Crossing Continents
Stories from around the world and the people at the heart of them.
- Update frequency
- every 7 days
- Average duration
- 28 minutes
- Episodes
- 392
- Years Active
- 2010 - 2025
Korea Host Bars
South Korean women, tradition says, are hard-working, respectful to family, and know their place in Korea's Confucian hierarchies. But the country's rapid economic development has meant some startlin…
Cold Turkey in Karachi
Karachi is facing a drugs epidemic. Pakistan's sprawling port city has an estimated half a million chronic heroin addicts. The drug is cheap and easily available as it comes across the Pakistan/Afgha…
Rwanda Cycling
Rwanda is a nation of bicycles; large cumbersome machines, piled high with sacks of coffee or potatoes, so heavy they can only be pushed up the steep winding roads in this "land of a thousand hills."…
Spain's White Elephants
The state-of-the-art Aeropuerto Don Quijote in Ciudad Real opened for business at the end of 2008. The vision was to create an air hub in the heart of Spain, and its backers believed it would bring b…
China Tweeting
In just three years China's main microblogging site, Sina Weibo, has surpassed Twitter's entire global membership. More than 300 million Chinese are now tweeting, with millions more joining the natio…
Some Promised Land
Writer and broadcaster Maria Margaronis follows the route taken by migrants fleeing war or poverty who are risking their lives to reach the Europe Union. It is estimated that around 75 thousand peopl…
China: Too Old to Get Rich?
In this week's Crossing Continents, Mukul Devichand tells the stories of Shanghai's rapidly ageing population. China's natural ageing process has been accelerated by the One Child Policy. Mukul tell…
Russia's New Energy Frontier
Lucy Ash visits Russia's new energy frontier in the Arctic Yamal region and explores the impact oil and gas extraction is having on the indigenous people there.
Gradually but inexorably, reindeer giv…
A Death in Honduras
Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world. The People's Funeral Service deals daily with the fall-out from these extreme levels of violence. Set up by the Mayor of Tegucigalpa, the capital ci…
The Marriage Breakers of Bangladesh
In Bangladesh, twenty percent of girls are married before their fifteenth birthday. Jemy is likely to be one of them. She is thirteen years old and due to marry a cousin in three days time. Meanwhil…
The Pink Certificate
There's a Turkish saying that every man is born a soldier; and in Turkey every man is conscripted for military service of up to 15 months. There is no alternative to this; Turkey does not recognise t…
Forced Sterilisation in Uzbekistan
Natalia Antelava reports on Uzbekistan where women have become the new target of one of the most repressive regimes on earth. She uncovers evidence that women are being sterilised,often without their…
The Angola 2
Tim Franks looks at the case of two US inmates who have been held in solitary confinement in Louisiana for what will be 40 years this month. It's believed to be the longest period of time in US penal…
Canada's prescription drug crisis
Canada's First Nations communities are in crisis. Addiction to prescription pain-killers is rife, and it's devastating the fragile communities of northern Ontario.
OxyContin - an opioid drug capable …
What happened to the Kurdish spring?
Twenty years ago, the Kurdish region in Northern Iraq achieved effective autonomy after the first Gulf War, establishing a liberal constitution and a democratic assembly. The region is booming econom…
Saving the Brazilian Amazon
The Amazon rainforest is perhaps the world's greatest single environmental asset. For years the accepted wisdom has been that the remorseless tide of destruction there is unstoppable. Justin Rowlatt …
Frank Wild's last journey
Sir Ernest Shackleton has a heroic place in the annals of Antarctic exploration, famously for his expedition on the aptly-named Endurance in 1914. He intended to cross over the Antarctic landmass. In…
The Graves of Kashmir
Jill McGivering, the BBC World Service South Asia editor, investigates the discovery of thousands of bodies in mass graves in Indian Kashmir. Human rights groups suspect they are just some of the vic…
China's Migrant Worker Mega-City
The world economy has pinned its hopes on China's economy, which depends on over 150 million migrant workers and their labour. The system of internal migration, based on the idea that workers do not …
Exposing Bali's Orphanages
Ed Butler reports on a cycle of abuse in the orphanages of Bali. Some seventy orphanages now populate the island, housing thousands of children, many recruited from poor families, on the promise of a…