Those Days Are Gone

Pascale Harter introduces stories of curiosity, fear and resistance from writers and reporters around the world.

Yemen's civil war is overshadowed by the conflict in Syria, but on a recent visit to the Yemen-Oman border region, Elisabeth Kendall found that the fighting has fuelled a burgeoning smuggling economy as well as a passionate appetite for news.

Benin City in Nigeria is a hub of the global sex traffic - and Colin Freeman heard how tales of a local goddess are used by the traffickers to intimidate their victims, victims' families and the entire community.

Andy Jones has seen how The Gambia is adjusting to new government - and how it is trying to revivify its economically crucial tourist trade.

And Owen Bennett Jones goes back to the USSR - or, more accurately, to Kiev, now the capital of Ukraine, part of the USSR when he last visited - during a time of full Cold War paranoia, the early 1980s - to meet a dissident. Their reunion recently provoked plenty of thoughts about awkward ideological alliances.

(Photo: A fighter loyal to Yemen's exiled President checks his mobile phone near the city of Taez, August 25, 2015. Credit: Ahmad alBasha/AFP/Getty Images)