04/03/2017 Reporters

Protestors have travelled from across the country

and Jeremy Corbyn is expected to address the crowd.

Now,

Now, Reporters.

Hello.

Welcome to Reporters.

I'm David Eades, and from here at the BBC Newsroom,

we send our correspondants to bring you the best stories

from across the globe.

In this week's programme, the other side of the American dream.

As Donald Trump sets out his vision for the next four years,

Ian Pannell assesses the challenges that lie ahead.

If you want to know what poverty in America looks

like, well, this is it.

President Trump says he is going to fix it.

He's going to deal with what he calls the carnage

in America, of crime, of drugs, of gangs,

of violence and of poverty.

Maram's Story.

Quentin Somerville tells the tale of the Syrian baby

who lost her parents and had nearly every limb broken in

a bombing in Aleppo.

And also her reunion with the British doctor who saved her.

Hello.

In Tunisia, Orla Guerin reports from Sousse,

reports on terror attack of its kind and asks if the Government security

crackdown has made it safe for tourists to return.

We would very happy to see again British coming back to us.

Yes.

Do you think it's 100% safe?

Can you say that?

Yes.

Absolutely.

100%.

100%.

Is Greece's era of austerity over?

As the authorities try to reach a new bailout deal, 18 months

after the first major one, Kevin Connelly finds ordinary people

unwilling to face more hard times.

50% of Greek people are poor, poor and in the limits of indignity.

And we are trying to protect all these people who cannot

protect themselves.

E-aid for Africa.

Alistair Leithead reports from Kenya on a new scheme to send

money electronically to stop poverty and famine.

And Fly Me To The Moon for $100 million.

David Shukman reports on plans for two passengers to join the first

manned flight to deep space for more than 40 years.

It's going to give two rich people the thrill of a lifetime.

Basically it's really an adventure thrill ride that

demonstrates a new capability.

President Trump used his first speech to Congress to declare

what he called a new chapter of American greatness.

In a surprisingly measured tone, he asked legislators to pass

a $1 trillion package to build new infrastructure and he missed

massive tax relief for the middle class.

But what about his pledge at his inauguration to help the poor

and repair what he called the carnage in America, crime,

drugs, gangs and poverty?

Well, Ian Panel has been to Baltimore, where a quarter

of the population lives in poverty, and many no longer see America

as the land of opportunity.

Say hello to Jackson.

A citizen of the wealthiest country in the world has ever known.

And yet, he's clothed in hand-outs.

His parents can't find work.

They have no home of their own, and every morning, they come

to the Manor House Charity, where the poor of Baltimore

meet for a little food, warmth and compassion.

What is your message to President Trump?

Come and help us.

Instead of critiquing is, come and help us.

You'll see we need help.

Bad.

Like much of America, this is a story of two worlds.

Baltimore is actually something of a boom town these days,

but it doesn't feel like it in many parts of the city.

In this economy there is no trickle down.

Gun crime is surging here.

Baltimore was even more violent than Chicago last year,

driven by gang turf wars.

For some of its residents, this is a city where selling your

body or selling drugs is the only job available.

If you want to know what poverty in America looks like.

Well, this is it.

Incredibly, this entire block is pretty much made up

of dilapidated, abandon houses.

Incredibly, some people are living in between here.

Under President Obama, poverty grew in America,

and President Trump says he is going to fix it.

He's going to deal with what he calls the carnage

in America, of crime, of drugs, of violence

and of poverty.

And there are few places better to do that than Baltimore.

Marcus Allsop has lifted for 40 years.

He repairs the city's homes.

An eyewitness to the worst Baltimore has to offer.

The poor live in the single houses.

The row houses in Baltimore are generally rat infested,

regardless of what you do as a person living there.

Roaches, mice.

I mean, an epidemic of bedbugs.

The neighbourhoods are falling apart, not

because the people are bad people.

We are underpaid, undereducated in so many of us have in living

like this for the second and third generation until we don't

know how to change.

Despair is a way of living.

And this is where it resides, on a bleak row of abandoned homes.

This is the end of the line for Americans gripped by poverty.

Here, we met the last family living on the block.

