What happens if you are carrying out a high profile job, and then go public as transgender - for example switching from a "he" to a "she" or vice versa? Will your employer, colleagues and clients accept your new status? Manuela Saragosa speaks to Claire Birkenshaw, who did exactly that whilst working as a head teacher at a secondary school.

She also hears from Beck Bailey of the Human Rights Campaign, which advocates for LGBTQ rights, about the surprising progress among big US and multinational corporations in supporting transgender employees. Plus endocrinologist Maralyn Druce explains why, even when it comes to your biological sex, life isn't as binary as we often assume.

Producer: Laurence Knight

(Picture: Former head teacher Claire Birkenshaw; Credit: Claire Birkenshaw)

The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia is keen to accelerate its path towards membership of the European Union. But there are obstacles too. Top of the list for the Balkans nation is resolving a dispute with its neighbour Greece over what the country calls itself. Our reporter Tanya Beckett has travelled to the capital Skopje to find out what's at stake. We also hear from the founder and chair of the UK Branding consultancy BrandCap, Rita Clifton, who tells us about some high-profile naming battles to secure corporate names and trademarks, reflecting on the sometimes extraordinarily high price companies will place on defending their named identity.

PHOTO: Greeks protesting against Macedonian name. Credit: EPA

The missiles that struck Syria on Friday night have certainly shifted the international economic focus from China tariffs to new potential trade sanctions targeting Russian companies with ties to the Syrian president, Bashar al Assad. So how does this economic tit-for-tat play at a time when America is apparently preparing for economic war with China? We hear from Pippa Malmgren, head of the risk consultancy, the DPRM group in London and former economic adviser to President George W Bush in Washington. She believes that US President Trump does have a grand plan for international trade and foreign policy. To discuss China's place in the global pecking order, we turned to Professor Kishore Mahbubani, a veteran former diplomat from Singapore and former dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. He argues that China will be soon on top and the West has failed to realise it. However, leading China-based economist, Michael Pettis from the Peking University told us he was skeptical that China would overtake the US in economic size.

PHOTO: President Trump/Getty Images

Jaron Lanier is a pioneer of the modern internet and known as the "father" of Virtual Reality. But at the TED conference in Vancouver, Jane Wakefield hears why he thinks things have gone so badly wrong that there should be a mass deletion of social media, and the tech titans should start charging for their services.

Jane also hears from Gizmodo's privacy expert Kashmir Hill about her experiment with turning her home into an internet-connected "smart-home" and the enormous amounts of data her devices produced, even as she slept. Plus Olga Yurkova, a Ukrainian journalist who set up the website StopFake to debunk fake news and propaganda, and Mikhail Zygar, a prominent Russian journalist who argues that the impact of fake news and Russian trolls is vastly over-stated.

(Picture: Jaron Lanier speaking at TED2018; Credit: Bret Hartman/TED)

The cashless economy: Who are the winners and losers in the worldwide shift to digital payments?

Rob Young hears from a grumpy pensioner in Sweden, a country that has blazed the way in ditching physical currency, as well as a Swedish expert on payment systems, Professor Niklas Arvidsson.

Plus what difference has Narendra Modi's "demonetisation" policy of banning large denomination notes made to India's economy? Monika Halan, consulting editor at Indian financial newspaper Mint, gives her considered opinion. Meanwhile Rahul Tandon explains why Indians still don't know what Bitcoin is, even though they know they like it.

(Picture: Indian farmer with daughter using mobile phone and credit card for online payment; Credit: triloks/Getty Images)

Ethiopia's economic growth has been hailed as a miracle by some, but it is a country deeply divided along the lines of ethnicity and wealth, and in recent years has been wracked by violence.

New Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has made a public apology to the hundreds who have died and hundreds of thousands displaced, but will his words be enough to bring harmony?

We hear from an Ethiopian medical student who fled to Yemen several months ago for fear of persecution, and ask Dr Awol Allo, a human rights lawyer and émigré from Ethiopia, about the reasons for the conflict, which prompted the government to declare a national state of emergency earlier this year. Ed Butler also visits a Chinese-built shoe factory south of the capital Addis Ababa to hear about pay and working conditions.

