It's the 75th anniversary of VJ Day today, Victory over Japan, when Japan surrendered to the US, Britain and China. That ended the Second World War. Japan was given a new, pacifist constitution by the Americans, and seems to have left its former, more aggressive and militaristic, path behind. But, as Rupert Wingfield-Hayes has been finding in Tokyo, there's more that connects the current political leadership to wartime Japan than one might think.
Colombia's decades-long civil war came to an end in 2016, it had pitted leftist guerrilla groups like the FARC against government forces and right-wing paramilitaries. Now the Supreme Court has ordered the house arrest of ex-president Alvaro Uribe, amid an investigation into allegations of bribing witnesses to deny his alleged involvement with these militias, charges he denies. Uribe remains divisive, and as Mat Charles reports, his arrest has split public opinion along the same fault lines that stoked the violence previously.
Tourism accounts for around a quarter of all jobs in Greece, and was a lifeline during the austerity years of the Greek Debt crisis. But this year the pandemic has kept a lot of visitors away, even though lockdown restrictions started to be lifted early. That has hit seasonal workers particularly hard. On the island of Crete, Heidi Fuller-Love went to meet a family, for whom Covid-19 has been the last straw.
On the Spanish Balearic island of Mallorca, the German tourists are back. For them, a sunny holiday on Mallorca is an annual ritual not to be missed, be they celebrities on their private estates, or revellers in Palma, on the capital’s party mile. What is it about the Germans and their favourite Mediterranean island, asks John Kampfner.
Presenter: Kate Adie
Producer: Arlene Gregorius