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The Fifth Floor

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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

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The Fifth Floor: Damascus Nightlife

Documentaries

Nightlife in Damascus

25/08/2017 GMT

Damascus Nightlife

BBC World Service - The Fifth Floor, Damascus Nightlife

Bars, clubs and pubs: BBC Arabic reveals a surprising new nightlife in Syria's capital.

Damascus nightlife scene; Russian fake news; meeting BBC Pidgin; remembering Quetta's best; Somalia's musical golden age; Fifi Haroon.  With David Amanor.

It's Saturday night, bars and pubs are busy, and loud music pumps out of nightclubs.   BBC Arabic's Omar Abdel-Razek discovered a surprising side to life in the Syrian capital Damascus, where six years into the civil war a new nightlife has emerged.  

Fake Russian news 
BBC Russian had a big hit this week with a real story about fake news.  Errors in syntax, spelling and the use of the indefinite article revealed the fake - all standard slip-ups among Russians trying to master English.  Not mistakes our esteemed colleague Famil Ismailov of BBC Russian would ever fall into.  Eh Famil?

Welcome to BBC Pidgin  
This week, the BBC launched its new Pidgin service.  Derived from English and local languages, it's a simple and ever-changing language of very ordinary people. So what will this street language bring to the news?  Over to Helen Oyibo and Daniel Semeniworima from the new Pidgin team.

Balochistan portraits
In August last year, a bomb ripped through a hospital in Quetta, provincial capital of Balochistan, Pakistan, killing 70 people.  BBC Urdu's Sharjil Baloch is from Quetta, and for him the attack wasn't just a news story, it was personal; several of his close friends were among the dead.   So he decided to remember them all - not in print, but in paint.   

Somalia's musical golden age
Disco, funk and racing dance tunes: a haul of cassettes hidden during the war between Somalia and Somaliland have been reissued on an album called Sweet as Broken Dates.  Yasmin Ahmed from BBC Somali has been getting stuck into these vintage tunes from Somalia's musical golden era.

And Fifi Haroon's pick of the world wide web.

Image: Nightlife in Damascus
Credit: BBC

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