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From Our Own Correspondent
Iran's hijab protests
00:28:22
A women's marathon race is the latest flash-point in ongoing protests over hijab laws.
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Hello. Today in Svalbard, Norway, we're on the trail of polar bears. But keep your distance and that's an order. Irish whisky once held preeminent status among connoisseurs. We chart its fall and rise as it makes a comeback in the bars of Mumbai. Tis the season for roast chestnuts. In the south of France, we sample some of the tasty treats now under threat from climate change. And in Switzerland, we explore the country's complicated claim to neutrality in light of new information about espionage activities during World War II. But first to Iran. Earlier this month, a marathon race was held on Kish Island, a tourist resort in the south of the country. Around 3000 men took part and in a separate race, around 2000 women. Noticeable for the decision of many runners to do away with the mandatory hijab. It was not an uncontroversial move. Race organizers were arrested after the event, but it has been seen as a sign of the determination among Iranian women to continue resisting the morality codes enforced by the government. Farah Naq Hamidi spoke to some of the women who took part in the race.
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I was scrolling through my Instagram when I came across a video. It showed hundreds of women dressed in red T shirts and athletic gear, their hair in ponytails or pushed back, with headbands, excitedly waiting, music playing loudly from speakers. And then, bang. The race starts. Many women in Iran have been protesting the mandatory hijab for more than 40 years. But things gained momentum in September of 2022 when a young woman called Mahsa Amini was arrested in Tehran by the so called morality police for allegedly not wearing her hijab properly. She died a few days later when, while in custody, protests swept across the country with women on the forefront, burning their scarves and shouting woman life. Freedom. For months, the regime couldn't stop the protests, but eventually hundreds of protesters, including some children, had been killed on the streets. The protest petered out, but the wider resistance didn't. One of the women who participated in the kish marathon is 40 year old Artemis, and she shared with me her observations about how things have been changing since 2022. We went from ditching our headscarves that summer to wearing crop tops and leggings around Tehran the next year, she told me. In the past few years, many women have been ditching the hijab altogether, and this has also changed the way they behave in public. Videos I've seen on social media show women running in parks, cartwheeling on sidewalks, or doing choreographed dances in shopping malls. And the authorities are finding it difficult to know how to respond to the sheer volume. Arrests are often made, women are fined and social media accounts are shot down by authorities. But the cat and mouse game continues after 2022. There seems to have been an unwritten agreement between the majority of people to keep spaces safe for women and not harass them. The harassment comes mostly from authorities, Artemis explained to me. Only two days before the marathon in Kish, the Islamic Republic's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, warned the domestic media to not promote Western values regarding women and hijab. The country's Chief Justice, Ghulam Hussein Mohseniyeh Ejayi added that the issue of hijab is everyone's responsibility and more needs to be done in regard to hijab and public decency. Just before the marathon in Kish, there was a state sponsored march in support of mandatory hijab that took place in Tehran. Fully covered women wearing chadoors also took part holding placards asking for a stricter approach to women who defied the mandatory hijab. All this made the Kish marathon more significant and I wanted to know what it felt like for women to be there. Being next to all those women, we all just felt so free. Even now it makes me want to cry thinking about it, One of the runners, Sara, told me. Even a year ago I couldn't think of such a thing happening. She added. It felt like we had finally reached a milestone. There is an old photo taken at an all women's race held in tehran back in 1999. In it you can see thousands of women running in long, heavy coats and black headscarves. I remember how back then that was considered a bold move, a breakthrough for women. I shared the photo with Sara and asked her what she thought about it. I salute those women. It was their fight. Running this year's marathon was my personal act of defiance. Passing that finish line was like finally winning over all those limitations, she told me. It was the same for Artemis. When I look at that image from 1999, I know it was a moment of freedom for them, she told me and added, this year though, it was different. People cheered us, there was live music. It made me want to stop and cry a few times. For many women the event was emotional. It felt like a victory, an achievement against all odds. And for Iran's authorities, it was another warning sign that the fight will go on.
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Farina Kemidi Svalbard is a remote Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean that's home to a unique array of wildlife, from reindeer to Walruses and of course, polar bears. This year, amendments to its Environment act came into force, mandating people to keep at least 300 metres away from the bears, extending to 500 metres during certain months. Though common sense might say you stay as far away as possible at any time of the year. Today, polar bears are facing serious threats to their survival, and Beth Timmins considers their future and past while sailing on a tall ship off the bay of Skansbuchter.
