Browse all episodes of Foreign Correspondent

U.S. Election / Kenya - Strictly Township / The Philippines - Child Labour

Afghanistan - Massoud / Africa - Camels / Palau

Kuwait - War? What War? / Russia - Ring My Bell / The Philippines - The Media

Israel - Hebron / Indonesia - Cyclos / Falklands - Penguins

Angola / Syria - Sister Narelle / Italy - Venice's peril

Iran - Guardians of the Ayatollah / Southern Jordan - Petra / Uganda - Chimps

Argentina - Tango / Japan - Didgerido / Palestine - Pals

Britain - Mad Cow / Brazil - Ipanema / China - Floating Population

Japan - Speed / Scotland - Tea Ladies / Rwanda

Japan - Okinawa / Uganda - Equator / India - Shiv Sena

Bolivia - Cocaine / India - Polo / Eritrea - Railway

Bosnia - Missing People / China - Strictly Beijing / Brazil - Bahia

Burma - Aung San Suu Kyi / Britain - Hounds / Siberia - Nenets

U.S.A. - Dead Man Walking / Vietnam - Hanoi Cycling / The Philippines - Manila Kidnaps

Siberia - Vorkuta / China - Granite Women / Vietnam - Returnees

Middle East - Israel Elections / Bolivia - Witches of La Paz / U.S.A. - Leary's Last Trip

Liberia - Monrovia / U.S.A. - National Rifle Association / Southern Jordan - Bedouins

Russia - Media / U.S.A. - Greenbrier Bunker / China - Black River

Tajikistan / Burma - Rangoon Rock / Canada/U.S.A - Ultimate Fighting

U.S.A. - New Deep South / Kyrgyzstan - Sanitorium / Romania - Street Kids

Turkey - Refah Party / Japan - Pachinko / Kazakhstan - Crossroads

Cambodia - Khmer Rouge Inc. / Moscow - Circus / Iran - Women

Kyrgyzstan - Drugs / Britain - Ballroom Olympics / Lost Japan

Canada - Cree Indians / Kenya - Runners / China - Chinese Christians

Indonesia - Megawati Sukarnoputri / South Africa - Rhinos / Britain - Tree People

Bosnia - Mostar / Jordan - Jerash Festival / Russia - Gays Liberated?

Solomons - Logging / Thailand - Katoeys / Jordan - Dead Sea

Italy - Padania / Turkey - Renaissance Houses / Sakhalin - Koreans

Syria - Kurds / China - The Last Brother-in-Law / U.S.A. - Bill Clinton

Cambodia - Decline / Japan - Tokyo Summer / Nepal - Child Prostitution

Bosnia - Brcko / Britain - Bag Lady / Kazakhstan - Space Race

Ireland - Drug War / Greece - Greek Greenie / Nepal - Child Prostitution

Borneo - Bakun Dam / U.S.A. - Rap Finishing School / Turkey - Stolen Antiquities

Northern Iraq - Kurdish Safe Haven / Marshall Islands / Peru - Shining Path

New Zealand - Election Lead-up / Britain - Murder Mystery / Russia - The Scandal of the Asylums

Nicaragua - Whatever Happened to the Revolution? / U.S.A. - Tug-of-War / Mongolia - Nomads

Afghanistan - The Kingmaker / Peru - Machu Picchu / Albania - The New Crusade

Israel - Shimon Peres / Fiji - Firewalkers / Malaysia - Migrant Workers

U.S.A. - Bill Clinton... How the West was Won / Singapore - Transvestites / Cook Islands

Fiji - The Coup that Turned Sour / China - Model Police / 1996 in Review

Which way is Mecca in space? Helen Vatsikopoulos ponders this and other imponderables when she meets Malaysia’s “it” man, the hunky former male model Dr Sheik Muszaphar Shukor, who’s become the country’s first astronaut.

Ramadan In Space

For 50 years David Frost has shared the world’s stage with the powerful, rich and famous – and this week he shares it with Foreign Correspondent’s Mark Corcoran.

The World According to Frost

What would you do if you discovered your adopted children were stolen and trafficked, and not willingly given up by their parents, as you’d believed? South Asia correspondent Sally Sara investigates the insidious trade of children in India, and joins an Australian family in their moving search for the truth.

Stolen and Sold

In Antarctica the race is on for scientific supremacy and to find an ice-scientist’s Holy Grail … a 1,000,000-year-old ice core. 

It’s thought that’s where the secrets to understanding global warming have been snap frozen.

And the best place to look – the vast Australian Antarctic Territory.

What Lies Beneath?

South Asia correspondent Sally Sara with the cricket tragics of Lahore, as Pakistan is wiped from world cricket's tour map.

Young Lions of Lahore

Washington correspondent Tracy Bowden uncovers one of the biggest killers in America - the US health system. Lack of insurance is now the third leading cause of death in the US, after cancer and heart disease.

