Let's Talk About It

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Across the Arab world, there's a hubbub of new voices - many of them female - speaking out about sex. Whether online or offline, says author Shereen El Feki, there's now a profusion of opinion and advice about a subject which was once very rarely discussed in public. Anu Anand introduces this dispatch along with other stories from reporters and writers around the world. Jeremy Grange sees how Nepal is tackling a serious problem at high altitude: the litter piling up along hikers', trekkers' and mountain-climbers' routes in the Himalayas. Both local people and visitors have devised some ingenious ways to tackle the trash. Emma Jane Kirby goes back to the island of Lampedusa - a speck in the Mediterranean Sea, far south of the Italian mainland, which has become a magnet for migrant boats and for people smugglers. She finds out that the island's doctor, who's spent thirty years attending to those who wash up here or are shipwrecked nearby, is tired of seeing so much suffering and so little change - so now he's heading to Brussels as an MEP to try and improve policy decisions. And Chris Bockman reveals a new source of village feuding in rural France: a row over noise. In a number of cases across the nation, the sounds which were once emblematic of country life - from church bells to croaking frogs to chirping cicadas - have caused legal complaints from incomers. The backlash has led one village mayor to try to gain official protection for traditional soundscapes. Photo: Aicha Ech Enna, President of the Moroccan association Solidarite Feminine, at the presentation of her book "A haute voix" in Casablanca, June 11, 2014 (FADEL SENNA/AFP/Getty Images)