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The far north is a place that still holds me spellbound. The ship's log read as weather calm, overcast, bright wind W force 2 air temperature 3 degrees centigrade 0815 anchor moored to ice edge sightings polar bear and there he was. Through binoculars off the northern coast of Svalbard, I saw him lift his head and point his nose forward, his entire form perfectly straight as he headed for Svenskohusit, the Swedish house. Now a shell of rusted tin, bent nails and collapsing wood. It was first built in 1872, the oldest house in Spitsbergen, the only permanently populated island of the Svalbard archipelago, and a sailor had told me of its curse. In the 1800s, a group of sealers were stranded nearby on the north west shoreline, and 17 of the men, the ones without families, were selected to set off and find help. After seven days they made it to the house and were happy to find a stock of tinned food provisions. So they chose to overwinter there. To the left of the house I could see two old crosses made of driftwood which marked two small bumps in the ground. Still watching, I spotted the bear disappear behind a steep white drift of snow. Weighing 2/3 of a ton, he'd cleared half the mountain in minutes, still going arrow straight for the house. The sailor told me that nothing more was heard of the men until another rescue expedition reached the Swedish house the following summer. From afar they'd seen men sitting at the table, in chairs and in the beds, but on a closer look, each had been frozen solid, then preserved by the cold. The cause of their deaths remained a mystery until research in 2008 found they had been poisoned by the lead soldiering of the tins. The first two to die were those buried beneath the driftwood crosses. The bear appeared once more, taking heavy, graceful steps. Earlier, hiking on the ice, I'd seen his print smoothed by the snow and the wind. They were sure and determined, nothing wasted. Reaching his destination, the polar bear leapt up to the boarded up window of the Swedish house, meters in a single movement. Dissatisfied, he inspected the next window and then Nosed back to the ground, left as quickly as he'd arrived. One thing I find very interesting about the polar bears is, is that the old seal trappers were rarely scared of them. They had to sneak up so the bears didn't run away, said Hukumi Nomevola, a young archivist at Svalbard's Museum. Nowadays it's the other way round. It is we who fear the bear. The bears are smart too. I'd read that they often employ complex techniques, using objects like rocks or pieces of ice to disrupt traps or throw at potential prey. Ever since Europeans first entered Svalbard, hunters pursued the polar bear for its coveted white fur. Svalbard's founder, the Dutch explorer Willem Barents, who gave his name to the Barents Sea, killed one back in the 1500s after a disastrous attempt to capture it after it boarded his ship. In the 17th and 18th centuries, they were hunted with lances and muskets. And then the Norwegians invented the self triggered rifle trap in the archipelago and killed around 300 a year. Today, though, a new law has been passed to better protect them, though it's also legally required to carry a rifle in this region due to the threat they pose. The law aims to preserve all of Svalbard's vulnerable ecosystem and keep the increasing human activity at bay. I am very glad to hear of the restrictions. The bears should be respected and need all the help they can get, Hookham told me. Back in the town centre of Longyearbyen, Svalbard's governor told me it will help the wildlife at a time of growing environmental stress. The purpose is to protect them, he said. A lot of tourist companies advertise seeing the bears up close and a lot of tourists have false expectations, he explained. Now it has become more strict, but everyone will adapt, he said pragmatically. In the mountains around us, I'd seen deep, wide ribbons carved into the steepest snowdrifts. I couldn't resist the fun of sliding down them belly first, as the Inuit word nuinarpog came to mind, meaning to take extravagant pleasure in being alive. These deep lines were, I'm told, made by the polar bears sliding down along the wide horizon of whiteness.
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Beth Timmins next. The French have a penchant for chestnuts, and demand in the country often vastly outstrips supply. But in the chestnut groves of the Cevennes, intensifying droughts are pushing this emblematic crop to the brink. Julius Purcell went to meet the Saevenol chestnut farmers working on the front line of climate change. And found that amid the brute realities of a warming planet, there are some glimmers of hope.