Three generations of the Stewart family are crammed in here.

They are months behind on the rent.

Unpaid bills are piling up, not surprisingly they just have

$30 a day to survive.

I love you.

Be careful.

Have a good day.

They've been evicted before, forced to live in one of Baltimore's

many abandoned homes.

It hurts, it hurts that they have to stay wrapped up in blankets

all day because they are cold.

They don't want to get out of bed because there's

no heat to keep them warm.

People talk about us.

They get bullied in school because of it.

It hurts.

They've got to where they don't even want to show their faces outside.

But we had no choice but to live there, because of the economy.

I've been struggling for seven years.

Seven hard years.

What pressure does that put in your relationship?

Oh, we argue and fight all the time.

All the time.

I love this woman to death.

She is my best friend, but to see her go through the things

she goes through, it hurts.

It hurts me.

For so many people, this is no longer a land of opportunity.

Hope has given way to despair.

And the children who clamour for charity hand-outs

have no American dream.

It will be perhaps the biggest challenge for the new president.

Ian Panel, BBC News, Baltimore.

The Syrian conflict of course is full of terrible tales

of horror and suffering, but one story stands out

as a symbol of just how brutal and unfair war could be.

In the New Year, five-year-old Maram lost both her parents

and nearly every limb in her body was broken when her house

was bombed in Aleppo.

The British surgeon who operated on her watched her leave

for asylum in Turkey, not knowing if she would survive.

Well, seven months on, Doctor David Nott has returned

to Turkey to be reunited with Maram.

As Quentin Somerville reports, this is a harrowing story

with a happy ending.

So much of a Aleppo's pain is anonymous.

But Maram's suffering was unforgettable.

An air strike killed her parents and left her gravely ill.

There was shrapnel inside her hip.

From here, and only five months old, she was evacuated

to Turkey, lost and alone.

But after months of searching, the BBC tracked her down

and reunited the two.

Everything at home, at Christmas it's lavish,

lots of food, lots of happyness and I left this little

girl without any food and without any happiness.

It's going to be a bit emotional, to be really honest.

A bit emotional.

Right.

Oh, my goodness me.

Well, well, well.

Well, well, well.

Hello.

Gosh.

Gosh, she looks beautiful.

You look beautiful!

Absolutely beautiful.

Look what I have got for you.

It's a dolly.

Dolly.

Is her leg healing?

The final surgery was nearly too much.

Maram almost didn't make it.

Her wounds are healing, but there will be work

to reconstruct her bones and repair damaged nerves.

It's said children can't remember pain.

Few though don't have as much to forget as Maram.

When I saw Maram today, it was very emotional.

As a doctor, you try and stay fairly unemotional when you're dealing

lots of people with injuries.

I suppose having got children as well now,

and how much you love that child, you know, a tiny piece of my heart

was left with Maram.

That's what I have been thinking about everyday since leaving.

This morning was a beautiful moment.

To meet her again.

The story of Maram.

We wish her all the best.

Just how safe is Tunisian today?

The Tunisian authorities say that now, 18 months after the biggest

terror attack of its kind in the town of Sousse,

it's now 100% safe for tourists.

Following a British inquest findings that the Tunisian police response

to the attack was shambolic, they insist major security

improvements have taken place and that you knew there is as safe

as many European destinations.

Orla Guerin has been back to visit Sousse yesterday.

On alert in Sousse.

The new vigilance that was utterly lacking on the day of the attack.

Now permanent checkpoints and patrols by the police

and the Armed Forces.

The message is clear.

You are safe.

It's a new Tunisia.

Ministers are looking to brighter days after tourism was gravely

wounded in the carnage on the beach.

We improved our security a lot, and we think that tourists will be

coming back in the next few months now.

We have good indications for summer 2017, and we will be very happy

to see again British coming back to Tunisia.

Do you think it's 100% safe?

Can you say that?

Yes, absolutely.

100% safe?

100%.

Metal detectors are now standard when you enter a hotel,

even if you own them like Mohammed Bashir.

He co-owns the now closed hotel where the British holiday-makers

were killed on June 26 2015.

