大象传媒

Owen Bennett Jones presents reports from around the world. In this edition:

"This whole town is a qat factory"

In much of the world, alcohol plays a large part in many lives - people drink for all sorts of reasons: to lift their mood, to loosen inhibitions, to block out things they don鈥檛 want to think about. In East Africa and parts of the Middle East, another substance performs much the same role: the leaf known as Qat.

Mary Harper has been finding out how people go to great lengths to grow it, process it and deliver it as fresh as possible to the millions around the world who chew. And she visited the hub of the global qat trade: an Ethiopian town which sleeps by day and works by night.

When Colonel Gaddafi fell, many politicians and diplomats in west European capitals cast an anxious eye on the TV news. What embarrassing documents would come out, revealing their complicity with the old regime? After all, governments across Europe had put their qualms aside and made deals with the Gaddafi regime.

And the closest relationship of all was probably between Libya and Italy. Of course, it goes back a long way - millennia in fact. In Rome, David Willey describes how Italy's age-old aspirations to rule and influence North Africa have been tempered.