This is the BBC.

Hello. Today Venezuela is mired in economic misery.

Our correspondent returns to find eye-watering inflation, imitated children and a nation going hungry.

It may be thousands of years since the ancient Phoenicians traversed the seas, but in today's Lebanon claims to Phoenician identity are proving controversial.

In South Africa the trial which sent Nelson Mandela to prison was recorded and our correspondent has family reasons for listening

to the tapes.

And as if what's outside isn't enough, we're going for a walk in the Arctic. Yes, it's freezing, but very special.

On March the 18th, the people of Russia will get to vote on who should be their next president. There seems to be little doubt

that Vladimir Putin will secure a fourth term in power. Announcing his candidacy

in December, he said that he'd like to see a more competitive political environment, but pointed out that there's no viable alternative to him, and that no one can compete with his record of salvaging the country from economic ruin.

Nevertheless, his won't be the only name on the ballot paper.

Gabriel Gatehouse has been looking back on Putin's rise to power and the story behind one of his

challenges. Russians rarely see their president cry, though there's been plenty of

tragedy during his 18 years in power. It happened once right at the start of his

rule on February the 24th in the year 2000 at the funeral of Anatoly Subchak.

Subchak was one of the men who alongside Gorbachev and Yeltsin helped bring about the end of the Soviet Union.

He was also the reformer who plucked a middle-ranking KGB officer by the name of Vladimir Putin from obscurity and gave

him his first job in politics.

No one really knows what drove him to make that fateful decision.

But today, factions from the old Soviet security establishment

have taken hold of the levers of power in Russia to such an extent

as to make democracy hardly worth the name.

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