He admits security in Tunisia should have been tightened that March,

after an attack on tourists in the Bardo Museum.

It should have been stricter after the Bardo attack.

To be honest with you, it should have been.

But there is a before 26th of June 2015, and there is an after.

This is not the same country any more.

This was the picture when terror came to the beach.

Locals say the lone gunman was on the loose

for over half an hour.

At the inquest in London, condemnation at the glaring absence

of the security forces.

When tourists were being slaughtered here on the sands, police

could and should have made an effective response

according to the coroner.

He says police could have arrived here in minutes with everything

they needed to confront the gunmen.

Instead, they deliberately delayed their arrival.

The first officer on the scene stayed outside the main gate

and never fired a single shot.

Mehdi knows only too well that the police

were nowhere to be seen.

When the shooting started, he was on the beach

selling rides on jet skis.

His response was swift.

Here he is, chasing the killer, armed only with two ashtrays.

Hoping in vain for help.

TRANSLATION: No one came, apart from the two

guards, who did nothing.

Then, when we ran along the beach, there were three

national guard boats in the sea.

They didn't come until afterwards, when he was killed.

At the Imperial hotel where the gunmen

claimed so many lives, they are getting ready

to reopen in May.

Hoping tourists will return to the golden sands.

Sunbathers now have company on the beach.

Protection that came too late for 30 Britons who just wanted

a break from it all.

Orla Guerin, BBC News, Sousse.

Greece's debt drama is back again.

This week, the country's creditors held talks with the government

over plans to unlock billions more dollars in bailout money to help

the struggling economy there.

18 months after the first bailout, the Greek Prime Minister has

insisted that the era of austerity is over.

As Kevin Connolly reports from Athens, it's clear that

ordinary people are just no longer prepared to put up with any

further economic hardship.

CROWD CHANTS

In the outskirts of at Athens, Greek frustrations

with deficit and debt and deadlines from banks boils

over at a courtroom.

The man in the striped shirt is a lawyer, come to process

a repossession order on a building whose owners couldn't

pay their mortgage.

The activists have come to stop him.

He can't get the case heard because he can't make himself heard,

and it's abandoned for the day.

A victory in the fightback against austerity say the protesters.

50% of Greek people are poor.

We are at the limits of indignity.

We are here to protect all these people who cannot protect

themselves because the state does not protect these people.

After years of cuts, many Greeks fear the IMF

and the leaders of the euro zone are preparing to demand more.

Traders in the Athens fish markets say business has fallen by 70%

since the debt crisis began to bite seven years ago.

They warn that they and their customers can't take any more.

TRANSLATION: We don't believe them.

They always want more cuts.

There are always new cuts and never new jobs.

If the IMF and Eurozone impose more austerity nothing will change.

More investment would make things better, but more austerity won't.

Greek problems with debt have an ancient feel

to them these days.

Superseded in the world's attention span regarding Brexit

and the coming of President Trump.

The Greek Government says those changes are part of a wave

of populism around the world, that are going to help

it resist any demands from its creditors for new cuts.

This is a general incentive for all people of Europe

especially in Greece, because we have been hit

by austerity much harder than any other places in Europe.

The real question, how to reverse austerity?

I think there is hope in that exactly because

the elites cannot govern as in the past.

Plenty of Greeks want their Government to push back

hard against any calls for more austerity.

This protesters are communists, not likely to be part

of any future Government, but certainly part of the drumbeat

of discontent against any deal with international creditors that

would mean further hardship here.

So, the international community talks about light at the end

of the tunnel on Greek debt, but the message from meetings

like this and from these streets is that it is a tunnel that keeps

getting longer, and a light that never seems to get any brighter.

Kevin Connelly, BBC News, Athens.

We are going to take you to the Horn of Africa where drought

is causing intense suffering for the people of that region.

Last week, famine was declared in South Sudan.

Somalia announced a national disaster this week because of

drought and that was just weeks after neighbouring Kenyan

declared its own drought emergency.

In the midst of all this, Kenyans have come up with a novel

way to help those affected.

Rather than food aid, it's started to use electronic cash payments.

