhi this week that Kashmir was losing its autonomous status took the world by surprise. The region has since been on lockdown, the residents left with few means of communication with the outside world. Rahul Tandon talks to young Kashmiris in Delhi, who oppose the new policy, and to Indians who support the government's move.

Sex is often a delicate subject. Norms are often very different from place to place – and the penalties for living outside the norm can be serious. Shereen El Feki has been working with a team from BBC Arabic to survey and interview people across the Middle East about their attitudes and their desires.

A group of Jewish orphans who survived the Nazi concentration camps and were resettled in Britain became known as The Boys, even though there were girls among them. Hannah Gelbart, the grand daughter of one of them, reports on a special reunion in Prague.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:05.5	Good morning.
0:06.5	Today, migrants needing help, should you be on the beaches of Lampedusa or in the corridors of Brussels. We hear from young Kashmiris in
0:16.2	Delhi cut off from events at home, no phone, no internet. Time to go shopping for underwear in Beirut and meanwhile hear about attempts to change
0:26.4	attitudes to sex across the Middle East and in Prague we witness a very special
0:32.1	photograph being taken. The political heat has been
0:36.5	rising in Russia this summer. For several weekends the people of Moscow have been
0:41.2	on the streets to protest peacefully against the
0:44.0	exclusion of opposition candidates from city elections.
0:47.8	There have been violent scenes with police detaining many of the protesters and a hard lines being threatened against further
0:54.8	protest. At the same time across vast swaths of Siberia, wildfires on an unprecedented scale have engulfed hundreds of millions of hectares.
1:06.0	President Putin has deployed the army to help tackle the flames,
1:10.0	so Steve Rosenberg set off on a long trip.
1:14.0	To give you a sense of the scale of Russia,
1:17.0	here's a geographical fact.
1:19.0	This country is so large you could fit the United Kingdom into it a total of 70 times.
1:26.2	I used to think it odd that in a land blessed with so much space
1:31.4	tens of millions of Russians live on top of each other, in apartments, in
1:36.7	high-rise blocks.
1:38.9	But then again, so much of this vast country is inhospitable and uninhabitable for reasons of climate and geography.
1:48.1	A consequence of this is that it can take a long time to get from A to B. I'm reminded of this in
1:56.9	Siberia. We've flown to Irkutsk to report on the wildfires ravaging the region,
	...

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