From Our Own Correspondent - 28/10/2010

The Chinese villages condemned to drown beneath the rising waters of the Yangtze. We're on the trail of a sniper who's striking fear into a Swedish city. Blood and guts at a rodeo in one of America's toughest prisons. And why French may be the language of love and cuisine....but not rock and roll. Before our very eyes....and at high speed....the new China is taking shape. Its booming cities are attracting people from the country like never before. And coping with this....supplying the exploding cities with the water and power they need....is a vast challenge. The government believes some of the answers lie in engineering projects on the grandest scale.....and Peter Day has been finding out what this means for life on the banks of Yangtze River.... There was a time when Ivory Coast was a West African success story....a stable place in a troubled neighbourhood. But that image unravelled badly. Several years ago the country was torn apart by violent ethnic and religious tensions.... Now though, elections are scheduled for this weekend. They've been postponed six times, but if they do finally go ahead on Sunday they might help heal the nation....and John James has been out getting a sense of the mood on the campaign trail.... The Swedish city of Malmo is everything that you might imagine. A neat, ordered, prosperous place on country's southern coast. It describes itself as a manageably small city....pleasant and friendly... But it seems that not everyone is friendly. As Tim Mansell explains, a deeply disturbing figure is stalking the streets of Malmo.... Few places in America have had a grimmer reputation than the Louisiana State Penitentiary....better known by the name "Angola". It used to be so violent that it was called the "bloodiest prison in the South". Today, conditions have improved to an extent. And rather bizarrely, the jail's become famous for its rodeos.... Andy Gallagher has been along to watch one of these events, where prisoners pit themselves against beasts in almost gladiatorial style.... More and more of the world's conversation is in English. It's the dominant language in this "Age of Communication".... But understandably, not everyone has welcomed its spread. The guardians of French have manned the linguistic barricades and done their best to drive back the invader... But as Hugh Schofield explains, when it comes to the language of rock and roll, French just keeps missing the beat.