The Superlinguists: Monolingual societies

The discovery of a mysterious delivery of defective, sediment-heavy fuel intended to generate electricity in Lebanon has sparked a huge scandal in the country. More than two dozen people, including senior officials, have been charged with various alleged crimes including bribery, fraud, money-laundering and forging documents. Lebanon has already been in uproar since last autumn, with hundreds of thousands of people involved in street protests demanding the overthrow of the entire political elite – and now the country’s suffering its worst economic crisis in decades. The national currency has collapsed and more than a third of the workforce is unemployed. Electricity shortages – long a problem in Lebanon - have become still more acute, with whole towns plunged into darkness for long periods – and the row over the suspect oil delivery has exacerbated the problem. Now the investigation into the tainted fuel has raised questions about the original deal to import heavy fuel oil – and Lebanese hope it will eventually help explain why they’ve suffered black-outs for so long. Did officials try to cover up the presence of sediment in the shipment? How did the original much-criticised 2005 fuel contract come about? And what do the revelations tell us about the shadowy world of oil trading that the world relies on? Reporters Tim Whewell and Mohamad Chreyteh investigate. (Image: Zouk power station, Lebanon – where the tainted fuel shipment was first discovered. Credit: Joseph Eid/AFP via Getty Images)

16 Juli 202026min

Want to know who you really are? Take an at-home DNA test, just like over 26 million others have around the globe. But the question is: why? For many, it’s just a bit of fun; for others it might be for medical insight. But for everyone, it promises to tell you who you really are – and for many, those results might come as a surprise. For BBC reporter Sophia Smith Galer and her father, an innocent at-home kit led to a series of shocking discoveries about their family

14 Juli 202027min

We listen in to four black-owned radio stations in the United States to find out how they are covering the killing of George Floyd and the waves of protest since. From Philadelphia, Houston, Los Angeles and Chicago, we hear discussions on preparing young people for encounters with police, on access to finance and housing and on black identity and activism. We also bring the hosts together, in conversation with Chloe Tilley, to find out what it means to be behind the mic on a black-owned station. How is it different to working elsewhere in the US media?

12 Juli 202050min

This series comes from the Bradford Royal Infirmary, in the North of England, with recordings made by Dr John Wright, who works there. He is an epidemiologist and as he helps the hospital prepare and cope with a huge influx of patients, he’s also searching for answers about Covid-19.

12 Juli 202050min

In March and April, Guayaquil in Ecuador was the epicentre of the Covid pandemic in Latin America. The city’s health services began to collapse fast – hospitals, cemeteries and morgues were overwhelmed. As the bodies of the dead were not collected, hundreds of desperate families kept the remains of their loved ones at home, or deposited them on the streets. Eventually they were picked up. But in the chaos, some corpses went missing.For Assignment, Mike Lanchin teams up with Guayaquil journalist Blanca Moncada, to follow the story of one woman in her dramatic search for the body of her late husband. (Image: Funeral workers with a coffin in the back of a pick-up truck outside Los Ceibos hospital in Guayaquil. Credit: Reuters/Santiago Arcos)

9 Juli 202027min

Maps are the scaffolding of the digital age. Without them, and their associated data, a technological revolution is impossible. Vast swathes of Africa are still not mapped to a true local scale. That means governments face huge problems when tackling rapid urbanisation on this fast changing continent – they simply don’t know where people are. It also means that when outbreaks of disease occur, mapping the spread of infections is all but impossible. Katie Prescott travels to Rwanda, to Kigali, which is rapidly changing its layout and erasing signs of the past, to the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the maps just seem to stop, and to Tanzania’s commercial hub of Dar Es Salaam, to hear how community mapping projects run by students are helping to tackle flooding, and outbreaks of cholera.

7 Juli 202027min

As Americans call for change following the killing of George Floyd, three women share the history of slavery in their families and discuss its impact on society today. Sharon Leslie Morgan in Mississippi is the founder of Our Black Ancestry Foundation, which provides resources for African American genealogical research. She's also co-written a book on the subject called Gather at the Table. Bernice Alexander Bennett is a blogger and radio host in Silverspring, Maryland. Shonda Brooks is a therapist in New Jersey. They've been reflecting with Nuala McGovern on what they uncovered when they researched their own family trees.

4 Juli 202027min

The BBC’s China correspondent, John Sudworth, travels to Wuhan – the city on the banks of the Yangtze river where Covid-19 first emerged. As the city returns to life, he examines one of the biggest questions on everyone’s mind: did the virus emerge naturally or could it have been leaked, as the US alleges, from a Wuhan lab, where work was being carried out to research bat viruses? As John and his team discover, asking questions and getting answers in Wuhan is no easy task. Reporter: John Sudworth Producer: Kathy Long Photo: Two motorcyclists in Wuhan, China - June 2020 Credit: Getty Images

2 Juli 202026min