Crossing Continents

The Allan B. Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas, used to be known as the Terror Dome for its high rates of inmate violence, murder and suicide. Polunsky houses all the men condemned to death in Texas (currently 185) and nearly 3,000 maximum security prisoners. But since the pandemic, a prison radio station almost entirely run by the men themselves has helped to create community--even for those on...

Illegal oil is big business in the Niger Delta. Oil thieves cut the pipelines, siphoning off oil, which they refine in the bush and sell on the black market. This vast underground industry is a huge employer in the region but it’s a dangerous business. Earlier this year, over 100 people were killed in an explosion at an illegal refinery. The local government has been cracking down on the illegal o...

Why are Native Americans striving to ‘reclaim’ the game of lacrosse? Lacrosse may have the reputation as a white elitist sport, played in private schools. In fact, it was originally a Native American game, practiced across North America before European colonisers arrived. As white settlers pushed westwards, taking land and resources, they also took lacrosse as their own. They stopped Native Americ...

Sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine, the former Soviet Republic of Moldova has recently been awarded EU candidate status. In an echo of what happened in Ukraine, Moldova lost a chunk of its eastern territory to separatists in a short war 30 years ago. The separatists were backed by elements of the Russian army. Since then Transnistria has remained a post-Soviet “frozen conflict.” In recent mont...

When the president stands accused of drug trafficking, what hope is there? From 2014, for eight years Juan Orlando Hernandez ruled Honduras like his personal fiefdom. A Central American strongman comparable with some of the worst from decades past, under his presidency Honduras began a rapid descent into a so-called “narco-state”. The allegations against his government soon started to mount up: hu...

Ukrainian forces have launched a counteroffensive to retake Kherson, the largest city captured by Russia in this year's invasion. But the occupiers are redoubling their efforts to integrate the city and surrounding region into Russia - and they need the help of local collaborators. A few Ukrainians are eagerly serving the invaders. But many key workers - teachers, doctors and other state employees...

Tigers are making a remarkable comeback in Nepal. The small Himalayan nation is on track to become the first country to double its wild tiger population in the last decade. A new census will be released on International Tiger Day (29th of July). The recovery is the result of tough anti-poaching measures that have involved the military and the local community. Other iconic species including rhinos...

Can music and culture help unite Estonia? Guitar riffs lilt through the air and over the narrow river that marks the border between Estonia and Russia. It’s the first time Estonia’s annual festival Tallinn Music Week has been held in Narva, bringing coach loads of musicians from 30 countries around the world to a normally sleepy city. The organiser moved the festival when the war in Ukraine broke...

While some countries fight to reclaim antiquities that were stolen centuries ago, Cambodian investigators are dealing with far more recent thefts. Many of the country’s prized treasures were taken by looters in the 1980s and 1990s and then sold on to some of the world’s most prestigious museums, including the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert museum. At the centre of many of the sales w...

Resistance and division among Mexico’s indigenous Yaqui people. Anabela Carlon is a legal advocate for the indigenous Yaqui of Sonora – a fierce defender of her people’s land. She is no stranger to the immense dangers that face her in northern Mexico, a region dominated by organised crime. In 2016, she and her husband were kidnapped at gunpoint by masked men. And now one of her biggest cases is re...

A form of oral poetry accompanied on the accordion is the basis of a wildly popular form of music in Lesotho, southern Africa. But jealousy between Famo artists has triggered warfare that’s killing hundreds. Some of the genre’s best-known stars became gang bosses, and their rivalry has helped make rural, stunningly beautiful Lesotho the murder capital of Africa, with the sixth highest homicide rat...

Myanmar is now in a state of civil war. What started in February 2021 as a mass protest movement against the military coup is now a nationwide armed uprising. The junta is under attack across the country from a network of civilian militias called the People’s Defence Forces who are fighting to restore democracy. The BBC gained rare access to the jungle training camps where young protests are being...

Hundreds of thousands of Russians – mainly young and well-educated - have fled abroad since their country invaded Ukraine. It’s the biggest brain drain in a short period of time in Russian history. Some fear a political crackdown. They worry they could be arrested for expressing opposition to the war, and young men might be drafted into the army. Others are escaping economic sanctions, trying to k...