American Emergency

Dambisa Moyo is a Zambian-born economist who says aid is killing Africa. 

In her new book, Dead Aid, she argues that official aid is easy money that fosters corruption and distorts economies, creating a culture of dependency and economic laziness.

Is Aid Killing Africa?

Cholera is a preventable disease, yet there’s an epidemic raging in Zimbabwe. At least 4,000 are dead, and some 90,000 infected.

Filming secretly and posing as tourists, reporter Andrew Geoghegan and producer Mary Ann Jolley uncover the true extent of the crisis.

Left To Die

China’s exponential growth took Australia along for the white-knuckled ride. It fuelled our resources boom and had economic optimists forecasting decades of good times. How things change.

The Big Smoke

He’ll have you believe he’s a quiet goat farmer and a keen horseman who just happens to think he might make an ideal Indonesian President one day.

But looks can be deceiving and there’s little doubt Prabowo Subianto’s pursuit of Indonesia’s top job will be ruthlessly efficient and purposeful.

The Farmer Wants a Country

When people in remote villages in Zanskar get sick, chances are they’ll turn to the “Oracle”. The Oracle is a faith healer who goes into a trance so a Tibetan spirit can take over and dispense medical advice.

It’s all part of a complex system of folk healing that has spread to this isolated district in north-west India, from neighbouring Tibet.

Children of Zanskar

He's in the fast lane to the top in South Africa but there’s powerful evidence the man following the trail blazed by Mandela has been on the take.

Reporter Andrew Fowler investigates whether Jacob Zuma - the man most likely to become the next President of South Africa – took bribes from a French arms company.

Jacob Zuma

They were hiding for their lives, hunted by gunmen who’d brought India’s biggest city to a standstill.

In this chilling ‘insider's’ account of a terrorist siege, two Australian business people tell of their remarkable survival trapped inside Mumbai’s Oberoi Hotel, during the attacks last November.

Trapped in Terror

It’s turned out some fearsome warriors in the past but can America’s prestigious military academy West Point manufacture the brass that will ultimately prevail in what’s now being dubbed ‘Obama’s War’ – Afghanistan?

The Young Guns

How and why did a bunch of illiterate, dirt poor Africans transform themselves from simple cray-fishermen into the fearsome, gun-toting gangs mugging giant, sophisticated shipping off the coast of Somalia and gouging multi-million dollar ransoms?

Marauding foreign fishing fleets took their lobsters.

Pirateland

Very few have seen it in the wild but those who have say it’s the most beautiful of the big cats.

The Snow Leopard prowls the roof of the world in dwindling numbers. Can it be saved?

Cats in the Clouds

For more than four decades, tens of thousands of Colombians have been kidnapped or killed in South America’s longest-running civil war. Now Colombia’s hard-line president Alvaro Uribe insists it’s coming to an end.

But will this country's most popular president ever, win the right to run for a third term in office? And at what cost to South America's oldest democracy?

The Third Amigo

It was big, it was shiny and it was brassy. Few things symbolised the wealth and optimism of a post-war America more than the big car and the Motown sound.

And perhaps few things symbolise the decline of American capitalism more than the sight of the country’s biggest car makers going cap in hand to Washington begging for a bail out. General Motors has until June 1 to come up with a survival plan, or face bankruptcy.

Detroit: Ain't Too Proud To Beg

Every year thousands of young Australians pack their backpacks, book their EuRail passes and make for Europe, leaving their parents to worry and fret about their wellbeing and their ability to cope with foreign languages and customs. 

God forbid anything should happen to them.

One Night in Sofia

They're big men with even bigger secrets. The cloistered world of Sumo hides myriad rituals and traditions, bone-jarring training schedules even humiliating and painful punishment. 

As scandal rocks Japan's venerable sport, Foreign Correspondent opens the door on life inside a Sumo stable.

Sumo Confidential

Foreign Correspondent presenter and reporter Mark Corcoran, who has spent a decade observing the dangerous world of South Asian narco-politics, takes us on a journey through Afghanistan's dark political underbelly.

The Bulldozer

How did a 15 year old boy, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, shot by a policeman in Athens six months ago become a cause celebre? Why was his name and the manner of his death invoked by students, anarchists and even terrorists as epitomising all that is wrong with the Greek government?

A Greek Tragedy

In a Venezuelan slum a young girl practices on her clarinet and dreams a big musical dream. On a stage in New York City an 80 year old clarinettist takes his final bow to rapturous applause. The two are worlds apart but joined by the profound, elevating forces of music.

Bravo! Encore!

It’s raw, it’s instant and it’s rocked authoritarian Iran and riveted world attention. It’s the phenomenal new-media broadcast by Iran’s angry, dissenting young that’s capturing a disturbing, perhaps defining collision of rebellion and repression. Digital dissent vs. bullets and batons - will the new technologies bring change in Iran?

