Thirty years later, a bombing in Lebanon still echoes

FBI investigators later said the bomb that blew up the marine barracks was the largest conventional blast they had ever seen   On 23 October 1983, bombs exploded in Beirut, killing 241 US service members and 58 French paratroopers. Survivors describe what happened on that day - and afterwards.  The multinational force of American, French, British and Italian soldiers was deployed to Lebanon following...

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Mapping unsafe areas for India's women

"I was going to my college at Dilsukhnagar in Hyderabad. I got down from the bus and was walking forward... Suddenly a few men were coming from the front, and two of them walked by my side really close and one of them pinched my breast..." This entry from the southern Indian city is one of the hundreds on safecity.in - a website created just days after last December's gang rape of a student in Delhi, to improve reporting and recording...

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Maid to entrepreneur: Rising out of poverty in Brazil

Lucineide do Nascimento was born into a large family in rural north-eastern Brazil   Lucineide do Nascimento has come a long way from her birthplace near Natal in the poor north-east of Brazil. Had things gone according to her father's plans, she would have been married as a teenager and followed a traditional rural lifestyle - living off produce grown on the family farm.  But she decided to move...

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The four sisters who took on Botswana's chiefs and won

Edith Mmusi: "We can finally rest - I sleep so well I even drool" In many countries across Africa, the right of the firstborn male, or closest male relative, to inherit family property - is still standard practice. Women are denied the right to inherit the family estate purely because of their gender, a custom that is upheld by some traditional leaders. But four sisters in Botswana did something that no-one there thought was possible...

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How did ancient Greek music sound?

The music of ancient Greece, unheard for thousands of years, is being brought back to life by Armand D'Angour, a musician and tutor in classics at Oxford University. He describes what his research is discovering. "Suppose that 2,500 years from now all that survived of the Beatles songs were a few of the lyrics, and all that remained of Mozart and Verdi's operas were the words and not the music. Imagine if we could then reconstruct the...

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Captain Collette: The life of a woman on the front line

Capt Ashley Collette was the only woman in her platoon of soldiers on the Afghan front line - and she was in charge. In the Canadian armed forces, unusually, every job is open to women - and both sexes live together and fight together.  On the first day that Capt Ashley Collette and her platoon of 60 men were deployed in the remote town of Nakhonay, near Kandahar, they came under attack.  "I don't think that the enemy liked...

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