Green campaigners are demanding that the new Israeli government take urgent action to save the Dead Sea, which is shrinking by more than a metre a year. The surface of the salt lake has been reduced by a third — 25m below its historical level — and the receding waters have created thousands of sinkholes.

By day, Ali Salim has stubble, scruffy jeans and a taste for cigarettes. But at night he pulls on a sequinned sari and high heels to become Begum Nawazish Ali — catty chat-show queen and South Asia’s first cross-dressing TV presenter. ”She’s every woman’s inspiration and every man’s fancy,” he smiles.

It starts with the sound of rain. A woman’s voice tells us it is night in the city, and a nurse is smoking the last cigarette in the pack. Then comes a nasal, gravelly voice, more familiar in song: ”It’s time for Theme Time Radio Hour. Dreams, schemes and themes.” The career of Bob Dylan, radio DJ, has begun.

Early in the morning of Saturday April 26 1986, the world’s worst nuclear disaster at Chernobyl jettisoned 100 times as much radiation into the atmosphere as the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Most fell on the now independent republics of Belarus and Ukraine, and in western Russia.