As Alistair Leithhead reports, direct transfers are helping to lift

people out of poverty.

There are thin pickings for the cattle of northern Kenyan.

Drought is back and with it, a difficult decision,

whether or not to sell the cows to survive.

Help can be as simple as sending cash to stop them having to

sell-off the family assets, and it's being done

from hundreds of miles away.

In Nairobi.

So the red shows the area where we have had extreme drought,

and if you have a look at this and compared to what we have this

year, you can see we have red all across the four counties.

The satellite data determines who gets emergency aid

money from the UK.

No strings attached, direct cash payments are becoming

increasingly popular.

This man's card automatically gets topped up with credit.

He identifies himself by a fingerprint scan.

$25 a month is handed over.

The worse the drought, the more people receive

cash to cover the bills and keep them going.

If it wasn't for these cash payments, he said,

he'd had to sell the livestock as there are lots of things that

have to be paid for.

School fees, food for the family and all the other basic needs.

Well, you can see why this idea of sending people cash directly

works in places where there's a humanitarian crisis,

like here, where there

is drought and people are doing everything they can just to keep

the cattle alive.

But there are joining places that aren't as bad.

Just to try and lift people out of poverty.

Here in western Kenya, there is no drought but people

are extremely poor.

A charity called Give Directly is doing just that.

Like everywhere, people have big dreams.

This evening a lump sum of thousand dollars

this lady to build a little house and start a business

selling cooking fat.

A tin roof replaced the thatch which needed

regular and costly repair.

TRANSLATION: I'm happy because I'm not using any more money on my roof.

I can use it to buy my close, food, pay school fees and other expenses.

Others use the lump sum to buy cattle, fertiliser, seed.

After five years of detailed research here into how people

spend their free money, there's little evidence

it is wasted or abused.

And there's plenty of proof to show it's being used to reduce poverty

and make a difference in humanitarian crisis.

Alistair Leithhead, BBC News, Kenya.

How ready are we to fly to the moon and back for a holiday?

Well, the prospect of space tourism has moved a little closer this week,

after an American aerospace company SpaceX has said it has room for two

passengers on its next mission 2018.

This would be the first manned flight to deep space

in more than 40 years, although it would involve

a lunar landing as such.

There's a catch.

It's going to cost you $100 million a seat.

Our science editor, David Shukman has been to find out more.

A SpaceX promotion.

Bold and often boastful, this young company knows how

to whip up excitement.

The rocket is the Falcon Heavy.

It's yet to be launched.

This is an animation, but already, two tourists

have been promised seats

on it to fly around the moon as early as next year.

Not since the last Apollo mission, back in 1972, have any humans flown

anywhere near the moon.

The tourists will not be landing on it, but if this trip happens then

they will get amazing views, and space scientists

say this is plausible.

We are really now entering the era where space

tourism is a possability.

In fact, a probability.

Maybe not for another 10, 15, 20 years,

for ordinary people to afford it.

It will be the playground of the rich.

The man behind SpaceX is Elon Musk.

When I met him he spilled out a startling vision

of travel beyond Earth.

I think we are really entering a new era of space travel

that's very exciting.

There is a history of SpaceX promises running late

but eventually being delivered.

Ten days ago, it landed

a huge rocket, significant because reusing spacecraft

will make launches cheaper.

Last year, one of its rocket blew up, but SpaceX quickly got

back to its key business of launching satellites.

This week, its Dragon capsule delivered cargo

to the International Space Station.

A trip to the moon is obviously harder, and critics say it

would just be a joyride.

Well, it's going to give two rich people a thrill of a lifetime.

It's not anything to do with science or exploration.

It's repeating missions that have been done 40 plus years before,

so it's basically an adventure, a thrill ride that

demonstrates a new capability.

I love space.

So, how much will it cost?

Well, tourists visiting the International Space Station have

paid at least $20 million each.

A moon trip would be much more.

We don't know who the two passengers are, but if they get there,

they may pave the way for others to follow.

David Shukman, BBC News.

That's your lot from Reporters this week.

From me, David Eades, goodbye.

Fancy

Fancy seeing

Fancy seeing you