大象传媒

A lynching in a mountain village shocks Lebanon.

Lingering memories of war poison the peace in South Ossetia

Why the Chinese are pumping millions into the Bangladeshi port of Chittagong

How the "beautiful game" helped end the bloodshed in Ivory Coast.

And the autobahn churches which give Germans a chance to park and pray.

Drive inland from Beirut, and almost immediately you begin to climb. The roads take you up into Lebanon's mountainous heartland. You leave the heat and clamour of the crowded coast behind. And it's easy to imagine that in the hill villages, life will be a little gentler. But just recently..in one of those quiet communities..something dark and shockingly violent happened. And as Natalya Antilava explains, the affair has left some Lebanese believing there's something rotten in the depths of their society...

There are endless, simmering, ethnic tensions all through the Caucasus mountains. And back in 2008 there was all out war. The Georgians and the South Ossetians tore at one another. The war ended swiftly in Georgia's defeat after Russian tanks poured through the mountains and sided with the Ossetians. But although the shooting died away nearly two years ago now, Tom Esslemont says South Ossetia remains swathed in uneasy suspicions that are a legacy of the conflict.

These days you can almost feel the balance of global power shifting eastwards. For now at least, America seems economically exhausted, and mired in foreign wars. But China is on the rise in every way. We've heard on this programme how it's expanding its commercial and diplomatic influence across Africa. But it's also doing the same thing closer to home -- in South Asia. Mukhal Devichand has been watching China's wealth begin to re-shape a frontier town in Bangladesh..

The old Liverpool manager, Bill Shankly once famously said, "football isn't a matter of life or death. It's much more serious than that.!" Shankly was joking, of course. But there will be moments in the World Cup this summer when football will feel heart-stoppingly important. And it's hard to underestimate the power and influence of the game. There are places where the passion for it can almost transcend politics. One of them, as Andrew Harding has been finding out, is the West African state of Ivory Coast..

A trip down a motorway is usually a relentlessly dull affair...nothing more than a means of getting from A to B as fast as possible. It's hard to think of a less romantic, more soulless kind of journey. But that's not always the case -- at least not in Germany. In the land that first came up with the idea of motorways, there's been an effort to humanise them a little. And as Steve Rosenburg explains, a spin down the autobahn can have its distinctly spiritual moments.