Latest update: 21/10/2009

- financial crisis - New York - unemployment - US economy - USA

New York's slow recovery

New Yorkers are used to working hard. But with unemployment nearly doubling over the last year, many find they’re working harder than ever to keep their job, or just to find one.

REPORTERS

A year ago, Lehman Brothers -one of the world’s biggest investment banks- collapsed, accelerating a severe financial crisis. Markets worldwide experienced one of their worst years in decades. Banks stopped lending to each other, slowing down the financial system.

But that’s only half the story: the financial crisis turned into an economic disaster, impacting the lives of millions.

We went to New York, the Ground Zero of finance, where the crisis began, to find out how ordinary people are doing. What we found is a city struggling to recover. It doesn’t show when you’re standing in the middle of Manhattan, but scratch the shiny surface and you’ll see the effects of a weak economy. Lionel, the cab driver in search of customers; Ravinda, the labourer eager for more hours on the factory floor; Amy, the unemployed financial expert forced to create her own job: these are the faces of New York’s economy.

25/12/2009 - REPORTERS

Yemen, the new Eldorado ?

Every day on the southern coast of Yemen, illegal boats drop off men and women running from war and poverty in Africa. But they’ve come to one of the poorest places on earth.

(8) comments

18/12/2009 - REPORTERS

Hunting for Romania’s communist crimes

Marius Oprea's job is to exhume and identify the thousands of victims the former state secret police killed at the end of the 1980s. Doing so, the "Securitate hunter" is working to heal the wounds that still linger 20 years after Ceausescu’s dictatorship ended.

(3) comments

15/12/2009 - REPORTERS

A little part of Mali in Brittany

Collinée is a village of fewer than 1000 inhabitants. Thirty years ago, the local slaughterhouse had a severe staff shortage. A dozen Malians came here to work and were later joined by their wives and children. Today, one inhabitant in ten is Malian.

(9) comments

11/12/2009 - REPORTERS

Ivory Coast’s long-awaited election

It’s been nearly five years now, since 2005, against a backdrop of civil war and political crisis, and Ivorians are still waiting for a presidential election that has yet to take place. Elections are now supposed to take place next in spring. But voters remain skeptical. What has led to these repeated postponements?

(2) comments

04/12/2009 - REPORTERS

Is Lake Chad disappearing ?

With the attention of the world fixed on the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, France 24 correspondents Melissa Bell and Hélène Frade travelled to Chad to take a closer look at its shrinking lake.