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Canada has stopped distributing its smallest coin –the one cent or the penny. This week Ruth Alexander looks at why some countries get rid of their smallest coins and some just cannot part with them.

This week Ruth Alexander looks at the extraordinary case of Andreas Georgiou the head of the Greek statistics agency, Elstat. He is facing criminal charges for what amounts to statistical treason. It is a story that goes to the heart of the Greek debt crisis, that includes extreme office politics, alleged e-mail hacking and a statistician facing at least five years in prison. We speak to Economists Miranda Xafa and Professor Yanis Vourafafkis as well as Syriza MP Dimitris Tsoukalas.

A ‘new’ BMI calculation has been proposed by Oxford Mathematician Professor Nick Trefethen but does it really address the problem with a calculation that is over a century old. Body Mass Index was first calculated over 150 years ago and in recent years has become controversial for its imprecise nature. Ruth Alexander and Wesley Stephenson look at how it has developed and what it really tells us, if anything, about our health.

This week Ruth Alexander is looking at farmer suicides in India. But is it any more prevalent than in any other area of Indian society?

Episode 1 of Tim Harford's new series, Pop Up Economics, in which he tells a live audience short stories about fascinating people and ideas in economics.

Reports this week suggest that we are wasting 50 per cent of our food globally. It comes from a study by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers in the UK. Ruth Alexander discovers why this number is out of date and is likely to be much lower than half.