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From Our Own Correspondent

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Kate Adie introduces insight, wit and analysis from BBC correspondents and writers.

Kate Adie introduces insight, wit and analysis from BBC correspondents, journalists and writers telling stories from around the world.

From Our Own Correspondent: 29/05/2010

29/05/2010

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent, 29/05/2010

Kate Adie looks behind the headlines with despatches from Jamaica, Germany and North Korea

Jamaica's gangster, aka 'The President'. Happier days of the troubled Euro. Germany's murderous past remembered on the pavements. The stranglehold of North Korea's propagandists.

The world of the Jamaican gangster who's sometimes called, "The President".

We remember much happier days for Europe's now deeply-troubled currency.

The reminders of Germany's murderous past on the streets of Berlin

And how North Korea can even make football feel like a state secret.


A woman called Justine spelled out just how bad things were in the Jamaican capital, Kingston. She told the BBC that she'd been trapped in her home for days by fighting between gangsters and the police. She said her neighbour had been shot in the face, and that outside in the street, dead bodies were swelling in the Carribbean heat.... The police operation was aimed at capturing a gangland Boss -- a man called "Dudas". The plan is to extradite him to America. And Nina Robinson has been piecing together the story behind this powerful figure at the centre of the violence..... 

Hosting the World Cup in the weeks ahead will give South Africa a chance to present itself at its very best. And it has an inspiring story to tell. It managed to dissolve Apartheid without violence. And there was admiration around the world for the effort to forge a "rainbow nation"....a land of racial harmony.... But that isn't the whole picture. As Hugh Sykes explains, not far below the surface real tensions endure.... 

For Europe's leaders, these are indeed tense times. The Euro zone is in crisis. The towering debts of its weaker nations are straining the whole system. Some wonder whether the currency union will even survive.... But it all looked so very different just over a decade ago when the Euro was launched. The optimism flowed like the champagne at celebrations in Brussels, and our correspondent, David Shukman was there. But he'd first begun to notice the Euro idea take hold years earlier.... 

As a correspondent in a new posting, you only really start to understand the place when you get a feel for its past. And a nation's history isn't only to be found on its battlefields, or in the ruins of its castles. It also lies in the bones of its culture -- in its poems, in its music, and in the stories that your neighbours might tell you... And in Berlin, Joanna Robertson felt an uneasy sense of the past even closer to home.... 

Even by their fraught standards, the latest tensions between the two Koreas are extreme. North Korea has threatened....in its words....to remove all the "human trash" from the peninsula if it's provoked by the South. This follows the sinking of a South Korean navy ship last month. The North's been blamed, but denies responsibility... Quite how it'll react if the crisis deepens is impossible to say. As Sue Lloyd Roberts has been finding out, North Korea remains as hard to read as ever....

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

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29/05/2010

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