Crossing Continents Folgen

The United States is in the throes of a heroin and opiate epidemic. For Crossing Continents, India Rakusen travels to Lorain County, in the state of Ohio, where addiction has become part of everyday life. West of the city of Cleveland, Avon Lake is a wealthy suburb - its large, expensive properties back onto the shores of Lake Eerie, and wild deer frolic on neat lawns. But behind this façade, there is a crisis. Many families have felt the damaging impact of addiction. And across Lorain County, opiates - pharmaceutical and street heroin - have killed twice as many people in the first six months of 2016 alone, as died in the whole of 2015.Producer Linda Pressly.

After the last elections in Russia, mass protests against vote-rigging led to clashes in the centre of Moscow. The events on Bolotnaya Square were the biggest challenge President Putin has ever faced to his rule. Four years on, several demonstrators are still serving long prison sentences, the laws on protesting have been tightened and the arrests continue. As Russia gears up for parliamentary elections in September, Sarah Rainsford talks to some of those caught up in the Bolotnaya protests, and asks what their stories tell us about Putin's Russia today. Producer: Mark Savage.

In the Colombian capital of Bogota, Lucy Ash meets two people who fear they will never be able to return to their homes. They both come from Choco, which is one of the poorest provinces and most violent parts of the country. Maria, an Afro-Colombian mother of four, fled her town after she was abducted and brutally attacked by paramilitaries. Plinio was trying to help members of his indigenous community go back to their farms when he received death threats from a splinter group of left wing guerrilla (the ELN) and his friend was assassinated.Their stories illustrate a nationwide trauma - the government may be on the brink of a historic peace deal with the FARC rebels, but Colombia has even more internally displaced people than Syria. More than 200,000 have been killed and seven million driven off their land during half a century of war. Lucy travels down the River Baudo to meet people uprooted from their jungle villages in violent clashes earlier this year and finds that Latin America's longest insurgency is far from over.Reported and produced by Lucy Ash.