The Fourcast

South Africa, along with ten other African nations, has been taken off the red list - a list of countries that the UK strongly discouraged travel to and from, requiring an expensive, lengthy stay in a government-approved hotel on return, should you make the trip. 

Scientists in South Africa said that travel "ban" never made any sense and that the country was being punished for its excellent genomic surveillance, which identified the Omicron variant early. 

It was another setback for a nation on a continent that has struggled to get vaccines compared to the West.

In today’s episode, we speak to the health journalist Pontshoe Pilane in Johannesburg to find out more about South Africa’s Covid journey: from harsh lockdowns that have exacerbated inequality to the struggle to get jabs in arms that means financial incentives and even mandates are now on the cards. 

Sources: CBS/CNN/MSNBC 

Boris Johnson has announced Plan B in England. Working from home is back on the cards and masks are now compulsory in more settings. But is it time to make Covid vaccines mandatory too?

Austria is doing it for all adults. The United States has made vaccination mandatory for all federal workers. But the WHO has said compulsory vaccines should be an "absolute last resort"

Today Kiran talks to Fact Check’s Georgina Lee about what happens when governments throw away the carrot and pick up the stick instead and make rules that enforce masks and even vaccinations.

Sources: The Telegraph, Daily Mail, MSNBC

It’s the party that everyone’s talking about… if it ever took place. And if indeed there was a party at 10 Downing Street on the 18th of December 2020, it may well have broken the law against gatherings at the time.

The prime minister and senior cabinet members denied it took place for days. 

But a video of Allegra Stratton, the prime minister's then spokesperson, joking about the “fictional” event with “cheese and wine” and “no social distancing” blew the story and scandal wide open.

Political Editor Gary Gibbon, seemingly more in the know than Boris Johnson himself, gives us a rundown on the backlash and explains why it has angered both the public and the Conservative Party so much.

Sources: ITV News, BBC News, Channel 4 News, Sky News

To its supporters, Bitcoin is the biggest revelation in finance in a thousand years. To its critics, it’s a giant Ponzi scheme.

So is Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies, the future of finance? How secure are the blockchains that they’re built on? And will we all be buying art through NFTs, non fungible tokens, in the future, rather than paintings for our walls? 

Today we speak to our Economics Correspondent Helia Ebrahimi about cryptocurrency, the future of our financial system, and how she could have been a Bitcoin success story - if only she could find the key to the crypto she bought. 

Sources: Twitter/@jjames_ak, BBC News, Reuters

Last week saw the start of one of the most highly-anticipated and talked about trials in history: the United States versus Ghislaine Maxwell.

Maxwell stands accused of sex trafficking and grooming. The prosecutors this week argued that she, along with the prolific sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, were partners in crime in sex abuse.

She denies this and has pleaded not guilty to eight charges of sex trafficking and other crimes.

In today’s podcast, our Investigations Editor, Job Rabkin, details not just how we got here, but what the victims allege, and how Ghislaine Maxwell’s team will try to avoid her being sent to prison for the rest of her life.

A warning: this episode contains content that some listeners may find distressing.

Sources: NBC News, ABC News, WUVR-TV

Since the murder of Sarah Everard, it has come to light that a number of police officers abuse their positions to target women, and a recent episode of Channel 4’s Dispatches programme revealed the shocking scale of that abuse. 

In the past four years, nearly 2,000 police officers, special constables and PCSOs in the UK have been accused of some form of sexual misconduct. 

Dispatches interviewed dozens of women who were victims, and the programme asked whether enough was being done to investigate these crimes.

On today’s podcast we speak to the investigative journalist, Ellie Flynn, about the widespread police sexual misconduct and police-perpetrated domestic abuse in the UK. 

And a warning - this podcast contains themes that some listeners may find distressing.

Ever since Boris Johnson marched into Number 10 after his 2019 landslide, he has promised to level up.

But the government was accused of ‘betraying’ the North recently after scrapping parts of their plans for HS2 - the high-speed rail service that was meant to transport the region’s infrastructure.

Number 10 argued their revised plan for the project was still "one of the biggest single acts of levelling up of any government in history"

But what exactly is levelling up and do voters really understand it or even care about it?

Our political correspondent Liz Bates explains how a political slogan and manifesto promise is now considered important enough to have its own government department. 

Today, Ayshah Tull asks what this move means for the Royal family but also for the status of ‘global Britain’.

We speak to Guy Hewitt, former High Commissioner of Barbados in London about why, after decades of discussions, Barbados has decided now is the right time to depart with the past and start the next chapter in the country’s history.

And we talk to Dr Christopher Sabatini, senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House, about what concrete changes this could bring for the people of Barbados and whether countries around the world will follow suit. 

Sources: ITV News, Sky News, Television Jamaica

When it comes to Covid, what starts in one country, quickly spreads to another. As Europe is gripped by a fourth wave, and sees civil unrest as some protestors say “no” to new restrictions, will we see infections, and tempers, peak in the UK too? 

Here in the UK, our Delta wave came much earlier in the summer, and our boosters are working - although cases remain high. So has the UK’s path through the pandemic taken a different turn to the rest of Europe? Are we on top of it, or do we need Covid passports, or vaccine mandates to keep things under control? 

On today’s Fourcast, our Health and Social Care Editor Victoria Macdonald explains why the cases are rising in Europe and asks whether the compulsory jab mandates seen on the continent are coming to our shores next.

For some parts of Africa, climate change is already destroying populations, causing unpredictable rains, failing crops and starving livestock. And now, as the battle for resources intensifies, it’s fuelling terrorism and war. 

One of the worst areas affected is the Sahel, a swathe of arid land crossing central Africa, where temperatures are rising by 1.5% more than the global average.

Conflict over diminishing resources is driving jihadi violence in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. Today, our International Editor Lindsey Hilsum reports on her recent trip to Niger.