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I'm standing inside a hopper the size and shape of a single bed. It has wooden sides, a metal base, and is filled up to my ankles with chestnuts. Below, there's a furnace whose heat I can feel through my boots. In the Cevennes, this type of furnace is known as a kled, and it belongs to a young chestnut farmer called Camille Fage, who has just stoked it with logs. The flames crackle under us. You can jump up and down, it's fine, camille says. And so I do, a little gingerly. My feet kick up a delicious toasted smell from the drying chestnuts. A precarious balancing act over a furnace seems a fitting symbol for Camille's business. A photo on the wall shows her, at age of three, with a basket, roaming the groves behind the kled that once belonged to her great grandparents. Now aged 34 and collecting five tons of chestnuts a year, she's maintaining a tradition that she loves. But she's also monitoring the alarming shifts in climate that could one day kill it off. We set up the steep slopes to see her trees. It's a chilly winter afternoon, but the cold has come to the Cevennes late this year, as Camille is only too aware. She's one of a team of farmers collecting data for France's national center for Scientific Research on the effect of climate change on chestnut trees. These trees need cold, heat and rain, all at particular times, but the summer was sweltering and there's been too little rain this autumn, she says. In October, we harvested in our T shirts. Her field notes brim with data on rainfall and temperatures when the chestnut buds, when the male flowers emerge. She's also monitoring disease. The root blight, known in French as lancre, thrives on milder winters. Climate change is accelerating its deadly spread. In the grove she's just harvested, the harvest nets are still lying on the ground. We push on up to another grove. No nets here. All these trees, she says, pointing at the tangle of bare branches, had ancre, and all of them are now dead. Chestnuts have long been a key crop in the hardscrabble, forested hills of the Cevennes. Then many groves fell into disuse. One big chestnut producer still operates here. But it's thanks to small producers that chestnut culture lives on in the Cevennes markets and village festivals. South of Camille's farm is the village of St. Martin de Bourbo. It's dusk, and I'm greeted by winter silence and a tournial. Down in the woods and nearby, though in a modern hall, all is cosiness and conviviality. This is the Essenciel, a social club and vital meeting place for St. Martin's isolated community. Celine Ruano is the Essenciel's founder and a chestnut farmer too. She sees the role of the Essenciel and chestnuts as essential pun intended to the social fabric of her village. At the bar I talk to Ann Katty, whose chestnuts are processed with the help of Margalie, a fellow essencial member. Margalie lends Ann Katty the equipment she needs to process her crop into chestnut jams. If the watchword of the Essenciel is solidarity, the other word of the evening is climate. Up here, chestnut trees can weather the hotter summers. But further down the valley, Ankatti tells me, at 200 meters altitude, the chestnut trees are dying. So will chestnuts disappear from the Cevennes. Everyone chooses their words carefully. Disappear is too big a word, Celine says. There have always been droughts and disease. It's just that it's all getting worse. But like this social club, she adds, en resiste, we're hanging on. Everyone I talk to mentions the more weather resistant chestnut varieties that are currently in development. Such solutions, it's hoped, will emerge in part from the climate data that Camille and others are gathering. So amid the eco grief, there is some hope in the chestnut groves of the Cevennes this Christmas. I don't know if new techniques will save my trees, camille had told me earlier. Will I still be able to make chestnut flower at 70? I hope with all my heart that I can.
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Julius Purcell Next to Ireland, Irish pubs may be one of the Emerald Isle's most ubiquitous exports. But Irish whisky has dipped in popular over the last century, in part due to politics, but also increased international competition. Today, Irish distilleries are fighting back, and Jordan Dunbar has been following the fate of his homeland's much loved liquor ever since a surprise encounter in Japan.
