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From Our Own Correspondent: Coal: Germany's burning issue

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Coal: Germany's burning issue

14/12/2019 GMT

BBC World Service - From Our Own Correspondent, Coal: Germany's burning issue

Can a Ruhr mining town transition to green energy? Plus tales from Haiti, Mali and Kuwait

Can the mining towns of the Ruhr - and the German economy - really leave fossil fuels behind? Also: musical politics in Haiti, a Malian postman and an imam's legacy in Kuwait

The industrial region of the Ruhr is full of former mining towns which will have to change radically to meet the German state's commitments to move away from fossil fuels. Caroline Bayley meets some of the people trying to manage the transition and build a cleaner future. 

Pascale Harter introduces this and other stories from reporters, writers and journalists around the world.

In Haiti, they say "the country is hot" - as crowds of angry protesters fill the streets to express their anger and despair at the poverty, violence and corruption still plaguing the nation under President Jovenel Moise. As Thomas Rees explains, not for the first time in Haiti's history, a good deal of the disillusion is also being expressed through music.

We pay tribute to the late Alex Duval Smith, a journalist of empathy, bravery and wit, with one of her best-loved despatches for FOOC: the story of a Malian postman with an unusually strong commitment to public service. Working in Bamako - a city without postcodes - and having to assemble his own uniform, he still makes the rounds, tracks down missing or confused addresses, and occasionally even acts as a kind of unpaid social worker. 

And nearly thirty years after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Sumaya Bakhsh explores the void left behind in one family bereaved by the takeover. Salah al Refaei was a young imam, arrested, tortured and killed by Saddam Hussein's troops. His name and his life are still well-respected across Kuwait - but how have his widow, and the son he left behind, kept his memory alive for themselves?

Photo: Burning coals in a home brazier (Photo by Müller-Stauffenberg/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

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