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Pascale Harter introduces analysis, reportage and personal reflections from correspondents around the world.

This week, the United Nations have announced that the crucial aid it supplies to people in Yemen – whose country has been blasted into the sand by 6 years of war – has been cut. More than a third of the UN’s humanitarian efforts in the country have been reduced or shut down entirely after the organisation received only $1-billion of the $3-billion it needed to operate. Mai Noman reflects on the talent for endurance, and the balance of facing facts and keeping hope alive, that her fellow Yemenis are forced to cultivate.

Greece and Turkey have agreed to hold talks to help defuse their stand-off over disputed gas reserves near their shores. Ankara had deployed a research vessel accompanied by warships near a Greek island, and military exercises on both sides followed, giving rise to fears of war between the two long-term rivals, as Heidi Fuller Love reports from Crete.

The US President, Donald Trump, has imposed fresh sanctions on Cuba. This week he banned US citizens from bringing home rum or cigars from the island – likely to be a move designed to appeal to the Cuban-American vote in the swing state of Florida ahead of November's election. There’s no one more hostile to the Communist government back home, than Cubans who’ve settled in the US. So it may be odd to think that the communist government in Havana is suddenly embracing the dollar - that symbol of unbridled capitalism, the currency of the enemy. Will Grant explores the monetary system and finds only a few decades ago it was illegal to possess or handle the US dollar in Cuba.

Presenter: Pascale Harter
Producer: Bethan Head
Editor: Jasper Corbett

(Image: A Yemeni man walks through food items provided by a local aid group. Credit: European Photopress Agency/Yahya Arhab)