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I sat there with a face like an abandoned pug. The smoke from a lone woman's cigarettes swirled around me. The dim lighting of this Hiroshima dive bar bounced off her well quartered hair. The barman in a well cut waistcoat surrounded by expensive looking bottles, looked perplexed. My colleague Chica had just asked him about the vast range of whiskies all around him, detailed in an expensive feeling leather drinks menu. He says they have no Irish whisky. In fact, he's not even sure what Irish whisky there is. She exclaimed the barman shook his head as I rolled off names of Irish brands. Bush Mills, Jameson, Middleton and more. Perhaps it was just this bar, I thought. Maybe it's just this barman who doesn't know of Ireland's whisky, an almost sacred spirit intimately linked with its national pride and identity. My own fascination with whisky began when I was growing up, when I was told of priceless barrels of it rumoured to be buried under my hometown in County Down. But why had it vanished from menus like this? Over a zoom call, Johnny Foyle, a smooth talking Englishman from Sotheby's, tells me about his job as head of Global Whisky to track down the world's most valuable collections for ultra high wealth clients in Hong Kong, Mumbai, New York and London. He lists them in order of their worth. Well, by value. It's Scotch, Japanese, Bourbon, and then last is Irish. Irish has really slipped in recent years. There is a world of difference between it and the best single malt Scotch or Japanese. My jaw drops as Johnny tells me of a bottle of single malt Scotch which sold for $2.7 million. The situation for Irish whisky was even worse than I'd thought. In fact, the whole industry had nearly gone extinct. This is where my buried treasure comes in. Ireland was once the world's largest whisky exporter and the largest of those brands was Dunville's. The company's secret was in volume, not value. They distilled whisky from their Belfast base for Australia, America, Canada, India and beyond in bars across the former British Empire. It was grand, ornate Dunville's Myrrhs you'd see behind the bar. By the start of the 20th century, Irish distillers controlled about 70% of the world whisky market. It was the Dunvilles and their associated brands that were doing most of that selling. But their fortunes mirrored that of the global whisky industry and fell. Hence the rumours in my town about the priceless whisky buried in tunnels under the ruins of their palatial mansion. This was in part because the world of whisky changed after the partition of Ireland. Prohibition in America and the Second World War in the Republic of Ireland, the distillers were cut off from the huge markets of the empire. In Northern Ireland, Belfast exports were still huge, but they got a reputation for being lower quality than Scotch, which was growing in popularity. Today, however, it's Dublin that has the reputation as the home of whisky in Ireland and it's beginning to make a comeback despite the industry's meteoric fall to just four distilleries in 2010. There are now over 40 distilleries on the island of Ireland. Irish producers now hope to get back in bars and pubs around the world by volume. India consumes the most whisky and the US is the most discerning market as the biggest by value. I had a drink with my neighbour Vidhi, a proud Moon biker and whisky drinker. Growing up, we all drank whiskey, guys and girls, young and old, at home or in clubs, she tells me whisky is a much bigger part of life in India than the uk. It'll take up most of the drinks menu. But what kind of whisky Indians are drinking is also changing. It's only in the last few years I've seen good Irish whisky for sale, she goes on. Brands we had never seen before are starting to make an appearance. It was always blended Indian or single malt Scotch before. Vidhi gives me a wide smile as she remembers her favorite dive bar in Bandra, the hipster district of Mumbai where she's from. This place is simple. A working class crowd mixing with people in media and creative industries. But at these bars you drink in quarts, even whiskey. She laughs as my eyes widen. Those quartz were full of local blended whiskies and the Irish staple Jameson. But times are changing and the Irish have another obstacle to reclaiming world dominance. Now we see these really great upmarket brands coming from Uttar Pradesh, the Himalayan region, Fiddy says even the desert region of Rajasthan is distilling its own now. The high end single malt Indian whiskies are the real status symbols, Fiddy explains. For me, the two biggest drinks in India are whisky and gin, she says. Both of which we now make great Indian versions of. Ironic, eh? The two drinks the British brought over to us and now we've taken them for ourselves.
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Jordan Dunbar and you can hear more on this in Jordan's series the Mystery of the Zebras, Bears and Barrels of Whisky on BBC Sounds. And finally, Switzerland is famously neutral. But soul searching about what that neutrality means is something the Swiss seem to do on an almost permanent basis. The country has accepted tens of thousands of refugees from Ukraine, but initially resisted exporting tanks to neighbouring Germany in case they were then transferred to Ukraine's fight against Russia. And in the Second World War, the Swiss alone in Europe remained untouched. How did they manage it? Imogen folks reports on a murky past and a new exhibition that sheds light on it.
