International report

Deming, New Mexico is a small town near the US-Mexican border that finds itself caught in the middle of heated immigration debates.

Starting in May, the US Border Patrol began dropping off asylum-seekers, mostly from Central America, at facilities on Deming's outskirts.

These migrants have traveled thousands of kilometers, often in dangerous conditions, and have official sponsors in the USA they'll eventually reach -- as opposed to undocumented migrants crossing the border without such connections.

While headlines out of detention facilities -- where children may be separated from their families -- fill the American news these days, processing centers like those in Deming provide a striking contrast.

In part, because they're mainly operated by local government and bands of volunteers from the community, rather than Homeland Security or other federal agencies, as Sam Schramski reports.

Click the 'play' button above to listen or subscribe to our podcast by searching 'RFI international report'.

An association in the Tunisian capital is striving to guarantee income and decent living conditions for plastic waste pickers from an informal area of the city.

The initiative is a pioneering effort of social and solidarity economy hoping to give recognition to a group of people that are often looked down on in Tunisian society.

Alessandra Bajec has this report from Tunis.

Click the 'play' button above to listen or subscribe to our podcast by searching 'RFI international report'.

Discarded waste items like plastic bottles are an environmental nuisance in slums around Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city. With no proper waste disposal, plastic bottles litter the environment, including drainage systems, which easily block creating floods when it rains.

But now, a school attended by many students from lower-income families has decided to create a payment scheme which tackles the problem of plastic and education.

Parents can pay their children’s fees using discarded plastic bottles and aluminum cans.

Sam Olukoya reports from Lagos.

Click the 'play' button above to listen or subscribe to our podcast by searching 'RFI international report'.

A team of scientists from the Sorbonne University in Paris have created a virtual acoustic simulation of a concert that was held in 2013 in the famed Notre Dame cathedral.

This simulation could play an important role in the reconstruction efforts of the Notre Dame cathedral which suffered significant damage in a fire this April.

Dhananjay Khadilkar has this report from Paris.

Click the 'play' button above to listen or subscribe to our podcast by searching 'RFI international report'.

In 20 years of existence, the Scottish Parliament has done a lot: a major land reform, more rights for the LGBT+ community, free prescriptions, and free university tuition.

But has it gone far enough?

As Scotland celebrates the 20th anniversary of this unique institution, this is a time for reflection on how much the nation has changed, and what challenges lie ahead.

Assa Samaké-Roman reports from Edinburgh.

Click the 'play' button above to listen or subscribe to our podcast by searching 'RFI international report'.

Nepal promised to re-write its mountaineering rules after at least 11 fatalities this spring on Mount Everest.

As the climbing season came to an end, veterans blamed the carnage on the world’s highest mountain on unruly pileups by rookie adventure-seekers.

Eight others, including four Britons, two Americans and an Australian died elsewhere in the bleak Himalayas.

This report by Vikram Roy who travelled to Kathmandu, is presented by Michael Fitzpatrick.

Click the 'play' button above to listen or subscribe to our podcast by searching 'RFI international report'.

In the mountainous regions of north-western Argentina is where you can find descendants of the Diaguitas, an aboriginal ethnic group that migrated to this region in the 5th and 6th centuries.

Suffering from discrimination since the Spanish invasion, they have seen their traditional knowledge erased to the profit of intensive industrial agriculture, which makes up 60 percent of cultivated land in Argentina.

Such practices have had diasterous consquences on the environment and on the health of farmers and consumers.

During the 1990s an alternative programme was put in place to overcome this and today it represents nearly 20 percent of the national production.

In the final report of a two-part series, Pauline Bandelier has more on this programme.

Click the 'play' button above to listen or subscribe to our podcast by searching 'RFI international report'.

In Argentina, the descendants of the natives make up only 1.49 percent of the argentinan population.

Recent studies however say that over 50 percent of argentines have at least one indigenous ancestor on one parental lineage.

Despite this biological connection, descendants of the aboriginal groups suffer from discrimination and struggle to have their rights to their ancestral land recognized.

In the first of a two-part series, Pauline Bandelier takes us to meet the Diaguita ethnic group, that includes 14 tribes, including the Quilmes.

Click the 'play' button above to listen or subscribe to our podcast by searching 'RFI international report'.

Scotland used to be one of the most dangerous places in the developed world, and Glasgow, in particular, had an exceptionally high level of gang-related crime. But thanks to a ground-breaking approach to tackle violence, Scotland has started to solve its problem.

Assa Samaké-Roman has this report from Glasgow.

Click the 'play' button above to listen or subscribe to our podcast by searching 'RFI international report'.

July 1st will be the start of the 133rd All-England Tennis Championships at London's Wimbledon.

For preview into what to expect this year, Andy May has this report.

Click the 'play' button above to listen or subscribe to our podcast by searching 'RFI international report'.