大象传媒

Even in places best-known for international conflict have hidden sides - as Mark Doyle finds when he is impressed by the beauty of Somalia, Lucy Williamson discovers when she meets plenty of North Koreans in the Chinese border city of Dandong, and Humphrey Hawksley learns from a Taiwanese geographer trying to ward off military tensions over Dong Sha island in the South China Sea. There are also environmental dangers - Sue Branford hears how hydropower is menacing one of Brazil's Amazonian communities and Nick Meo gets an expert view from a Ukranian atomic scientist, on how safe the site of the Chernobyl accident can ever be rendered. The personal landscape is political too as Joanna Robertson bravely explores the eternal battle against weight gain in France - where, it turns out, French women DO get fat - and then rapidly stigmatised and insulted.

(Photo: Sections of a colossal arch-shaped structure that will cover the exploded reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power station. Credit: Genya Savilov/AFP/Getty Images)