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In the heart of Berne's charming old town there is an elegant 18th century mansion with its imposing baroque facade and stunning terraced gardens. Number 23 Herngasse is one of the city's most desirable properties. On the wall is a plaque telling us the wealthy von Vattenfield family lived here in the 1750s. But there's no mention of another famous resident who arrived almost 200 years later, sneaking across the border from occupied France in 1942 to set up espionage operations in neutral Switzerland. Alan Dulles, head of the United States Special Operations Service, which later became the CIA. Neither his presence nor his activities were a secret to his ostensibly neutral Swiss host. So why not mention him? On the plaque is Switzerland, 80 years later, still unwilling to acknowledge it. How shall I put this? Flexible neutrality during the Second World War. As I stood reading that plaque, Parliament was debating a revision to Switzerland's law on arms exports, which would allow the sale of weapons to NATO members, even if those members were, for example, sending troops to NATO's eastern flank to fight a Russian invasion. Some argued the move would compromise Switzerland's neutrality. Others pointed to the increasingly fraught security situation in Europe and the embarrassing spat with neighbour Germany, which was for months denied a few of Switzerland's decommissioned Leopard tanks. Berlin had wanted to buy them for domestic use only to fill a gap created by Germany's transfer of some of its own Leopards to UK Ukraine. Jusse Hani Maki, professor of international history at Geneva's Graduate Institute, describes Switzerland's strategy as a tightrope act between trying to keep neutrality, but then realising that the pressures from outside require a certain, well, you have to bend with the wind. His comments reminded me of a visit years ago to one of Switzerland's most famous watchmakers. The manager proudly showed me intricate pilots watches supplied to Britain's Royal Air Force during the Second World War. As a British citizen, these, the manager thought, would be a highlight for me. The date on the display case was 1944. The manager didn't show me a neighbouring case, but I noticed it anyway. Dated 1943, these were watches made by the same company for Germany's Luftwaffe. At some point in those years, as UC Hanimaki put it, the wind changed and Switzerland bent. Not mentioning Alan Dulles on that plaque or glossing over the Luftwaffe watches reflects a Swiss tendency to portray neutrality as virtuous rather than pragmatic. But in recent years, that tendency has waned. Everyone knows Switzerland didn't just defend its borders during the war, it banked Germany's money and stored its looted art. And now a new exhibition in the medieval castle of Morges shows just how cooperative Switzerland also was to the Allies. Spies like Alan Dulles step through a castle door disguised as a bookcase and you are Transported back to 1940 and a Switzerland, as curator Gudrun Beger told me, in shock as it watched its neighbors subsumed into the Third Reich. The Germans drafted five different plans to invade Switzerland, but never did, in part because of those useful financial ties. At the same time, Swiss intelligence officers decided to work with their counterparts from the us, Britain and even the Soviet Union. Alongside Alan Dulles, Britain's Special Operations Executive set up an office in bern. Its estimated 70% of secret messages to European resistance groups passed through the Swiss capital via a secret transmitter. This also helped escaped prisoners of war. One room in the exhibition would make James Bond's queue proud. Cufflinks embedded with tiny compasses, exploding pens, maps disguised as playing cards. Perhaps most astonishing is a transmitter used by Soviet spies based in Geneva. Moscow had a secret agent at military command in Berlin, sending details of German troop movements around Stalingrad first to the agents in Geneva, then and from there to Moscow. The Swiss knew about the operation and eventually shut it down, but not before key information crucial to defeating the Germans at Stalingrad had been sent. When that hot war ended, the Cold War began in Switzerland. The spies remained. It's easier to operate on neutral territory, which UCI Hanimaki says can be positive. The summits between Reagan and Gorbachev, complex negotiations to reduce nuclear weapons, and just last month, the talks between the US and Ukraine. It's a place where you can have a discussion about sensitive issues, he goes on, without it being interpreted that you are under the influence of one power or another. Of course, those meetings don't always result in peace, but still, Switzerland ploughs its often lonely neutral furrow, publicly offering itself services to sworn enemies in the hope of creating some mutual understanding and privately hoping to ensure its own survival. But today, the wind is blowing from Russia, from the United States, from China, even from Europe, and it's hard to know which way to bend.
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Imogen, folks. And that's all for today, but you can hear more dispatches from around the world on BBC Sounds. We'll be back again next Saturday morning. Do join us. Hello, I'm Noola McGovern and I want
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to tell you about a BBC podcast
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called Send in the Spotlight. The number of children with special educational needs is increasing.
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Too many parents are having to fight
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to get those needs met, and councils
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are spending money that they do not have.
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Against a backdrop of government reform. I bring together families, teachers, economic experts
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and decision makers to reimagine the system.
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Listen to Send in the Spotlight on BBC Sounds.