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From Our Own Correspondent: Heroes and Villains

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Heroes and Villains

03/06/2017 GMT

BBC World Service - From Our Own Correspondent, Heroes and Villains

Figureheads and rabble-rousers in the USA, Egypt, Spain's African enclaves and Indonesia

Symbolic stories: the Confederate monuments some Americans want gone; Egyptian NGOs under pressure; African migrants in Spain's Ceuta and Melilla; a sexting Indonesian preacher.

Pascale Harter introduces stories of pioneers, figureheads and public enemies from around the world. 

Aleem Maqbool has reported from across the United States for the BBC - and race has been a recurring theme in the stories he's covered. Inequalities in education, policing and criminal justice are still glaring today - so why are some activists so keen to focus on removing or altering statues and plaques, among other reminders, commemorating figures from the era of slavery? It turns out that many feel it's necessary to confront the past to move on from it.

Orla Guerin reports from Cairo on the latest moves in an ongoing crackdown on dissent in Egypt. From media bans, to apparent show trials of political challengers, to a highly restrictive new law limiting the activities of NGOs, the demcratic space seems to be shrinking. 

Guy Hedgecoe visits Spain's tiny, fenced-in African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla - and meets some of the migrants who breached their defences to cross a land border into Europe.

And as a sexting scandal rocks Indonesia, Rebecca Henschke recalls her own efforts to follow the trail of apparently disgraced firebrand preacher Habib Rizieq - who's spent his career calling for moral revival and Islamic values, yet is now accused of trading explicit words and images with a woman not his wife.


Image: American Civil War re-enactors dressed as Confederate cavalry and artillery take part in a re-enactment of the Battle of Appomattox, on April 9, 2015 in Appomattox, Virginia - the 150th anniversary of Confederate General Robert E. Lee's surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, which marked the beginning of the end of the American Civil War in 1865.

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