Our Focus programme brings you exclusive reports from around the world, followed by comment and analysis from our newsroom in Paris. Monday to Friday at 7.15 am and 11.15 pm.
Super PACs dominate TV advertising in run-up to presidential election
Advertising is a big part of campaigning in US political contests, and this election is no exception. The money spent by the US presidential candidates and like-minded support committees on TV advertising exceeds $6 billion. Much of this money has poured in from outside groups known as Super PACs. Thanks to a landmark Supreme Court ruling, these groups can raise and spend as much as they like to influence elections, so long as they don't coordinate directly with a candidate.
Hernan Castillo, author of a book linking Hugo Chavez to the FARC rebel group, is one of a number of Venezuelan thinkers leaving a hostile country they feel now resembles a police state for fear of persecution for their political views.
Niger's citizens are voting in a referendum to change the constitution to allow President Mamadou Tandja to remain in power until 2012. The opposition and media are worried that it is anti-democratic.
More than twenty years after Fatah's last convention, two thousand delegates of the Palestinian movement meet in Bethlehem in a bid to restore some of the legitimacy lost since the death of their late leader Yasser Arafat.
In 2005, Israel pulled out of the Gaza strip as part of a disengagement plan that left Israelis divided. Four years on, nothing has really changed or improved for former settlers in the region, some of whom consider themselves refugees.
Southern Europe has been hit by devastating wildfires this summer, with tens of thousands of hectares of countryside ravaged and countless homes damaged. Arson has not been ruled out. Focus on the situation in Greece and Spain.
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