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Outlook: Outlook Weekend: Pick of the Week

Sammy Samuels (Left), Tomi Menaka (Right)

23/08/2015

Outlook Weekend: Pick of the Week

BBC World Service - Outlook, Outlook Weekend: Pick of the Week

The man leading Myanmar's 20 Jews;  The Japanese band with an average age of 84.

Sammy Samuels, leader of Myanmar's tiny Jewish community - just 8 families; 92 year old Tomi Menaka, singer in the latest band to take Japan's music scene by storm.

Most people in Myanmar are Buddhist; many are Muslim. But there are just eight Jewish families and Sammy Samuels is their leader. The thirty four-year-old describes what it's like to lead only 20 people.

With an average age of 84, a Japanese group called KBG84 are taking their country's music scene by storm. The 33 women in the band have been playing to sell-out crowds and have just got a record deal with their song, 'Come on and Dance, Kohama Island'. Singer Tomi Menaka reveals what it's like to be famous and dance on stage at the age of 92.

The small American town of Leith, North Dakota, has seen better days - many of the houses have been abandoned and there are only around twenty residents left. So, when new people moved in a couple of years ago, the locals were intrigued. But it turned out the incomers were Neo-Nazis, led by a known white supremacist who wanted to take over the town and turn it into an all-white enclave. The news was particularly disturbing for Leith's only black resident Bobby Harper and his wife, Sherrill. 

Thousands of women and girls have disappeared over the past decade in the State of Mexico. Many girls are targeted online and go willingly and nobody knows how many of the missing have been found, dead or alive.Some families are left to do the investigating themselves. For Outlook, Nina Lakhani meets one of the families whose daughter went missing.

Growing up Jamila Afghani had to hide the fact that she was going to school from her disapproving brothers, but these days she trains thousands of imams to deliver sermons on the importance of educating women. She shares her remarkable story with Outlook. 

Alabaster Box is a group from Ghana. They sing acapella, without instruments, and the four of them say they each have an instrument in their belly. They demonstrate their unusual orchestra to Pooneh Ghoddoosi at the Edinburgh Festival.

(Picture: Sammy Samuels (Left) and (Right) Tomi Menaka. Credit: Toru Yamanaka/AFP/Getty Images)

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