蜜芽传媒

Alan Johnston introduces personal insight, wit and analysis from 蜜芽传媒 correspondents around the world. In this edition, Kevin Connolly goes on an unusual shopping trip, trying to find a tasteful shirt amid Tripoli's early days of revolution; Huw Cordey learns why so few creatures, let alone people, can survive summer in California's Death Valley.

What to wear to a revolution?

Events in Libya might seem to be following a classic pattern. The dictator has come crashing down, and with him has gone the whole structure of control he built. But now there's uncertainty as to what exactly will replace it. What shape will the new Libya take? Will it fulfill the dreams of the revolutionaries? Will it be worthy of the sacrifices they made?

A lost suitcase and blazing heat forced Kevin Conolly onto an impromptu shopping trip - and triggered some reflections on what it means to live through this particular moment in the country's history.

"Like trying to breathe in a pizza oven"

There's a place in California's Mojave Desert, where a long thin gash opens up in the surface of the earth. This is Death Valley: a sun-blasted wilderness every bit as harsh and forbidding as its name suggests. In some years, no rain at all falls on what is a land of almost perpetual drought, shifting sand dunes and scorching winds.

Huw Cordey has been finding out how any form of life can survive this most extreme of environments - even sweltering through the 'heat Armageddon' of its summer months.