Plus, what has been the international business reaction to the unrest? Has it deterred investment? We speak to Arusha Mehta, from clothing firm Goldmark Ltd, William Attwell from Frontier Strategy Group, and Zemenedeh Negatu, the Ethiopian-American chairman of the Fairfax Africa Fund, which invests heavily in the country.

(Picture: A protest against government crackdowns in the Oromo and Amhara regions of Ethiopia. Credit: Gulshan Khan,Getty Images)

As shares tumble and talk of regulation increases, we ask whether Facebook, Google and Amazon are facing a crisis.

High-profile data breaches, falling user numbers and presidential questions over tax affairs have upped the pressure on these corporate giants in recent weeks. Bilal Hafeez, from the Japanese investment bank Nomura, tells us why he thinks their tech bubble is bursting.

Another troubled tech firm, Uber, is under pressure once again - Jeremy Wagstaff tells us that this time it is from rivals in Southeast Asia.

Plus, we take to the skies with real-life Iron Man Richard Browning, founder of tech start-up Gravity, who has set a world record in his jet-powered suit.

(Picture: A man holding a smartphone showing Facebook's logo. Credit: Kirill Kudryavtsev, Getty Images.)

Does the world face a food crisis in the next 10 years? Or could the solution to world hunger already be at hand? Laurence Knight explores whether technological solutions like multi-storey indoor farms and self-driving tractors could help provide affordable food for everyone.

Producer: Laurence Knight

(Photo: Greens growing on floating beds. Credit: Mira Oberman/AFP/Getty Images)

Africa has the youngest population of any continent in the world and that figure is expected to double in less than 30 years. The BBC's Tamasin Ford travels across three countries to hear from young people about their hopes and dreams for their working lives. In Ghana, she talks to award winning actor and producer Yvonne Nelson. In Ivory Coast Tamasin hears from Edith Brou, CEO of her own Digital Agency, the Africa Content Group. And in Liberia, young people tell Tamasin about their hopes for the future in a country where youth unemployment is very high amongst the sixty percent of the population who are under 25.

(Photo; Young men on the streets of Monrovia, Liberia. Credit: Tamasin Ford)

As the country prepares for elections, Ed Butler visits Sierra Leone to find out how people are feeling about the economy as it fights back following the devastating Ebola outbreak. Ed speaks to top politicians and also hears from ordinary people struggling to make a living. And he asks what happened to money donated to deal with Ebola victims, amid reports of corruption.

(Picture: Children attending school on November 15, 2017 at the Old Skool Camp. Credit:SAIDU BAH/AFP/Getty Images)

Business Daily hears remarkable stories from Yemen's civil war. The tens of thousands of African economic migrants risking everything each year to travel into the world's worst humanitarian crisis. And the man who decided to start a coffee export business out of the very heart of the war-zone. Ed Butler talks to Mokhtar Alkhanshali from the Port of Mokha coffee company, humanitarian worker Rabih Sarieddine at the International Organization for Migration's office in the Yemeni port of Aden and journalist Iona Craig who's been reporting on Yemen for many years. The programme contains descriptions of kidnapping and violence.

(picture: Yemeni tribesmen from the Popular Resistance Committees, keep watch at Nihm district, on the eastern edges of the capital Sanaa, on February 2, 2018. (Credit ABDULLAH AL-QADRY/AFP/Getty Images)

Are you saving for a rainy day? Eight of the world's major economies will between them have a joint shortfall of some $400 trillion in the next thirty years in terms of pension provision, according to the World Economic Forum. The assumption here is that most of us need about 70% of our working income to get by in our retirement years. But the shortfall they've come up with is a staggering 5 times the size of global stock markets. Luckily, Dan Ariely, a behavioural economist based at Duke University in the US, has been studying some of the simple human tricks that perhaps might nudge us towards a more prudent attitude.

(Picture: Getty images)