麻豆社

Pascale Harter introduces stories from Syria, China, Brazil and Greece.

Whole neighbourhoods in cities across Syria lie in ruins after 14 years of civil war. But amid the wreckage, there are some signs of life - as refugees trickle back into these areas and try to work out how to remake their lives. In Ghouta, one man called out from the shell of his home to our correspondent Lyse Doucet and talked about how he's rebuilding after the fall of the Assad regime.

China's ambitions for the coming year are high. The country's still striving for pole position in the global pecking order as it makes advances in green energy, artificial intelligence, and military might. But what might be its Achilles heel? Laura Bicker looks at the challenges facing Beijing in the year ahead.

In Brazil, the battle over the future of the Amazon rainforest is still being hard fought. A group of industrial agriculture companies are trying to overturn a landmark moratorium on trading soybeans grown on recently-deforested land - a policy said to have said thousands of hectares from the chainsaws. Justin Rowlatt got a bird's eye view on the issue from the top of a tower built to gauge the health of planet Earth.

These are hard times for Greek livestock farmers - with an outbreak of sheep pox ripping through their flocks. The highly contagious viral disease isn't dangerous to humans, but it can kill animals - and it's threatening Greece's feta cheese production. There's been a surge in cases over recent months, and mass culls have hit farmers across the country - more than 400,000 sheep and goats have been killed so far. Hester Underhill travelled to the agricultural heartland of Thessaly.

Producer: Polly Hope
Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith
Production coordinators: Sophie Hill & Katie Morrison(Image: Eastern Ghouta. Credit: Lyse Doucet/麻豆社)