The Rebellion Network

A perilous year undercover - ducking the authorities and informers and risking decades in jail – has resulted in an unforgettable Foreign Correspondent with a team of Burmese cameraman capturing the plight of a pitiful new cast of Burmese – The Orphans of the Storm.

Orphans of the Storm

Kilometres of high concrete walls snake through Belfast in Northern Ireland - graffiti daubed and grim. They divide Catholic neighbourhoods from Protestant.

They’re called the Peace Walls.

But do they keep the enduring hatred and suspicion locked outside or inside?

Us and Them

The Uighurs. Who are they and why is the Chinese government flattening vast tracts of their magnificent cultural capital, Kashgar? 

Is it for safety or to secure against separatists and potential terrorism?

The Uighur Dilemma

It's an idyllic tropical atoll, but amid the coconut groves are billions of dollars of high-tech surveillance equipment. Mark Corcoran reveals a hitherto top-secret, Club Med style nuclear missile test range which "sees" everything that moves across a third of the globe and in deep space.

Rocket Island

When Venezuela’s socialist firebrand Hugo Chavez lost his best enemy and saw global capitalism teeter you might think he’d be jumping for joy. Not so.

Total Control

A year ago Foreign Correspondent flew into the scandalously unsafe skies over PNG to examine why the nation’s aviation industry sustains so many fatal accidents and dangerous incidents then struggles to examine those crashes and near misses and fails to apply stricter safety standards.

Return to the Fatal Sky

They’ve been scarred so deeply they’re shockingly disfigured and yet they’ve refused to bow their heads or withdraw from the world. They’re the remarkable women who’ve survived acid attack and who have overcome their injuries to transform their lives.

A Brave Face

It’s a staggering national habit and it’s grown into a juggernaut of a killing machine claiming an annual toll eclipsing the Aceh tsunami. Welcome to the warning-free, smoking free-for-all that’s become Big Tobacco’s big new frontier.

80 Million a Day

Are mobile phones the new blood diamond? Is our insatiable appetite for the latest electronic gadgets actually fuelling despair, deprivation and oppression in another part of the world … even threatening the survival of central Africa’s magnificent gorillas?

The Congo Connection

Most African adoptions don’t have a Hollywood ending. A Foreign Correspondent investigation in Ethiopia exposes a booming international adoption trade out of control – mothers duped into surrendering their children and some foreign families unsure if their adopted child was really an orphan after all.

Fly Away Children

In Iceland, the financial crisis is called the kreppa and a year after it hit, the whole country is still well and truly in it. Thousands are losing their homes, unemployment is ten times higher and Britain is demanding it pay back billions of dollars lost in Icelandic investments.

Hook, Line and Sunk!

He’s got money to burn, enormous political and personal power, and well, a problem. Beautiful women. Why can’t Silvio Berlusconi behave himself and why do Italians shrug off his sexual escapades and say so what?

Berlusconi and the Beautiful

Paul Kenyon travels three thousand miles along the most dangerous illegal immigration route out of Africa. Many die crossing the Sahara, or at sea on the way to a better future in Europe - but can the survivors convince those who follow, that Europe in recession is no longer worth the risk?

Europe or Die Trying

In California massive wildfires are met with massive force – but it comes with a multimillion dollar price tag. With fires on the increase around the world, is money and manpower the answer or is there a better way?

California Burning

It’s claimed Japan’s ferocious and feared Yakuza murder, extort and intimidate according to an honour code. But where is the honour in the squalid new enterprise now adding to their billion dollar criminal turnover?

Without Honour and Humanity

What brought down Air France flight 447? The families, friends and fellow workers of the 228 people who perished when the Rio-Paris flight ditched in the Atlantic mid-year are all desperate for answers. But with airlines relying on outmoded technology that may never happen.

Flight AF 447

With its giant wind farms and pedal-pushing population, Denmark looks like a model global citizen setting a shining green example for all comers to the Copenhagen Climate Summit. Look a little closer though and there are some grubby realities.

Winds of Change

Foreign Correspondent’s 2009 spins to a close with an inside look at the stories, characters and issues that moved, provoked and enthralled our audience. It’s a fascinating, behind the scenes edition featuring some things we didn’t show you along with updates, insights and candid reflections from some of the team.

Thanks for Watching

If they stay they face intimidation, violence even death. If they go they put their lives and life savings in the hands of people smugglers, run the gauntlet of naval patrols and the perils of the sea itself. They are the Tamils of Sri Lanka and many of them are choosing to take the high water over the hell at home. For some it's a case of if at first you don't succeed, try again.