Just before Christmas, 2021, Joel Vilard was driving his cousin home on a dual carriageway just south of Rennes in Brittany. Suddenly, a bullet flew through the window and hit the pensioner in the neck. He later died in hospital of injuries accidentally inflicted by a hunter firing a rifle from a few hundred metres away. A year earlier Morgan Keane, was shot dead in his garden, while out chopping...

Imagine walking down a street in a European capital and meeting your torturer. For many Syrian refugees fleeing war and human rights abuses, Europe was meant to be a sanctuary. So it was a shock when people began bumping into their torturers out shopping or in a cafe. In fact many of those involved in the Syrian government’s notorious interrogation facilities are hiding in plain sight in European...

It’s been called the priciest piece of tarmac in the world. In 2014 the government of Montenegro signed a contract with a state-owned Chinese company to build part of a 170 kilometre-long highway – a road that would connect its main port with the Serbian border to the north. The price-tag on the first 42 kilometres of asphalt was a staggering $1 billion - most of which has been borrowed from a Chi...

A giant new canal for the world’s biggest ships is the most ambitious engineering plan yet proposed by Turkey’s President Erdogan, whose massive infrastructure projects have already changed the face of his country. The proposed waterway would slice through Istanbul, creating in effect a second Bosphorus, the busy shipping lane that is now the only outlet from the Black Sea. The president himself h...

Peru has been battered by Covid-19. It has the highest known death toll in the world per capita. But behind the figures there’s another hidden pandemic. By the end of April 2021 around 93,000 children had lost a father, mother, grand-parent, or other primary caregiver to the virus - that’s one in every hundred children. For Crossing Continents, Jane Chambers travels to Lima to meet the families st...

Hundreds of young women from Sierra Leone, West Africa, have been trapped in the Arabian sultanate of Oman, desperate to get home. Promised work in shops and restaurants, they say they were tricked into becoming housemaids, working up to 18 hours a day, often without pay, and sometimes abused by their employers. Some ran away, to live a dangerous underground existence at the mercy of the authoriti...

Every weekend night in Copenhagen's red light district of Vesterbro, a group of volunteers pull up and park a red van. This is no ordinary vehicle. The interior is lit with fairy lights. There is a bed – and a ready supply of condoms. The Red Van constitutes a harm reduction strategy like no other. It is designed for use by women selling sex on the streets – somewhere they can bring their clients....

Thousands of people – mostly migrants from the Middle East - are camped in freezing weather at the Poland-Belarus border. Many have spent thousands of dollars to fly into Belarus on tourist visas, with the hope of an easy crossing into the EU. They’re pawns, trapped in a battle of wills between Belarus’ autocratic president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, and Poland and the European Union. The Polish gover...

Korea is one of the most stressed and tired nations on earth, a place where people work and study longer hours than anywhere else. And statistics show they are finding it increasingly difficult to switch off and relax; they sleep fewer hours and have higher rates of depression and suicide than almost anywhere else. And as a result sleeplessness and stress has become big business in Korea; from sle...

In the Port of Rotterdam they are preparing for a ‘White Xmas’ - but no one is talking about snow. Europe’s North Sea coast has overtaken the Iberian peninsula as the primary point of entry for cocaine reaching the continent. Industrial-sized labs have been busted in the Netherlands, and mafia-style executions have occurred on the streets. Most recently the crime journalist, Peter R de Vries was s...

A bitter fight over fish is playing out in the American West. Sockeye salmon make one of the great migrations in the world, swimming 900 miles from the Pacific Ocean to 6,500 feet up in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, where they spawn and die - but that journey may not happen much longer. In addition to the gauntlet of predators the fish face, from orcas on the west coast to eagles in the mountains, t...

It’s ten years since Libya’s dictator Col Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown. But the country’s still not a a democracy – or even a unified functioning state. The militias that brought down the dictatorship in 2011 never disbanded. They turned the country into a battleground, abducting and murdering countless citizens. Since last year, there’s been a ceasefire in the long civil war. Elections are plan...