The world needs to trust science, urges historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari

Our guest is Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Distinguished Professor at UCLA and professor at the Collège de France in Paris. He has authored numerous books including "Europe's India: Words, People, Empires", which has been translated into French.

The economic impact of the coronavirus is similar to the situation during both world wars. It could even match the despair of the Great Depression. Still Germany is well prepared, says Albrecht Ritschl in a DW interview.

Who are we, and where did we come from? These are the questions Yuval Noah Harari, historian and philosopher, attempts to answer in the first volume of the graphic edition of his bestselling book: “Sapiens, the birth of human kind”. If our guest goes back in time, it’s to help his readers understand the challenges of our present: against the backdrop of the ongoing crisis, the world community needs come up with a global response, and urgently keep its trust in the scientific truth.

For Osmair Candido, who has worked as a gravedigger for the past 30 years, the pandemic was worse than a nightmare, an ordeal the Brazilian overcame only with the help of a few old friends -- Kierkegaard, Kant and Nietzsche. The soft-spoken 60-something -- whose occupation necessitates spending most of the day in a small cemetery in Sao Paulo -- is not just a laborer but also a man of letters, a philosopher.

He was the last surviving member of the Companions of the Liberation, an elite group of Resistance fighters hand-picked by Charles de Gaulle. Hubert Germain passed away in October at the age of 101. Today, he will be laid to rest at the Mont-Valérien war memorial outside Paris. For many, the passing of Germain marks the end of a chapter in French history and opens a new debate on how to keep the memory of the French Resistance alive. Historian Guillaume Piketty joined us on Perspective to tell us more.

Russian historian Yuri Dmitriyev, who also serves as a local head of Memorial rights group, was found guilty of abusing his adopted daughter. His supporters say charges against him are politically motivated.

Three months after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we spoke to French historian Antoine Arjakovsky, a specialist on Ukraine and Russia. He told us that the conflict is a "war of civilisation" between two different visions of the world: Russia, a state that wants to become a "21st-century empire", and the "nation state" of Ukraine. Back before the Russian invasion, when Moscow already controlled Crimea, Arjakovsky gathered with 200 experts. They produced a report in 2019 explaining their fears that Russia would indeed invade the rest of Ukraine – but this warning fell on deaf ears in the West.