Hell or High Water

It's a lifetime. Short, urgent and definitive. One hour to save those who can be saved - soldiers, civilians and the enemy critically wounded in the war in Afghanistan. Another defining feature - the surgeons, medics and patients are very young. Welcome to M.A.S.H. 2010 or to update another long-running American TV show - Gen Y Hospital.

The Golden Hour

How does a deeply personal spiritual offering from India's poor to their Gods suddenly become a super-expensive, must-have style accessory in the haute salons of Europe, Asia, USA and Australia. Fire up the Benz, cue the hip-hop track and set the GPS for a collision course with faith, fashion and truckloads of money.

The Rapunzel Machine

A 7 year old Ethiopian girl is portrayed as destitute and in grave danger. She is in fact 13 and has been well cared for much to the surprise of her adopting family. Then there are the children told they're just visiting a foreign land who are in fact on a one way ticket. This is the powerful next instalment of Foreign Correspondent's investigation of international adoption in Ethiopia and the United States that began with 2009's Fly Away Children.

Fly Away Home

They imagined a breathtaking future-world, burned billions of dollars to summon it out of the sand and hundreds of thousands of expats and investors stampeded into Dubai for a piece of the action. But when the sands suddenly shifted it wasn't going to be quite so easy getting out.

Quicksand

It's thought a single, fluffy pillow killed a Hamas operative in Dubai. But it took 27 secret agents with pilfered passports and a bag of disguises to administer it. We investigate the incredible case of overkill and over-exposure that's astonished even the most hard-boiled of spies.

The Hit Parade

The dominant face of the United States has long been white. Soon, when the nation looks in the mirror it will see a tanned, smiling Latin American face looking back. In a relatively short space of time a downtrodden minority will become a majority - restless and assertive.

The Whole Enchilada

When it comes to stem cells, mainstream scientists in the UK and America tell us their potential is both exciting and unlimited. But, they hasten to add, treatments for most illnesses are still years away and more research needs to happen.

For Wilma Clarke, there is no doubt. Her three-year-old daughter, Dakota, born with a rare condition that left her almost blind and suffering from balance problems, can see things that she could not see before.

Stem Cells & Miracles

It's not Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya or Somalia. But it is - arguably - the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist. That's one reason we know so little about a massacre in November 2009 that claimed the lives of more than 30 reporters.

Pet Monsters

Beware, Greeks bearing debts! Olympus-sized debts that would give Hercules a double-hernia and that threaten to swamp the nation like some modern day Atlantis. Sink or survive there's plenty of pain ahead in the land of fakelaki. What?

Coming Acropolis

In fashion conscious France it's much more than a simple case of what not to wear. It's a case of what should be illegal to wear. The push is on to outlaw cover-all Islamic dress in public places.

French Dressing

Before Haiti there was Aceh - a catastrophic natural event claiming tens of thousands of lives, destroying towns and villages and drawing enormous global sympathy and billions in aid. What is life like now for those traumatised survivors in this historically divided place?

Aceh Afterwards

Is the Chinese economy a bubble that's about to burst, taking Australia down with it? Stephen McDonell looks for answers all over this vast country... from young Beijing rock stars to the owners of the tallest building in China, and the lonely residents of a brand new ghost town in Inner Mongolia.

The Biggest Domino

Few in the world had heard of it and very few could get close to pronouncing its rolling, rambling tongue-twister of a name. And yet - suddenly and spectacularly – a volcano called Eyjafjallajokull impacted millions of lives and blew away billions of dollars. 

But did the greatest aviation grounding since WW2 really have to happen?

World, Interrupted

Not so long ago it was thought worry and stress triggered the chronic pain of stomach ulcers. So how would yesterday's doctors have reacted to scores of peaceful, meditating Tibetan monks rolling up to the surgery complaining of crippling pain. Thankfully, new medical science has sorted it all out.

Oh and a dedicated team of Australian helpers.

Gut Instinct

They say they wanted to blow the lid on Japan's super-sensitive whaling program. They were sure they'd found the red-hot evidence. But when they took their find to the authorities they were arrested and charged with crimes that could put them away for 10 years. What was in the box?

The Catch

It's perched on a perilous fault-line but California can't blame the San Andreas for this big black bottomless pit. It's a frightening financial hole engulfing the most populous state in the USA and there seems no way to fill it. Time to think outside the square.

Or, just out of it.

High Finance

So, you're in a highly sensitive job working on a top secret project but something's not right. In fact you think it's very, very wrong. Go public and you risk your job, perhaps jail – maybe even your life. Stay silent and many other lives may be endangered or life-savings imperilled and malignant corruption festers. What do you do? Hurry – time is ticking!

Truth or Dare

Australia's leading international affairs program featuring fascinating, in-depth stories from the ABC's unrivalled network of foreign correspondents.

All Episodes of Foreign Correspondent

Season 1