This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm Alex Ritson, and at 14 hours GMT on Tuesday the 24th of December, these are our main stories.

A NASA spacecraft tries to fly closer to the sun than any previous man-made object.

The UN warns that famine is spreading across Sudan with the region of Darfur among the

worst affected, and hundreds of people demonstrating Christian areas of the Syrian capital

Damascus over the burning of a Christmas tree.

Also in this podcast.

I read something like 30% of the island have power back

and only 27% have water back.

A rare glimpse into life on the island of Mayotte

in the aftermath of Cyclone Cheado.

Never has man or a man-made object got so close to the sun.

Flying at almost 700,000 kilometres an hour, NASA's Parker solar probe is right now soaring through the sun's outer atmosphere, battling scorching temperatures and extreme radiation

in the process. NASA's head of science, Dr. Nicola Fox, says it's all to improve humanity's

understanding of our great star. We've never been able to sort of explain some of these mysteries,

things like why is the corona, that hazy atmosphere that you see during a total solar eclipse?

Why is that roughly 300 times hotter than the visible surface of the sun?

Why does this atmosphere get super energized so much so that it can break away from the pull of a huge magnetic star and bathe all of the planets.

It carves out a protective bubble for us.

And as we're looking for planets in other solar systems that could actually, you know, harbor life,

we need to understand how our star works so that we can know what kind of stars we're looking for in other galaxies

as we search for more and more exoplanets.

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