High-rolling pensioners? predicting Norovirus, air pollution deaths and lost or found?
More or Less: Behind the Stats - WS More or Less: Avoiding Asteroids
A new NASA warning system means we?re getting better at spotting Earth-bound space rocks. But how safe are we?
Start the Week - Rewriting the Past: from Empire to ivory
On Start the Week Andrew Marr looks back to the end of Empire when government officials systematically destroyed the records of imperial rule, and he explores the impact of outside organisations on a nation's ability to govern. The journalist Ian Cobain has uncovered details of the mass bonfires of sensitive official papers across Africa, which subverted the legal obligation to preserve important historical records. Edna Adan Ismail first came to Britain in the 1950s to train as a nurse before championing women's rights and health at the WHO and in her native Somaliland. She explains how the self-declared independent state of Somaliland, once a British protectorate, has been fighting for international recognition for the last 15 years. Baroness Amos has worked in international affairs both for the government and the UN. Now as the head of SOAS University she says it's vital to think about the world differently, from the perspective of the countries themselves. Keith Somerville has investigated the illegal ivory trade in Africa and argues that regulation - not prohibition - is the best way to stop uncontrolled poaching and smuggling. Producer: Katy Hickman.
More or Less: Behind the Stats - Is dementia the number one killer?
Is dementia on the rise? Plus immigration, incomplete contacts and chocolate muffins
Start the Week - Island Mentality
On Start the Week Amol Rajan considers the making of the British landscape and an island mentality. The President of the Royal Geographical Society Nicholas Crane looks back over the last 12 millennia to understand how we have shaped our habitat but also how the landscape has shaped our lives. Madeleine Bunting travels through the Hebrides to see what the furthest reaches of these isles can tell us about the country as a whole. David Olusoga re-tells the story of the relationship between Britain and the people of Africa, which reaches back to the Romans, to demonstrate how black history has shaped our world, and the poet Imtiaz Dharker reflects on displacement and belonging. Producer: Katy Hickman.
More or Less: Behind the Stats - WS More or Less: Liberia?s Rape Statistic Debunked
Sexual violence was widespread in Liberia?s brutal and bloody year civil war. But were three quarters of women in the country raped? We tell the story behind the number and reveal how well-meaning efforts to expose what happened have fuelled myths and miss-leading statistics that continue to be propagated to this day, including by the UN.
We speak to Amelia Hoover Green from Drexel University, Dara Cohen from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, researcher Phyllis Kimba and Aisha Dukule from the think tank Center For Liberia's Future in Monrovia.
(Photo: Liberian women and children wait for rice rations in overcrowded Monrovia, June 2003. Credit: Georges Gobet/AFP/Getty Images)
More or Less: Behind the Stats - US election, stray cats and puzzles
Who voted in the US elections? Plus are there nine million stray cats in the UK?
More or Less: Behind the Stats - WS More or Less: Ice Cream versus aid
Does the world really spend three times as much on ice cream than on humanitarian aid?
Start the Week - Virtue and Vice
On Start the Week Andrew Marr hears stories of virtue and vice. Lucy Bailey is directing Milton's Comus, a masque in honour of chastity, in which a Lady, lost in the woods, is tempted by pleasure. In Berg's opera Lulu the eponymous heroine appears to be the epitome of seductive pleasure, an amoral seductress, but William Kentridge's production questions how much she is the real victim. The academic Simon Goldhill charts the transition from the high Victorian period into modernity through one family's relationship with sex, psychoanalysis and religion, while the very modern preoccupation with therapy is laid bare, as Susie Orbach reveals what happens behind the therapist's door.
Producer: Katy Hickman.
Start the Week - Virtue and Vice
On Start the Week Andrew Marr hears stories of virtue and vice. Lucy Bailey is directing Milton's Comus, a masque in honour of chastity, in which a Lady, lost in the woods, is tempted by pleasure. In Berg's opera Lulu the eponymous heroine appears to be the epitome of seductive pleasure, an amoral seductress, but William Kentridge's production questions how much she is the real victim. The academic Simon Goldhill charts the transition from the high Victorian period into modernity through one family's relationship with sex, psychoanalysis and religion, while the very modern preoccupation with therapy is laid bare, as Susie Orbach reveals what happens behind the therapist's door.
Producer: Katy Hickman.