From Our Own Correspondent Folgen

A tour of Angela Merkel’s childhood, swapping books with Kurdish fighters and reading the landscape of Gabon. Kate Adie introduces correspondents’ stories.Jenny Hill visits the town where Angela Merkel grew up as she tries to learn more about the notoriously private politician. Richard Hall’s repeated trips to the Qandil mountains of Iraq allow him to assess the evolution of the PKK. But is a copy of Hemingway’s ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’ an appropriate gift for a battle-hardened Kurdish commander fighting IS?Nick Thorpe meets the migrants trying to cross the Hungary-Serbia border and Robin Banerji visits the Indian city where biryani was invented, or so some locals claim. And Andy Jones learns how the Baka hunter-gatherers of Gabon are turning their mastery of the country's tropical forests against the poachers who prowl the region.

Kate Adie introduces correspondents' stories and analysis from around the world - including from the Bangladeshi border, where we meet the Rohingya fleeing violence in Myanmar. Sanjoy Majumder is on the banks of the Naf River as families arrive by the boatload trying to escape Rakhine state. In Uganda, Ruth Alexander finds out what it’s like to try and build a home and a new life in the country often applauded for its generous policy towards refugees. In Germany, Damien McGuiness meets the “elite hipsters” of Berlin living in a parallel, English-speaking society.In Russia, Martin Vennard joins the back to school celebrations on the Day of Knowledge. And in Colombia, Mark Rickards witnesses an extraordinary race around the country and explores how cycling is helping to bring together a once divided nation.

Kate Adie introduces dispatches by: Yolande Knell in Qaraqosh, who observes Iraq's trials of people accused of fighting for so-called Islamic State; Martin Patience, who takes his leave of Nigeria with mixed emotions after a two-year stay; Matthew Hill in Sri Lanka, who finds that the strains and tensions between those who govern and many of those whom they govern are intensifying; Harriet Constable, who reports from Kenya on the increasingly violent and costly incidence of sand harvesting; and Hywel Griffith visits one of Australia's many micro-nations to meet the white-bearded Prince Paul of Wy to discover why he has set up his own realm.