Podcast Episodes

How did India's Covid crisis become so bad?

India hit what it thought was its peak of Covid-19 infections in September 2020 when the pandemic then started to ease. But the country now has the w…

4 years, 10 months ago

Can desalination quench the world’s water worries?

Season 1 Episode 12

Desalination used to be the preserve of money-rich but water-poor Middle Eastern countries. It was expensive and caused pollution but in the arid des…

4 years, 10 months ago

How Abu Dhabi’s Hope Consortium is helping to vaccinate the world

On December 31, 2020, one year after coronavirus was first detected, the World Health Organisation gave the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine emergency validat…

4 years, 10 months ago

Is the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine safe?

The AstraZeneca vaccine was heralded as ‘the vaccine for the world’ when it was first approved for use in the UK on December 30. It is inexpensive an…

4 years, 11 months ago

Stuck in the Suez Canal

For nearly a week, the ultra-large Ever Given container ship was wedged across the Suez Canal, stopping dead all trade through one of the world’s mos…

4 years, 11 months ago

Is corruption in Iraq impossible to beat?

Iraq is listed as the 20th most corrupt country in the world in the latest ranking by anti-corruption organisation Transparency International. Venali…

4 years, 11 months ago

Raqqa after ten years of war and revolution in Syria

March 2013, Raqqa. The Syrian revolution is in full swing. A crowd gathers around a statue of Hafez Al Assad in the centre of the city. The statue is…

4 years, 11 months ago

The legacy of the Pope's Iraq visit

It's hard to overstate just how significant Pope Francis's visit to Iraq really was. Nor how remarkable it is that it actually went ahead. Iraq, desp…

5 years ago

Tunisians numb to the horror of public self-immolation

It was beyond our capacity of understanding ten years ago when a young man in Tunisia decided to take his own life by setting himself on fire. This a…

5 years ago

Why have Indian farmers been protesting for months?

On February 21 about 120,000 Indian farmers gathered at a grain market in Punjab to protest against the government. The crowds of men and women arriv…

5 years ago