From Our Own Correspondent Folgen

The day after history was made in Libya Kevin Connolly was out shopping -- and tells a story of a capital city trying to return to normal. Few parts of the United States have escaped the economic downturn -- as Jonny Dymond's been finding out on a Main Street in North Carolina; Fiona Lloyd-Davies has been meeting a woman in the Democratic Republic of Congo who's been helping thousands of victims of rape. Summer may have been something of a damp squib in the UK but Huw Cordey's been to Death Valley in California where it's been scorchingly hot. And back to Tripoli in Libya where Andrew Hosken's been learning about the dangers of what they're calling 'celebratory gunfire.' What goes up, he's told, must always come down!

The Arab-Israeli conflict seems to have been sidelined in this year of revolutions. But our Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen tells us that it hasn't gone away, and the signs are not good. It was 37-degrees at the Italian air base where Jonathan Marcus has been to meet some of the pilots flying NATO missions over Libya -- but not too hot for them all to tuck into a full English breakfast while Jonathan inquired: how much have the pilots contributed to the rebels' success in and around Tripoli? They've been celebrating twenty years of independence in Estonia and, not surprisingly, we find they've been doing it in song. Kieran Cooke's been to Shangri-La. This town in western China is supposed to be as close as you can get to an earthly paradise, but Kieran's not entirely convinced. And call him a hypochondriac but our man in the Hollywood hills, David Willis, is more than a little scared when he opens up an email telling him if he's likely to get Parkinson's or Alzheimer's.

'Politics at its most brutal, its most basic, democracy as a demolition derby.' That's Mark Mardell's view as he contemplates months of Republican infighting ahead of next year's US presidential election. The Moscow coup of twenty years ago: Bridget Kendall, who was there during that eventful August back in 1991, says it could so easily have succeeded. The smiles seem to have faded somewhat in newly-independent South Sudan but Robin Denselow, just back from the capital Juba, says they still revere their cattle. David Hargreaves has been attending a spectacular riverside religious festival in central India and Karishma Vaswani's had to call in the Indonesian witch doctor after strange goings-on at her house in Djakarta.