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From Our Own Correspondent: Data, doctors - and doubt over Turkey's Covid statistics

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A man mourns by coffins at the Kucukcekmece Municipality Morgue in Istanbul

19/12/2020 GMT

Data, doctors - and doubt over Turkey's Covid statistics

BBC World Service - From Our Own Correspondent, Data, doctors - and doubt over Turkey's Covid statistics

Are Turkish figures downplaying the pandemic? Plus: Sudan, the Galapagos and a holy cave

Are official Turkish figures downplaying the scale of the pandemic? Plus: stumbling towards peace in Sudan's Darfur; barter is back on the Galapagos and a holy cave for mothers

Even the official statements of Covid infection cases in Turkey are alarming - but some of the country's doctors and opposition politicians argue that the true figures are higher still. Orla Guerin has been investigating the dispute over the numbers, and allegations from all sides that a health crisis has become highly politicised. 

Pascale Harter introduces this and other stories, insights and analysis from BBC correspondents and writers around the world.

The new government which replaced Omar al-Bashir's regime  in Sudan is a hybrid: half-civilian and half-military. What does that mean for the prospects for peace in some of the country's more restive corners - and in particular for its western region, Darfur, where a brutal conflict has lasted 17 years and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths? Mike Thomson wanted to see for himself. But at least some of the men now in power had other ideas...

The Galapagos Islands are a very special place - a laboratory for the process of evolution; home to unique flora and fauna amid gloriously impressive landscape. That's why so many people visit - or used to. As the Covid-19 pandemic closed down many of the islanders' usual supply lines, though, they've had to make adaptations of their own - including going back to a barter system for goods and a return to hunting feral introduced species. Jamie Lafferty has been looking into this rebalancing of their way of life.

And Yolande Knell visits another site with particular meaning - for women hoping for a child, or struggling wth motherhood. The so-called 'Milk Grotto' in the town of Bethlehem is believed by many to be a haven where the Virgin Mary herself once stopped to nurse the infant Jesus, during the holy family's flight from the massacre of the innocents ordered by King Herod. Today it's a shrine offering calm and comfort to families all over the world hoping for children of their own. 


(A man mourns by coffins at the Kucukcekmece Municipality Morgue in Istanbul, Turkey. Credit: EPA/Sedat Suna)

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