The death knell for Beirut?
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 8 August 2020
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In Lebanon, shock is turning to anger at the authorities and political class at large, after the catastrophic blast in the capital Beirut. It was caused by explosive chemicals stored improperly at the city’s port, and caused much loss of life, thousands of injuries, and damaged large swathes of the city. Lizzie Porter asks what impact this will have on the residents.
In South Africa coronavirus infections have surpassed half a million cases. That makes it the fifth worst affected country in the world. The nation had been doing well initially - measures to contain the virus were working. But, then, other problems reared their ugly heads, says Andrew Harding in Johannesburg. Around 20,000 people took to the streets of Berlin last weekend to protest against the anti-coronavirus restrictions, even though few of them remain in force. Most of the demonstrators had been bussed in from elsewhere, and as it turns out, their real agenda had relatively little to do with measures to combat the pandemic, as Damien McGuinness reports.
In Iran, Covid-19 carries great social stigma, as Jiyar Gol has learned. Some people claim their relatives died of other illnesses, and others fear that no one will marry their daughters if anyone finds out they ever had Covid-19. The state, too, is less than fully transparent. The real number of cases could be three times that of government reports.
According to a recent, yet ineffective campaign, France is the European champion for the abandoning of pets. Never more so than at this time of year, when so many people drive to their holiday destinations that the motorways are congested. Why won't they take their cats or dogs along, asks Chris Bockman in the southwest of the country.
Presenter: Kate Adie Producer: Arlene Gregorius
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. |
| 0:05.0 | Good morning. Today, most countries struggling with the pandemic are having to cope with the |
| 0:10.3 | urban flow of statistics. Are they winning the battle? Are they merely holding things at bay? |
| 0:16.8 | Something which in South Africa has been signaled by the noisy celebratory vuvozala's falling silent. Germany has seen politicians use the word |
| 0:27.0 | COVID-idioten for the demonstrators in Berlin protesting about restrictions. We look at the reasons. On Iran, the |
| 0:36.1 | statistics are hard to pin down, but what's certain is that the virus comes with |
| 0:41.5 | considerable social stigma |
| 0:43.6 | and our correspondence nieces are infected with their mother fearing |
| 0:47.3 | no one will marry them if they find out. |
| 0:50.5 | And it's the tale of the tail end of summer in France, where more pets are abandoned this time of year than anywhere else in Europe. |
| 0:59.0 | First to Lebanon. Beirut is one of those cities you can fall in love with. Lively, great food, |
| 1:07.0 | the beach, the wine, a cosmopolitan air, in good times that is. Now it couldn't be in greater trouble after the massive |
| 1:16.2 | explosion in the port with 300,000 people homeless says Lizzy Porter, and anger rising. |
| 1:24.0 | The sky turned dusty pink and then cobalt blue as the sun set over a bay route with a broken soul. |
| 1:31.0 | At the Jaitawi-Lebanese hospital, two nuns sat in front of a gaping window frame, |
| 1:37.2 | with what remained of the city's port behind them. The glass had been blasted out by the catastrophic explosions that ripped through a seafront warehouse the previous night. |
| 1:47.0 | That blast rocked the large hospital, a Maronite Christian church property, hence the nuns, smashing equipment, door frames and all the windows. |
| 1:57.0 | Staff had to move the 115 patients already there, including individuals infected with coronavirus, to other units and urgently. |
| 2:06.2 | But people with injuries from the blast soon began to stagger into the hospital, which, like |
| 2:10.4 | others in the capital, was unable to cope with their numbers. |
| 2:14.0 | In disaster situations you do triage, says Pierre Yarred, from behind a white face mask. |
| 2:19.0 | Yesterday we got people who didn't revive. |
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