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The Fifth Floor

Factual: Life Stories

Global stories from the BBC’s 40 Language Services, with Faranak Amidi

Faranak Amidi presents global stories from the Fifth Floor, home to the BBC’s 40 Language Services.

Faranak Amidi presents global stories from the Fifth Floor, home to the BBC’s 40 Language Services

The Fifth Floor: Life in the Freezer

The other side of Fallujah

10/01/2014

Life in the Freezer

BBC World Service - The Fifth Floor, Life in the Freezer

Tips from Siberia on how to survive the polar vortex

Fallujah before the violence; Siberian survival tips for the polar vortex; Juba diary; and Cyril Radcliffe - the man who drew the line of partition between India and Pakistan.

It has been so cold in the United States this week that whole parks have seemingly iced over and people have been throwing pans of boiling water in the air to watch it turn to snow before it lands. Stories like this are an every day occurrence in the Russian town of Oymyakon, the coldest inhabited place on the the planet. Cars there are double glazed so the windscreens won't shatter in the cold and thermometers have to be specially built to record the extreme temperatures. Russian service head Artyom Liss, who visited the area shares some survival tips. 

The Other Side of Fallujah
If you have heard of Fallujah you will most likely have been hearing about violence. The government lost control of the city last week, but for years it's been a hotspot of insurgent activity. Why is this city so troubled and what happens there outside of the chaos we are used to hearing about? BBC Arabic's Basheer Alzaidi tells us a different story of the city.

Multilingual Children
One of the common dilemmas that many of our Language Service journalists face is not necessarily in the newsroom, but in their own homes. It is the challenge of raising a bilingual - or even multilingual - child here in the UK. Does your child speak your mother tongue? And which language do they prefer? We get insights from the BBC's Zoya Trunova, Leyla Najafova from our Azeri language service and Thomas Pappon from BBC Brasil.

Juba Diary
South Sudan saw out the old year with a bang and ushered in the new with more bangs. On New Year's eve, BBC Africa's Anne Soy got the green light to fly into the capital, Juba and she shares her diary from her week there.

Drawing Partition 
The lawyer Cyril Radcliffe's name is barely remembered in his native United Kingdom, but it has an immediate resonance in India and Pakistan where he was responsible for drawing The Radcliffe Line demarcating the two countries in 1947. A new play in London, by Howard Brenton, looks at the remarkably short period of five weeks in which he did so, with no prior knowledge of the area at all or experience in map making. Vandna Dhand of BBC Hindi and Arif Shamim of BBC Urdu have previewed the play and tell David what they thought.

Online Greatest Hits
Fifi Haroon takes us on a whirl around some of the top-hitting stories from the BBC's language websites, including the dog who swallowed a diamond ring and the man who got stuck in a washing machine.

(Image: A woman pushes her daughter and their groceries through blowing snow. Credit: AP)

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