Algeria & Western Sahara

When Uruguay elected Jose Mujica as its President in 2010 at the age of seventy-five, it elected a President like no other. Following his election, he refused to stay in the luxurious Presidential State house instead opting to stay at his wife's farmhouse, off a dirt road outside the capital, Montevideo. Famously he continued to drive a 1987 Volkswagen car. On his election his personal wealth was the value of that car – worth $1,800 at the time.

Sierra Leone is officially Ebola free. But memories of the disease and the devastation it caused are still fresh. The country will have to deal with the consequences for many years to come.

Between 2005 and 2014 Amnesty International documented 8,466 cases of registered police killings, with the number of such homicides in the city of Rio de Janeiro representing nearly 16% of all homicides in 2014. This episode is about state violence, state complicity in the execution of their own people. But it is also a film that highlights how young, male, black people are singled out, targeted and quite often shot. This is also a film about guns and the extent to which militarism is becoming the norm as a way of dealing with the poor.

Ghana has become one of the world's digital dumping grounds, where the West's electronic waste piles up — hundreds of millions of tons of it every year.

In March 2011, pro-democracy protests erupted in the southern Syrian city of Deraa, after the arrest and torture of some teenagers who painted revolutionary slogans on a school wall. Violence escalated and the country descended into civil war as rebel brigades were formed to battle government forces for control of cities, towns and the countryside. Fighting reached the capital Damascus and second city of Aleppo in 2012. The devastated city of Aleppo tells the story of its people, the dead and the injured, those who left and those who have remained.

The rate of elephant poaching in Eastern Africa has increased, in recent years, rising to levels that could threaten the local population. In the last seven years, an estimated 144,000 African elephants were illegally killed for their ivory. On average, one elephant was killed every 45 minutes in Tanzania alone causing their population to decline by 60%, to 43,000 animals. The ivory trade in Africa has been associated with the arms trade. Across Africa, the struggle against poachers costs the lives of around 100 wildlife rang¬ers per year.

Important coastal regions of the ice sheets on Greenland and West Antarctica, and the glaciers of the Antarctica Peninsula, are thinning and contributing to sea level rise. Also shrinking is the regional culture for the 56,000 people who live there.

 

 

"You can cut the flower, but you cannot stop the coming of spring." This episode of "What in the World" features Afghan women's rights activist, Malalai Joya.

Elected in 2003, Joya was expelled from Parliament in 2007 for refusing to retract a speech. She fights for the rights of the people, particularly disadvantaged women.